The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (PDFDrive)

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
MARXISM
Volume 3
THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS

OF MARXISM
7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN
THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS
OF MARXISM
EUGENE KAMENKA
First published in 1962
This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1962, 1972 Eugene Kamenka
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-138-85502-1 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-71284-0 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-88550-9 (Volume 3) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71539-1 (Volume 3) (ebk)
Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome
correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
THE ETHICAL
FOUNDATIONS
OF MARXISM
by
EUGENE KAMENKA
Routledge & Kegan Paul

L O N D O N AN D B O S T O N
First published 1962
Second edition 1972
by Routledge & Kegan Paul L td
Broadway House, 6 8-74 Carter Lane,
London E C 4 V jE L and
9 ParA Street,
Boston, M ass, 02108, U .S.A .
Printed in Great Britain by

Redwood Press Lim ited
Trowbridge, Wiltshire
© Eugene Kamenka, 1962, 1972
iVb / w r 0 / A00A /rcczy reproduced in

any form without permission from the
publisher, except fo r the quotation o f brief
passages in criticism
I S B N o 7100 7360 7
Contents
PREFACE TO THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION page vii

PREFACE TO THE JAPANESE EDITION ( 1 9 6 5 ) X
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION ( 1 9 6 2 ) xii
CITATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS xxi
p re lim in a rie s: Marx, Marxism and Ethics 1
Part I: The Primitive Ethic o f Karl Marx

1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONCEPT 17
2 THE FREE INDIVIDUAL 26
3 THE NATURAL LAW OF FREEDOM 32
4 THE ‘ TRULY HUMAN* SOCIETY 37
Part II: Karl Marx’s Road to Communism

5 THE NEW SOCIAL DIALECTIC 31
6 THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICS 60
7 THE CRITIQUE OF ECONOMICS 70
8 COMMUNISM AND THE COMPLETE, UN ALIENATED

MAN 82
Part III: Critical Resume: Ethics and the

Young Marx
9 ETHICS— POSITIVE OR NORMATIVE? 89
V
CONTENTS
1 0 THE REJECTION OF MORALISM, OF ‘ R IG H TS’ AND

OF NORMATIVE LAW 10 6
1 1 ETHICS AND THE ‘ TRU LY HUMAN* SOCIETY IIO
Part IV : Ethics and the Mature Marx

12 THE NEW ED IF IC E : H ISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND
THE R EJECTIO N OF ‘ PHILOSOPHY* 121
1 3 THE M A TER IA LIST IN TERPRETATIO N OF HISTORY

AND M A R X ’ S CRITIQUE OF MORALITIES 132
1 4 HISTORICAL M ATERIALISM AND THE OVERCOMING
OF A LIE N A TIO N I44
Part V : Communism and Ethics

1 5 ETHICS AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY 163
16 LAW AND MORALITY IN SO VIET SOCIETY 168
Conclusions
ETHICS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARXISM I91
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED 200
INDEX 204
vi
Preface to the Second English Edition
i t is now almost ten years since this book was first published. I still
hold, without significant reservations, what I take to be the book’s

main theses in the area of Marx scholarship. These are:
(1) The underlying ethical and logical assumptions of Marx’s work
are to be understood in terms of a technical metaphysical concept of
freedom, involving the associated philosophical notions of ‘univer
sality’, ‘rationality’ and ‘self-determination’.
(2) The internal logic of Marx’s intellectual development is to be
understood as the attempt to realise his concept of freedom by ‘over
coming’ the dualisms of universal and particular, society and indi
vidual, civil society and state, autonomy and heteronomy.
(3) Marx’s work thus reveals no radical break between his early
philosophical concern with freedom and alienation and his subsequent
exposition of an allegedly scientific theory of social change and social
development. After his ‘discovery’ of the materialist interpretation of
history in the spring of 1845 we a certain change in style and a
growing socio-historical concreteness. Marx’s concern shifts from
proclaiming the philosophical nature of freedom to ever-deepening
studies of the social and historical conditions that produce alienation,
but we do not find a change of theoretical structure or a major revision
of his philosophical premises.
These three theses, which go to make up and explain the assertion
that alienation is a central concept in Marx’s work, are now very much
more familiar to an educated English-speaking public than they were
ten years ago. As set out in this book, they may not command universal
assent; nevertheless it seems to me that they have survived unscathed
the widespread scholarly discussion of these issues, a discussion that
takes up material in this book and in other books. Certainly, these
theses have gained much wider acceptance than they had ten or fifteen
years ago and among the scholarly the place of ethics in Marx’s
vii
intellectual development and in his mature ‘scientific’ system is now
very much better understood. For a period, under the influence of such
men as Robert Tucker, Fromm and Marcuse, this led, intra et extra
muros, to an excessive moralisation of Marx, to a tendency to ‘expose’
him as a moralistic religious ideologist or to deify him as a philosopher
of the human condition whose relevance is eternal and largely in
dependent of the concrete social and historical details of his work. In
my more recent writings on Marx and Marxism, no doubt in reaction
against this tendency and the growing misuse of Marx’s name by
peasant anarchists, romantic nihilists and revolutionary Jacobins, I
have put greater stress on the nineteenth-century European context
and on the specific socio-historical content of Marx’s work, on his
numerous social insights, on his concern with modernisation, with
revolutionary realism, with the educative role of the industrial process,
and with the social base of a revolution. Nevertheless, the eliciting of
Marx’s philosophical and ethical assumptions does remain of central
importance to an understanding of the total thrust and direction of
his work, to a grasp of the interrelation of its parts, to a deeper
appreciation of the force and point of his key categories, from
‘exploitation’ and ‘dehumanisation’ to ‘free labour’ and the proletariat
as a ‘universal class’.
With all this in mind, I have thought it best to allow this book to
go into a second edition unchanged, except for the correction of
misprints and some minor improvements in the Index. To write in
the historical dimension of Marx’s work at this stage would be to open
up new concerns more appropriate to another book and to destroy the
unity and coherence that I have striven to give this one. Similar
considerations have made me resist the temptation provided by a new
edition to expound in somewhat greater detail my views on the extent
of Marx’s debt to Kant, to Fichte, to Hegel, to Feuerbach, to Moses
Hess, to French Socialism and French historiography, to Ferguson
and to classical English economics. The determination of Marx’s
precise position in the movement of ideas is both exciting and difficult;
Marx’s work is part of many intellectual histories. The careful reader
of this book will note a certain emphasis on the Young Hegelian
character of Marx’s interpretation of Hegel and on his consequent
debt to Kant and Fichte and to the aesthetics of German Romanticism.
This is part of what is now often discussed under the heading ‘Marx’s
Prometheanism’ and Marx’s handling of alienation in many respects
owes more to Fichte than it does to Hegel. I have said and am saying
viii
something more on these matters in other works. Here, I was con
cerned to refer to Marx’s intellectual antecedents and to his cultural
debts only in so far as such reference was necessary to an under
standing of Marx’s work; it seems best to leave it thus.
Canberra
1971
, EUGENE KAMENKA
ix
Preface to the Japanese Edition ( 1 9 6 5 )
as a theoretical system, is a product of nineteenth-century

m a r x is m ,
north-western Europe, which nevertheless looks beyond Europe and
its nineteenth century. In the name of science and of man it seeks to
transcend the specific divisions of climate, race and creed, of nation
state and language-group, in order to chart a common future for
mankind.
The bases for this transcendence, as Marx himself emphasised, were
being laid by the industrial developments and the economic expansion
that were primarily associated with Europe and the United States.
Marx, no doubt, grossly overestimated the rate at which Africa and the
Orient would be socially and economically ‘Europeanised’: the
creation of a world in the image of the bourgeoisie is not yet complete,
and in many areas of the world it has followed, instead of preceding,
the spread of Marxism. Marxist ideology, in these circumstances, has
lost most of its connection with the existing industrial proletariat:
Marxism, once to be the heir of industrial civilisation, has become,
in such countries as Russia and China, its pre-condition.
Marx, in seeking to transcend national ideologies and national
concerns, was somewhat too cavalier in gauging the influence of
national, social and geographical distinctions on the long-term trend
of historical development. The age of the nation-state was not over
when he died, even in Europe, let alone in the non-European world.
The rise of sociology as an academic subject at the turn of the nine
teenth and twentieth centuries, though given a decided impetus by
Marx and Marxist thinking, owed equally much to the concern of
German and French intellectuals with the conditions of nationhood.
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were consciously looking for the
factors that weld a society and a nation together: the factors that make
men a community. Marxism, as a theoretical system and as a practical
movement, thus now finds itself in an age of nationalism and of
x
internationalism, of One World and of many. The technological
progress that has brought men all over the face of the globe into ever
closer contact with each other has also made men more aware of the
differences in social and economic circumstance, and of the resultant
differences of temperament and attitude, that distinguish one society
from another. Much as mankind has suffered from the recognition (and
especially from the over-emphasis) of human differences, the study of
society has benefited enormously from our new-found acquaintance
with an even wider range of social settings. To have a theory of
society forged in London or in Paris tested in the circumstances of
China and Japan is a scientific experiment beyond the wildest hopes
of a Vico or a Hobbes.
For me as author, then, the translation of my Ethical Foundations
o f Marxism into Japanese is at once an exciting and a humbling
experience. We are all, as Marx said, an ensemble of social relations:
apart from the individual blindnesses my book may display, the reader
reared in somewhat different circumstances may find in it further
examples of social and cultural blindness. To have this book trans
lated into Japanese and presented to the Japanese reader is thus to
put it to an important double test. It is to extend, in the first place, the
company of men who will read and judge the book as men. It is to
subject the book in the second place to the extra dimension of criticism
that can be provided by readers who, at least in some respects, will
have been raised in traditions and circumstances very different from
my own. It is not in the common content of what we know, but in the
common standards of discussion and the common aim of truth, that
the international character of the community of scholars is to be found.
EUGENE KAMENKA
Canberra,
November 1964
xi
Preface to the First Edition ( 1 9 6 2 )
karl m arx , I shall argue in this book, came to Communism in the

interests of freedom, not of security. In his early years he sought to free
himself from the pressure exercised by the mediocre German police
state of Frederick William IV. He rejected its censorship, its elevation
of authority and of religion, its cultural Philistinism and its empty
talk of national interest and moral duty. Later he came to believe that
such pressures and such human dependence could not be destroyed
without destroying capitalism and the whole system of private property
from which capitalism had developed.
At the end of his Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,
Marx paints a picture of the society of Communism, of the society of
true and ultimate, human freedom. Sympathetic critics have called it
the picture of a society of artists, creating freely and consciously,
working together in perfect harmony. In such a society, Marx believed,
there would be no State, no criminals, no conflicts. Each man would
be ‘caught up’ in productive labour with other men. The struggle
would be a common struggle; in his work, and in other men, man
would find not dependence and unpleasantness, but freedom and
happiness, just as artists find inspiration in their own work and in the
work of other artists. Truly free men will thus need no rules imposed
from above, no moral exhortations to do their duty, no ‘authorities*
laying down what is to be done. Art cannot be created by plans
imposed from outside; it knows no authorities and no discipline except
the authority and the discipline of art itself. This discipline and
authority every artist accepts freely and consciously; it is this and this
alone that makes him an artist. No government authority, no patron
or overseer, can make him one. What is true of art, Marx believed, is
true of all free, productive labour.
This vision of Communism remained with Marx all his life. It
xii
PREFACE
comes out clearly in the German Ideology of 1 846, in the notes and
drafts he made between 1850-9, in his Critique o f the Gotha Programme
of 1875. It runs through all three volumes of Das KapitaL It is a
vision of freedom, of spontaneous co-operation, of men’s conscious
self-determination. It is not a vision of economic plenty or social
security. Engels may have seen Communism that way; Marx did not.
Freedom, for Marx, lay in struggle, but in conscious, co-operative
struggle. The desire for security under the protection of authority
would have seemed to him a base desire, born o f ‘inhuman’ conditions.
Marx’s vision, I shall argue, rests on a sound if unworked-out
perception of positive ethical distinctions, of the difference between the
spontaneous co-operation of goods and the forced and extrinsic tem
porary alliances possible to evils, of the tension between the producer’s
morality of freedom and enterprise and the consumer’s concern with
ends, with securities, profits and returns. The fundamental weakness
of Marx’s thought lies in his failure to work out the distinction between
freedom and servility in positive terms, in terms of the character of the
processes and movements involved. It is only because Marx glosses
over the positive character of social movements and ways of living
that he is able to believe in a classless society, in a society in which the
conflict of movements and ways of living has disappeared. The transi
tion to socialism thus becomes something he simply cannot afford to
examine seriously: the precise character of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’, the Values’ and ways of living represented by the people
in whose hands it would lie, have to be left out of account. Here he is
driven back on a crude economic reductionism: the abolition of private
property destroys the foundation on which competing interests rest.
Socialism, on Marx’s view, would be bom out of capitalism. But
socialist or Communist society would be the society of true freedom
and enterprise, in which capitalist morality had been entirely destroyed.
Marx was right in the first proposition and wrong in the second.
Socialism was born of capitalism. But it was not the result of the
catastrophic collapse of capitalism. On the contrary, it sprang from the
very ideology fpstered by capitalism: from the concern with economic
ends over ways of living, from the belief in the universal exchange
ability and rational control of all things as mere means to a common
commercial end. The socialist’s vision of society, as Rosa Luxemburg
once said of Lenin, is the capitalist’s vision of a factory, ‘efficiently’
run by an overseer. The conception of economic planning is a capitalist
conception: the capitalist manager is the prototype of the socialist
xiii
PREFACE
administrator. Both depend in their ideology on the commercial

morality of utilitarianism: on the conception that all things can be
treated and assessed as means to ends and that ends can be reduced
to a common measure.
Marx had a strong desire to believe that the proletariat, in its misery
yearned for initiative, enterprise and freedom, that it rejected servility,
careerism and the concern with security as Marx himself had rejected
them. It would not be bought off with ameliorated conditions, with
prospects of higher rewards or of ‘opportunities’ for the individual to
‘better* himself. But Marx was not prepared to make such a claim
part of his theory, to see socialism as the extension and culmination
of the freedom and enterprise already displayed by the worker.
Essentially, he stuck to his negative view of the proletariat as the most
suffering c la s s a class whose future was determined not by its char
acter, but by its deprivation. This prevented him from paying
serious attention to freedom and enterprise as historic traditions
operating in any society, strengthened and not necessarily weakened
in the struggle against adversity. It prevented him from seeing the
importance of other forms of production and of other manifestations
of the productive spirit in social life: of artistic and scientific produc
tion, for instance, as continuing traditions capable of supporting and
strengthening the productive spirit in industry. Instead, Marx chose to
rely on ‘history’, to hold out to the proletariat the vision of a classless
society made safe for goods, where enterprise and freedom would be
guaranteed by the economic foundations of society itself, where
freedom would not lie in struggle, but follow from mere existence. It
is a servile conception, appealing, however unwittingly on Marx’s
part, to the demands for security and sufficiency, to the longing for
certain returns. Its servile character was strengthened even further
by the fact that it was Engels, with his blindness for alienation, with his
crude evolutionism and his utilitarian concern with economic satisfac
tion, who became the ‘ideologue’— the propagandist and populariser—
of Marxism.
It is obvious that the labour movement, and even the socialist
movement, were at no stage wholly given over to enterprise. The
search for security, for welfare and economic sufficiency, was always a
powerful motive within them. But it is also obvious that propaganda
1 This was the accusation which Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto,
flung at the Utopian socialists; yet they themselves remained open to the same
accusation.
xiv
PREFACE
of a Marxist colour, with its insistence on ends and aims, its elevation
of economic rewards, did much to destroy what enterprise there was.
In their controversies with anarchists and syndicalists, Marxists may
have been able to expose much that was utopian in both movements.
But against the anarcho-syndicalist elevation of the free and enter
prising character of the existing working class, Marxists were upholding
a servile and unfree morality.
Partly as a result of Marx’s failure to deal positively with ethical
questions, as a result of his failure to highlight ways of life and organisa
tion over ‘ends’ and policies, ethical distinctions did not play a central
part in the splits and controversies that racked Marxism. The revision
ists in the 1890’s, it is true, made much ado about their Kantian ethics.
Bernstein proclaimed his seemingly sound slogan: ‘The movement is
everything, the goal is nothing.’ But Bernstein, for all this, preached
security and sufficiency all his life. The real issue confronting Marxists
was not ethics, but the consequences of their neglect of ethics. Marx
had been wrong in forecasting the imminent collapse of capitalism and
the growing pauperisation of the worker; no longer driven by needs,
Western workers were displaying their preference for rewards and
security over freedom and struggle. If one wanted to follow the
worker, the Marxist vision of a radically new society born of struggle
had to be abandoned. Socialism became a matter of negotiation and of
demand for improved conditions and greater security within the
existing society. This was the path of reformism. Notably, the Marxist
neglect of ethics prevented Marxists from attacking reformism for its
elevation of rewards and security: the orthodox Marxists had to argue
instead, quite implausibly, that the reformists were bound to fail, that
increased rewards and greater security could not last under capitalism.
Orthodox Marxists, clinging to the vision, had to find a substitute
for the proletariat. Lenin, drawing on Russian populism, found it in
the revolutionary intelligentsia and the centralised, hierarchical party
of professional revolutionaries acting as the ‘vanguard’ of the working
class, driving it beyond the bread-and-butter politics at which the
working class by itself would always remain. Enterprise was not to
be won by the worker, but for him.
The bringing of freedom and enterprise to somebody is not a free
but a despotic conception. Yet Marx, too, had seen freedom as some
thing that would be brought to the worker by ‘history’. Marx’s work
laid no foundations for thoroughly exposing the course the Communist
Party under Lenin was soon to follow. Indeed, his failure to see
xv
PREFACE
freedom as a force within history, his treatment of it as merely a final

end, made it possible to erect despotism in his name. The erection of
this despotism points not to the worthlessness of Marx’s vision, but
rather to its half-heartedness. A radical of genius, Marx was, in the
end, not radical enough.
Karl Marx is still best known for the political and economic writings
of his maturity that were published in his own lifetime. These, and
these alone, form the popular corpus of Marx’s work; they have been
widely disseminated in English translations. For any thorough under
standing of Marx and his thought they are not enough. The ethical
enquirer, especially, must take into account Marx’s earlier, more
philosophical, writings and the notes and drafts not meant for publica
tion as they stood which Marx habitually made throughout his life.
Marx’s mature writings notoriously eschew any direct consideration
of ethical or philosophical questions; it is in the earlier writings and
private drafts that we shall find the key to his ethical views and their
puzzling place in his mature beliefs. The study that follows therefore
draws heavily on those of Marx’s writings that preceded the publication
of the Communist Manifesto in 1 848 and on the notes and drafts that
Marx compiled between 1850 and 1859. The former have been pub
lished in the language of composition (usually German) in the M arx-
Engels Gesamtausgabe, brought out by the Marx-Engels Verlag,
Frankfurt-Berlin, between 1927 and 1932. The latter, first published
in Moscow in 1939 and 1941, have been republished in the original
German by the Dietz Verlag, Berlin, under the title Grundrisse der
Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (1953). The major portion of these
writings has not been translated into English; the rendering of those
writings that have been translated is not always satisfactory. Greater
space than would otherwise be necessary has therefore been devoted to
the translation and presentation of relevant passages from these works.
Where the source reference is a foreign-language text, the translation
is my own unless otherwise indicated.
The Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe was not completed, though it
contains all of Marx and Engels’ extant writings down to 1848 and the
entire Marx-Engels correspondence. Its original editor, the Communist
D. Riazanov, was removed; he died in a Stalinist prison. Some of
Marx’s writings had been tampered with in earlier editions and were
to be tampered with again in later Soviet editions; the Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe, most scholars agree, shows no signs of any conscious
xvi
PREFACE
unfaithfulness to the originals.1 Despite its incompleteness, it is still

indispensable. From Marx’s mature political writings I cite verbatim
less frequently; here I have found the current English translations
quite adequate. I have preferred, however, to use the German text in
citing from Capital since I was largely looking for philosophical terms
and overtones that might unwittingly be lost in any translation. In
making these citations, I append references to the (Kerr) English
edition for comparison.
Accuracy in translating Marx’s more philosophic writings is extremely
important to a sound understanding of his views. His constructions
are involved; his language is studded with philosophical terms; his
sentences are often ungrammatical. He plays with words and makes
deliberate use of their overtones or their ambiguity. He sets out a
sequence and then fails to follow it; he poses questions and leaves them
unanswered. I have thought it neither illuminating nor proper to
‘tidy up’ the young Marx’s writing, to turn a clumsy, Hegelian German
into elegant empirical English that eschews vagueness, metaphysics
or ambiguity. To do that would be to present as Marx a man who is
not Marx.
Presenting the metaphysical side of Marx faithfully and yet con
vincingly in English is not easy. Words like ‘essence’, ‘true reality’,
‘actuality’ and ‘objectification’ do not sit readily on an English tongue.
Those raised in traditional German culture will read their German
counterparts without the least unease, often even without stopping to
ask what they mean. Most Englishmen, faced with these wordsvin
English, will not. To translate Hegel into English, it has been said,
is to rob him of much of his plausibility. The same is often true of the
early Marx. But to shear Marx of his metaphysics, or to translate his
earlier Hegelian conceptions as though they were his later Communist
ones, as many translators have done, is to misunderstand and to
misrepresent Marx’s thought. At the risk of leaving a Hegelian clumsi
ness where many previous translators have felt justified in substituting
a pamphleteering simplicity, I have striven not to do so.
The genius displayed in Marx’s writings— the suggestive power of

his leading ideas, the illumination afforded by his subsidiary insights,
1 Professor Lieber, of the Free University, Berlin, has very recently drawn
attention to a number of errors in the Gesamtausgabe version caused, he claims,
by the fact that Riazanov was working from photostat copies. None of the
suggested errors affects the citations or conclusions given below.
xvii
PREFACE
the interest of his very inconsistencies—has made writing this book as

exciting and stimulating as it has often been difficult. No author could
wish for a more interesting body of work, or for a more impressive
man, as his subject.
Work and thought requires time. The main work on this book was
done—under the supervision of Professor P. H. Partridge— in the
two-and-a-half years that I held one of the generous research scholar
ships awarded by the Australian National University in Canberra; the
manuscript of this book has been accepted as a thesis for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in that University. Without the opportunities
for untroubled research offered by what is now the A.N.U.’s Institute
of Advanced Studies, the writing of this book would have taken many
more years.
Intellectually, I owe my greatest debt to John Anderson, Emeritus
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Sydney, under whom I
read as an undergraduate and for whom I retain the highest admiration,
friendship and respect. Many younger men who have worked on
Marx— Georg Lukdcs and Sidney Hook, for instance— have tended
to see in Marx the doctrines of their first teachers. No doubt I have
done the same. But Anderson’s social theory and ethical position, on
which I have drawn heavily, still seem to me to illuminate both Marx
and the subjects with which Marx is dealing. Specific debts to Anderson
are acknowledged in the text; though his influence on my thought has
been wider than these acknowledgments indicate, this should not be
taken to imply that he necessarily agrees with my interpretation of
Marx or with the formulation and applications his own doctrines are
given here. Those interested in Anderson’s position should consult
Anderson’s work.
Alice Erh-Soon Tay has shared in all the trials that accompanied
the writing of this book. Chapter 3 on ‘The Natural Law of Freedom’
and Chapter 16 on ‘Law and Morality in Soviet Society’ are based on
articles dealing with Marxism and law which we published jointly; she
has read and re-read the drafts that became the rest of this book with
untiring patience. Without her steadfastness and encouragement
during the difficult period when I lectured in the University of Malaya
in Singapore and amid the uncertainties of a far more stimulating year
in London, this book would hardly have been completed.
In London, too, I gained much encouragement from new but warm
friendships with men working in or around my field—notably with
Dr. George L. Kline of Bryn Mawr, Mr. Leo Labedz, Mr. Walter Z.
xviii
P REFACE
Laqueur, Mr. George Lichtheim, and M. Maximilien Rubel of Paris.

Preliminary drafts and studies for this book have been published
in the Australasian Journal o f Philosophy, the Hihbert Journal, the
Indian Journal o f Philosophy and Soviet Survey. I am grateful to the
editors of these journals for permitting me to draw freely on the
material published by them, and to Professor John Anderson and
Professor A. K. Stout, editor of the Australasian Journal o f Philosophy,
for allowing me to cite from Anderson’s contributions to that journal.
EUGENE KAMENKA
Canberra,
March 1962
xix
Citations and Abbreviations
the bibliography of works cited at the conclusion of the text indicates

the editions used; page references are to these editions. Where two
sources are given together, the citation is from the first and the second
is given for comparative purposes only.
I have used the following abbreviations for works frequently cited
in the text (see bibliography for details of editions):
AD—Engels: Herr Eugen Diihrings Revolution in Science (Anti-
Diihring), trans. E. Burns.
A .J.P .P .; A .J.P .—Australasian Journal o f [Psychology and] Philo
sophy.
C—Marx: Capital, Aveling-Moore trans., vols. I—III, Kerr edition.
CPE—Marx: A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy,
trans. I. N. Stone.
CWF— Marx: The Civil War in France, trans. for Marxist-Leninist
Library.
EPM—Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844, trans.
Martin Milligan.
GI—Marx and Engels: The German Ideology, Parts I and III, ed.
R. Pascal.
HF—Marx and Engels: The Holy Family or Critique o f Critical Critique,
trans. R. Dixon.
HM—Emile Burns (ed.): The Handbook o f Marxism.
K—Marx: Das Kapital, vols. I—III, German text.
M—Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Section I, vols 1-7, Section III,
vols. 1-4.
M -E Soch.—Marx-Engels: Sochineniia (The collected works in
Russian, publ. 1939 f.).
PP—Marx: The Poverty o f Philosophy, English trans. by Foreign
Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
xxi
CITA TIONS AND AB BRE VIATIONS
SC—Marx-Engels: Correspondence 1843-1895, ed. Dona Torr.

SW—Marx-Engels: Selected Works, vols. I and II, Foreign Languages
Publishing House, Moscow.
Arabic numerals directly after the abbreviation indicate page
numbers; if a Roman numeral precedes them it normally refers to the
volume. The M arx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, however, is divided into
sections as well as volumes, and volume 1 of Section I appeared in two
sub-volumes ([Halbbander). In citations from this edition, therefore,
the large Roman numeral refers to the Section, the Arabic numeral
that follows to the volume within that section, a small Roman numeral
to the sub-volume (if any) and the final Arabic numeral to the page.
volume ii of the Gesamtausgabe .

Thus M I, i-ii, 435 refers to page 435 of Section I, volume 1, sub
Where other English translations of material here translated from

the Gesamtausgabe are available, I have generally cited them after the
M reference for purposes of facilitating comparison.
References to other parts of the present work are to the Part
(Roman numeral) and chapter (Arabic numerals). The chapters cited
are generally brief and I therefore hope that the omission of page
numbers— for technical reasons—will not prove too burdensome.
xxii
Preliminaries: Marx, Marxism
and Ethics
t h e relationship between Marxism and ethics is often alluded to and
rarely explored. The disputes that surround it have produced little

precision or clarity concerning the issues involved; so far they have
generally illuminated neither Marxism nor ethics. Marx himself wrote
nothing devoted directly to the problems of moral philosophy. No
where did he analyse critically the meaning of moral terms or the basis
of ethical distinctions; nowhere did he consider carefully the concept
of moral obligation or the criteria for distinguishing moral demands
from other demands. He did, it is true, emphatically reject the con
ception of ethics as a normative science; he denied completely the
existence o f‘values’, ‘norms’ and ‘ideals’ above or outside the empirical
realm of facts. He prided himself that he had not asked what ought
to be, but only what is. Yet the answers he gave to his question have
seemed to many of his disciples and critics implicitly ethical and/or
advocative. He called feudalism a state of bondage; he described the
dehumanisation of the worker under capitalism in terms highly
reminiscent of ethical writing; he identified the empirical culmination
of history with the emergence of ‘rational’ and ‘truly intelligible*
human relations. Many of the ‘contradictions’ that play so large a part
in his exposure of capitalism smack of moral as well as logical ‘contra
dictions’. His life and work seem to proclaim a unity of theory and
practice, of science and advocacy, that characterises the ethical Weltan
schauung rather than the positive ‘value-free’ science. Even his own
disciples seem uncertain whether Marx revolutionised the foundations
of ethics or showed that it could have no foundation.
The tensions thatâppear to lie beneath the surface of Marx’s work,
and to which he may have had a coherent solution, break out as crass
inconsistencies in the ‘philosophical’ works of his leading collaborator
i
prelim in aries : MARX, m a r x i s m and eth ics
and disciple, Friedrich Engels. The ‘co-founder* of Marxism asserts in

one ill-considered breath that all moral judgments are relative and that
moralities have in fact progressed: he rejects all absolute moral values
and yet foretells the rise of ‘a truly human morality* (AD 104-109).
Under his influence, dogmatic Marxists have vacillated helplessly
between the belief that Marxism is a ‘value-free’ science which destroys
the very basis of moralism and exposes moral demands as no more than
economic interests in disguise and the belief that Marxism is the most
progressive, the most humane and the most ethical of all world-views.
Hilferding, it is true, sought to resolve the contradiction ruthlessly.
‘The theory of Marxism, as well as its practice,* he wrote in 1910,1
‘is free from judgments of value. It is therefore false to conceive, as is
widely done, intra et extra muros> that Marxism and socialism are as
such identical. For logically, regarded as a scientific system and apart
from its historical effect, Marxism is only a theory of the laws of
movement of society formulated in general terms by the Marxian
conception of history; the Marxian economics applying in particular
to the period of commodity-producing society. But insight into the
validity of Marxism, which includes insight into the necessity of
socialism, is by no means a matter of value judgments and just as little
an indication to practical procedure. For it is one thing to recognise a
necessity, and another thing to work for this necessity. It is quite
possible for someone convinced of the final victory of socialism to
fight against it.* Whatever the logical position may be, Hilferding’s
analysis has not commended itself to Marxist writers and does not fit
readily into a Marxist system. Marx himself would not have conceded
the distinction between ‘facts* and ‘values’, ‘science’ and ‘attitude*,
in the crude terms suggested by Hilferding. Thus the doyen of con
temporary Soviet moral philosophers, A. F. Shishkin, writes: ‘Marxist
ethics does not “ prescribe” norms, it deduces them from the social
being of men; it does not divorce “ values” from facts, the “ ought”
from the “ is” .*2
1 In the preface to his Finan^kapital, p. 10. I cite the translation by Sidney
Hook in his Towards the Understanding o f K arl M arx, pp. 33-4.
2 Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali (The Foundations o f Communist Morality),
p. 103. In an earlier article in Voprosy Filosofii on ‘The Decay of Anglo-American
Ethics’, Shishkin wrote: ‘The chief struggle [in Anglo-American ethics] is against
Marxist ethics and its objective and rigorous norms and principles derived from a
scientific understanding of society; ethical relativism was implicit in the thought
of Rosenberg and Goebbels.* (Cited by H. B. Acton, The Illusion o f the Epoch,
p. 195, from Soviet Studies, vol. I, no. 3, January 1950.)
2
prelim in ar ies : MARX, m a r x i s m a n d e t h i c s
The attempt to combine description and advocacy, to claim scientific

objectivity and yet ‘deduce’ moral ‘norms’ and social ‘principles’,
appeared cautiously in the work of Marx and crassly in the work of
Engels; it has remained, despite Hilferding, the most obvious feature
of subsequent Marxist writing on ethics. Kautsky, for instance, pro
claimed1 that ‘it was the materialist interpretation of history which first
completely deposed the moral ideal as the directing factor of social
revolution’, and added, in the same sentence, that this theory has
‘taught us to deduce our social aims solely from the knowledge of
the material foundations’, i.e., it has shown us what we ought to do.
Lenin insisted that Marxism ‘contains no shred of ethics from beginning
to end’— and then went on to speak of ‘the simple and fundamental
rules of every-day social life’ 2 and o f ‘the revolutionary consciousness
of Justice’ 3 to be established by Communism. More recently, the
Soviet philosopher P. A. Sharia wrote:4 ‘The founders of Marxism
had no need to separate out a special science of ethics, since the
scientific theory of social development created by them already
provided a scientific foundation for morality as one of the forms of
social consciousness as w ell. . . One must not confuse two things: the
basing of socialism on ethics, which the classics of Marxism-Leninism
attacked bitterly, and the ethical nature of Marxism itself, as the most
progressive, scientific world-view, striving toward incessant progress,
toward the liberation of exploited and suffering humanity.’ Consciously
or unconsciously, virtually every Marxist has sought to have it both
ways.
Marxism has become a dogma. Like Christianity, it speaks in the

name of its founder more frequently than it speaks with his voice. Its
sacred texts-‘the great classics of Marxism-Leninism’— are not con
fined to the writings of Marx; its most general conclusions and simpli
fied catechisms were not formulated by him. Marx’s life-long friend
and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was elevated (partly by himself)
to the status of co-founder of Marxism and intellectual alter ego of
Marx. Lenin and then Stalin were proclaimed ‘disciples of genius’,
1 Ethics and the Materialist Interpretation o f History, p. 201.

2 State and Revolution.
8 Letter to Kursky preceding the enactment of the 1922 Civil Code, quoted
by R. Schlesinger: Soviet Legal Theory, p. 140.
4 P. A. Sharia: O nekotorykh voprosakh kommunisticheskoi morali (Concerning
Some Questions o f Communist Morality), pp. 30 and 31-2.
3
prelim in aries : MARX, m a r x i s m and ethics
clarifying the thought of the Master and building on its foundations.

A world-wide political party, fighting or governing in his name, has
claimed to be the sole repository of orthodox Marxism and the final
arbiter o f ‘what Marx really meant’. ‘Since the publication of Comrade
Stalin’s new works on linguistics, intended to provide the basis for
all scientific knowledge and not only for Soviet-Marxist linguistics,
many debatable questions of logic have been automatically settled.’
Thus wrote one of the ablest and most independent of Soviet philo
sophers, the Georgian S. K. Bakradze, in Voprosy Filosofii for 1950-1.
Was Stalin speaking in his own name or Marx’s? It was not a question a
Soviet Marxist could ask. As the number of ‘Marxist’ pronouncements
and ‘classics’ increased, Marx steadily slipped from one’s grasp. The
abundance of followers and interpreters obscured rather than illumin
ated his thought. ‘Joint founders’, ‘inspired disciples’ may carry the
prestige of numbers; they do not make for a single view.
Marx has been widely read as the great founder of ‘scientific social
ism’ for at least seventy years—he has been dead for seventy-eight.
Yet there is still no complete, scholarly edition of his work; there is no
definitive biography, no monumental study of his thought. His early,
more philosophical writings had been printed in the minor journals
and newspapers for which they were written or left in manuscript to
‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’; their systematic publication did not
commence until 1927. The tireless notes, comments and drafts that
formed a considerable part of Marx’s mature output and that throw
important light on the basis and development of his thought have
attracted increasing attention in the recent revival of Marxian scholar
ship; most of them were unavailable and almost unknown before
1939; some, at least, are still unpublished. In the decisive years that
saw the building of Communist ideology, Marx’s unalloyed influence
rested on his political pamphlets dealing with concrete contemporary
affairs and on the detailed economic and economico-historical studies
culminating in Das KapitaL Marx, in his serious work, propounded
no general principles as a substitute for detailed knowledge. It was
Engels who became at once the populariser, the systematiser and the
‘philosopher’ of Marxism. It was he, and not Marx, who compressed
Marx’s thought into a few simple principles. To Marx, few things were
simple. For those who wanted to master his thought, he provided no
short course, no quintessence of Marxism. To do this was the work of
other, less able, minds.
All this is not to say that there is no connexion between the works
4
of Marx and the corpus of Marxism. It is rather to warn that the

connexion must be examined carefully and never taken on trust. ‘The
ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’ is a legitimate field o f
enquiry. It is neither synonymous with the study of Marx nor of the
same intrinsic intellectual interest. The subtle ambiguities and sup
pressed conflicts in Marx’s position are often made evident by the
clumsy restatements of his disciples; none of these disciples can be
regarded as an equal partner of Marx’s in the building of a Marxian
system and a Marxist philosophy. Where these disciples claim, like
Engels, to speak on Marx’s behalf, or to expound a view shared by him,
they must be treated with the suspicion appropriate to dealing with any
disciple ‘expounding’ a master. For the first and most profound
distinction between Marx and his disciples is a distinction in intellectual
capacity.
Marxism, Georges Sorel argues in his La Decomposition du M arx-
isme, is not the simple, coherent and purely empirical science it some
times pretends to be. For Sorel it is in fact three things: a set of dogmas,
a canon o f historical interpretation and a heroic social myth meant to
promote working-class education and strength. The dogmas, Sorel
thought, were absurd; the canon could be very useful; the myth was to
be judged in terms of its effectiveness, not of its truth. The word
‘dogmas’, of course, is pejorative: Marx was aggressive, self-confident
and much given to regarding his opponents as fools; he was neither a
believer in dogmas nor an expounder of them. (Herein lies a second
distinction between him and his followers.) But for all his intellectual
caution, for all his dislike of generalities ‘abstracted’ from concrete
facts, his leading works between 1845 and 1875 unmistakably— if not
unambiguously— embody the set of general propositions and con
clusions which Marxists have summarised as the fundamental principles
of Marxism and treated as political dogmas. There is the ‘materialist
interpretation of history’— the proposition that ‘the mode of produc
tion in material life determines the general character of the social,
political and intellectual processes of life’.1 There is his distinction
between the forces of production and the relations of production and
his belief that social change takes place— violently—when the relations
1 This is Marx’s formulation in the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique

o f Political Economy, CPE, 11. Both the phrase ‘mode of production* and the
vague ‘general character* suggest immediate difficulties, but at least Marx’s
formulation is significantly different from Engels* inept reduction of this state
ment to the individualistic claim that man’s desire to eat controls his other desires.
5
of production cease to correspond with the forces of production and

become fetters upon them. There is his allied doctrine that society is
divided into competing classes, whose struggle for mastery is reflected
in the political institutions and theoretical life of any given period.
There is his suggestion that the capitalist state is merely the executive
committee of the bourgeoisie. Finally, there is his detailed analysis of
the economic processes of capitalism—his belief that the capitalist
system must inevitably collapse through the very logic of its own
development and give way to a dictatorship of the proletariat to be
followed by the unflowering of the rational society of Communism.
These are the doctrines most commonly associated with Marx’s name
and the chief link between him and his ‘orthodox’ disciples. They
formed the basis of the Communist Weltanschauung; they were for
many years, and officially are even now, the test of Marxist orthodoxy.
Apart from the detailed analysis of the economic processes of capital
ism, all the propositions outlined above suggest a general philosophy
of history and the basis of a universal view. Marxists, indeed, have
treated them as such. But virtually every one of the propositions is
surrounded by ambiguity and qualified or contradicted by some of the
most brilliant of Marx’s specific insights in specific fields. Time and
time again, critics who assume quite fairly from these general proposi
tions that Marx could not have foreseen or accounted for the emergence
of fascism, the rise of capitalist managers, the existence of a state
bureaucracy or the economic effects of law find that Marx did foresee
them or mention them, at whatever cost to his general theory. The
‘materialist interpretation of history’ and the materialist reduction of
ideologies have become Marxist dogmas, but their precise content
has always been, and remains, far from clear. To Marx himself, they
were not even dogmas to be followed at all costs.
Marx’s conclusions concerning the fate of capitalism are unquestion
ably at first sight the most specific of his doctrines; they also seemed to
his immediate followers the doctrines most pregnant with contempor
ary significance and the most conclusive in establishing that Marxism
is the most ‘advanced’ of all sciences.1 Beginning with the Ricardian
theory that the value of a commodity is the amount of labour ‘em
bodied’ within it, Marx sought to show that the capitalist’s profit
1 Tf the theory correctly estimates the course of development and foresees the
future better than other theories, it remains the most advanced theory of our time,
be it even scores of years old/ wrote Leon Trotsky in The Living Thoughts o f
K a rl Marxy p. 14.
6
prelim in ar ies : MARX, m a r x i s m and eth ics
depended upon the extraction of ‘surplus value* from hired labour by

paying the labourer less than the values the labourer produced. The
well-being of the bourgeois thus necessarily implied the misery of the
proletarian. The very nature of capitalist competition, Marx was
understood to be saying, would lead and was leading to recurrent
crises, to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, to the
proletarianisation of unsuccessful capitalists, petty bourgeoisie and
other intermediate classes and to ever-increasing misery for the
proletariat. Goaded by its destitution, the proletariat would rebel
against a bourgeoisie no longer capable of supporting society or itself.
It would establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, abolish private
property, socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange
and usher in the ultimate truly human society of rational economic
planning and free associative production.
For a period, such doctrines seemed more than an intellectual tour
de force; they carried conviction and appeal. Capitalist crises, un
employment and the miseries attendant upon rapid industrialisation
were real and disturbing phenomena, belying the moralistic optimism
of classical economists and the pious hypocrisy of Protestant industrial
ists. There seemed no reason why uncontrolled competition should
not lead precisely where Marx said it would lead; the human debase
ment and destitution it had brought in its wake were all too evident.
As the basis for an ideology and a social myth, Marx’s doctrines
skilfully if unconsciously combined the messianic faith of a future
state of bliss with the growing prestige of objective empirical science,
the wistful longing for the community and fellowship of the feudal-
agrarian past with the realistic acceptance of the inescapable process of
ever-increasing industrialisation. What anarchists and Utopians strove
to make possible, Marx seemed to prove inevitable. Where they
posited a conflict between the proletarian’s work and his hopes, Marx
showed the proletarian’s work leading inevitably to the fulfilment of
his hopes. History only seemed to crucify man; in fact, it was working
toward his restoration.
The effectiveness of the myth even was weakened— though not
completely destroyed—as the doctrines on which it rested became less
convincing. Precisely that dynamic quality of capitalism which Marx
had been the first to appreciate thoroughly, its continual transformation
of the social background in which it operated, quickly made his analysis
too simple, too primitive, too crude. The catastrophes he predicted did
not occur; there are some indications that in the last years of his life
7
Marx may no longer have expected them to occur. Kautsky, it is true,

in drawing up the Erfur ter Programm of 1891, still envisaged a bleak
future of mounting class tensions, increasing centralisation of wealth
and the certainty of ‘growing insecurity, misery, oppression, enslave
ment, debasement, exploitation’ for the proletariat and the sinking
middle class. Eduard Bernstein only eight years later saw evidence of
increasing order, security, tranquillity, prosperity and a more equitable
distribution of wealth. Statistics, he argued in his Voraussetiungen des
Sofialismus und die Aufgaben der Sofialdemokratie (The Presuppositions
o f Socialism and the Tasks Facing Social Democracy), proved that
the middle classes were holding their own and that the incomes of
wage-earners were actually rising, small-scale enterprise were still
flourishing alongside the industrial giants, business cycles were
continuing to flatten out, social tensions were lessening, ownership of
property was becoming more widespread.1 Bernstein’s statistics were
hotly contested; nevertheless, Marxist attention shifted from the
unprofitable expectation of internal economic collapse to the national
economic rivalries between competing capitalist countries, thus
implicitly confirming Bernstein’s analysis of the situation. The
Austrian Marxists discovered that, capitalism was moving into a new
state of ‘finance-capitalism’ in which the banks were assuming the
power previously held by the great industrialists; Lenin, basing himself
on the work of J. A. Hobson, proclaimed in 1916 that this period of
‘finance-capitalism’ or imperialism was the final stage preceding the
collapse of the entire capitalist system. The more developed countries,
he argued in his pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage o f Capitalism,
had already reached the point where they were producing more goods
than their home markets could absorb; they were therefore driven to
find markets in backward countries where they could get raw materials
in exchange. These countries were then annexed, while the ‘super
profits’ derived from the exploitation of their peoples were used to
bribe the proletariat in metropolitan countries with better wages and
conditions that seemed to belie the Marxist prognosis. But the struggle
for markets in a world where there were no new territories to be
discovered implied an inescapable series of imperialist wars, while the
creation and exploitation of a proletariat in the backward countries
only added a further nail to the coffin of capitalism.
Lenin’s thesis became and remained of vital importance to the
1 See George Lichtheim: M arxism: An Historical and Critical Study, pp.
278-300, where these and other examples are cited.
8
Communist movement— not because it successfully explained the

failure of Marxist expectations of a world-wide capitalist collapse, but
because it provided a theoretical justification for Communist revolu
tion in such industrially backward countries as Russia and because it
enabled Communists to mobilise totally new forces and different
resentments into the ‘national-liberation’ Communism preached in
Asian countries. But as proof that the inevitable, catastrophic collapse
of capitalism through its own ‘contradictions’ has merely been delayed,
the Austro-Marxist and Leninist thesis has also ceased to convince.
However great the underlying tensions in a system resting largely on
private capitalism, the Marxian picture of an uncontrolled competitive
capitalism propelling itself inexorably towards catastrophic collapse
has proved quite false. Even conceding that Marx had been somewhat
more cautious about the pauperisation of the proletariat than many of
his disciples, and had recognised various countervailing tendencies,
Marx had erred basically and most seriously in neglecting the rise in
the real value of wages that could and did occur under capitalism as a
result of technological advance. At the same time, legislative inter
ference with working conditions gathered pace within a few years of
the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867; the trade union
movement overcame its legal disabilities and grew in strength and bar
gaining power. The skilled worker has thus moved slowly but steadily
toward a middle-class standard of living and a middle-class ideology;
even the living conditions and purchasing power of the shrinking class
of unskilled labourers have patently risen and continue to rise.
Arguments can still be adduced in favour of the validity of some of
Marx’s long-range predictions. The movement toward more and more
social control, not only through Communist expansion but also within
the Western ‘capitalist’ world, is an obvious feature of our time;
Marx’s suggestion in the third volume of Capital that the nature of the
capitalist process of production and the emergence of a class of capital
ist managers would produce a certain ‘socialisation from within’ under
capitalism seems today peculiarly striking and relevant. The tremen
dous strides made by Soviet technology are seen by some, at least, as
vivid proof of the fact that socialist production is more ‘rational’ and
therefore bound to triumph in economic competition. But by and
large, despite the prevision and suggestiveness of many of his insights,
the leading themes in Marx’s analysis of capitalism have become
irrelevant to the economic problems and economic conflicts of our
time. Even thirty years ago, a serious book on Marx would have largely
9
prelim in aries : MARX, m a r x i s m and ethics
consisted of a detailed examination and criticism of the central Marxist

dogmas outlined above. To the mature Marx, unquestionably, these
were the central and most important aspects of his work; to us their
interest has already become largely historical.
Truly great men and truly great works have something to say to
each generation. They do not come back as unrecognised elements of a
cultural inheritance; they come back, as Schumpeter put it, ‘in their
individual garb with their personal scars which people may see and
touch.’ 1 Each generation finds in them new features, new sources of
illumination. The specific predictions Marx made, which seemed so
important and challenging to earlier generations, now seem to us
false. The general canons that permeate Marx’s work—his recognition
of the relatedness of all social phenomena, his emphasis on the existence
of social conflict, on the impossibility of standing outside or of
manipulating society and on the importance of production in social
life— still need to be hammered home against voluntarists, individual
ists and social engineers; but poorly learnt as they may have been, they
bring us today no new, unsuspected insights. Yet Marx still has much
to say to us.
While the Marxist picture of capitalism still appeared to the less
able or more fanatical to be truthful and relevant, West European
Marxists were largely immersed in the task of ‘exposing’ the contradic
tions of capitalism. The relation of Marxism to ethics and the founda
tions of a positive morality of Communism did not seem burning
practical issues. When Marxists in the advanced industrial countries
did deal with ethics, they tended to concentrate on the Marxist critique
of morality, using it to distinguish their ‘scientific socialism’ from the
woolly, unscientific humanitarianism of liberals, social democrats and
revisionists. Even the serious critics of Marxism in this period, unless
themselves moralisers, mostly thought the Marxist relation to ethics a
side issue. On the whole, the attitude taken by Marxists accorded well
with the intellectual climate in capitalist countries. It could draw on the
science-worship of the late nineteenth century2 and the scientific
1 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 3.

2 Sorel is certainly right in suggesting that much of the appeal of Marxism from
the i88o’s and 1890’s onward is connected with this growing prestige of science,
whether or not we accept Sorel’s belief that the prestige resulted from public
recognition of the role played by German technological superiority in the Franco-
Prussian War.
IO
prelim in ar ies : MARX, m a r x i s m a n d e t h i c s
positivism of the earlier part of the twentieth century; it could mobilise,

quite effectively, the young intellectual's contempt for moralism, cant
and hypocrisy. At the same time, it was useful to a party leadership
which, from the time of Lenin, began increasingly to pursue a course
of unprincipled, opportunistic tactics and consistently refused to
consider the character, rather than the aim, of the proletarian move
ment.1
The anti-moralistic strain in West European Marxism did not lead,
as we have seen, to a thorough-going rejection of norms, duties and
principles, or to a shedding of all ethical assumptions. Marxists
continued to speak of society evolving towards something ‘higher’,
‘more magnificent’; they were neither willing nor able to discard
the Messianism, the mingling of logic and ethics into an optimistic
metaphysic of history, which had given Marxism so much of its
popular and intellectual appeal. They wanted to have it both ways.
But when speaking directly of ethics, they tended to protest their
amoralism.
The development of the Soviet Union, as we shall see in Chapter 16,
created new problems and with them new attitudes and new inter
pretations of Marx. The Soviet radicalism of the early twenties was
soon abandoned; dangerous tensions were discovered between moral
scepticism and party and national discipline. A period of the glorifica
tion of economic planning (and of stringent secret police controls)
was followed by a frank insistence from the late thirties onward on
traditional means of ensuring social stability. Soviet propaganda
increasingly emphasised the importance of patriotism, obedience to
the ‘will of the community’, respect for Soviet law and for the norms
of Soviet morality. As conventional moral slogans became more and
more part of the Soviet machinery of government, even the materialist
interpretation of history was steadily reinterpreted to give greater
prestige and independence to ‘ideological’ factors.2
1 The opponents of such a course, e.g. Rosa Luxemburg, were inevitably

drawn into having to counterposit an ethic and thus helped to keep alive some
interest in the question of Marxist morality. But their influence on those who
remained ‘orthodox* was not great.
2 Although some recent Chinese Communist pronouncements suggest that the
Chinese wish to be regarded as ‘purer* and more radical Marxists than the
Russians under Khrushchev, Chinese Communism is even more moralistic than
Soviet Communism. I would feel quite strongly, however, that Chinese Com
munists have made no significant contribution to Marxism as an intellectual
system and that any consideration of the morality preached in China today would
II
Soviet party leaders and theoreticians have begun to emphasise the

importance of ethics in Marxism for patently political reasons and
because the radical Marxism of the twenties has become increasingly
irrelevant to their problems and purposes. From a different angle,
Marx critics in Western Europe and Communist revisionists in
Eastern Europe have displayed growing interest in the philosophico-
ethical conceptions that underlie the work of the younger Marx.
Chief among these conceptions is that of ‘alienation’: the notion that
in modern capitalist society man is estranged or alienated from what
are properly his functions and creations and that instead of controlling
them he is controlled by them. This concept is never mentioned in the
well-known mature works of Marx; but the Hungarian Marxist
Georg Lukacs suggested with impressive insight in his Geschichte und
Klassenbewusstsein (1923) that the Hegelian concept of alienation was
nevertheless an underlying theme of Marx’s mature work. A few years
later, the publication of Marx’s early manuscripts was to document fully
the development Lukacs had postulated. The publication of these
works no doubt gave a new fillip to philosophical examinations of
Marx; but the main cause is again political and ideological. Precisely
because Marx’s leading economic and social doctrines no longer make
the impact they did, radical critics seek comfort or enlightenment in
his metaphysics. To left-wing radicals in the West, the concept of
alienation suggests a subtler and more plausible critique of contempor
ary society than the Marxist slogans of the past; to the revisionist
philosophers in Eastern Europe Marx’s philosophical concepts offer
support in the struggle for freedom against the Party machine and the
doctrinaire Marxism of the Party theologues.
Two recent trends thus again highlight the problem of the relation
between Marx, the Marxism preached in his name and ethics. Neither
trend, I should argue, has led to its solution. From the Soviet side
there has been a refusal to face up to the distinctions between Marx
and his disciples, including Engels, as well as a refusal or inability to
grasp the fundamental difficulties that have to be solved by a moral
philosophy or science of ethics. The work of the non-Soviet radicals
and recent philosophical Marx critics deserves far greater respect;
but the willingness it displays to examine Marx freshly and critically
have to be almost entirely in terms of its relation to Confucian tradition and
Chinese social structure. I have therefore left Chinese Communism entirely
out of account in the pages that follow as throwing no light upon Marx and the
intellectual problems of Western Marxism.
12
is not generally matched by a similar willingness to deal with the

nature of ethics freshly and critically. To throw truly penetrating light
on the relation between Marx, Marxism and ethics we must be willing
to do both.
*3
PART ONE
The Primitive Ethic o f Karl Marx

i. The Philosophy o f
the Concept
i n autumn, 1835, the 17-year-old Karl Marx, recently matriculated
from the Trier Gymnasium, entered the University at Bonn as a student

of jurisprudence. The family intention was that he should become a
lawyer like his father. His conduct at Bonn was not exemplary; he was
arrested by the police and punished by the University authorities for
‘nocturnal noisiness and drunkenness’, involved in a duel in Cologne
and investigated for possessing ‘forbidden weapons’ (i.e., duelling
pistols instead of the permissible swords). By October, 1836, he had
persuaded his father to allow him to transfer to the great centre of
critical thought, the University of Berlin. Here he quickly became a
Left or Young Hegelian, infected with the philosophy of radicalism.
Beside his courses in law, he attended lectures in philosophy, history
and the history of art; when his father died in May, 1838, he openly
proclaimed his intention of abandoning his training for a legal career
and of concentrating on philosophy. For the next three years he worked
on his doctoral dissertation, The Differences Between the Democritan
and the Epicurean Philosophies o f Nature. It was finished in 1841 and
accepted for the degree by the University of Jena, where Marx had sent
it to avoid the new anti-Hegelianism in Berlin and, possibly, to secure
an easier degree. His confident hopes of a lectureship in philosophy at
Bonn, promised him by his friend and fellow-Left-Hegelian Bruno
Bauer, were dashed when Bauer himself was dismissed from the theo
logical faculty in consequence of his radicalism. Meanwhile, Marx made
his public political debut in 1842 with two contributions to Arnold
Ruge’s radical journal, Anekdota: a lengthy criticism of the Prussian
King’s new instruction to censors and a brief theological note in sup
port of Feuerbach’s exposure of miracles. There followed a spate of
17
T HE P R I M I T I V E E T HI C OF K A R L M A R X
political articles for the radical newspaper newly formed in Cologne,

the Rheiniscke Zeitung, which had been permitted by the Prussian
authorities in the belief that it would uphold Prussian culture against
Rhenish Roman Catholic separatism. On November 14, 1842, Marx
was appointed editor—his first paid employment. On March 17, 1843,
hq resigned in a vain attempt to help the shareholders stave off the
newspaper’s threatened suppression. He occupied himself with a
detailed criticism, paragraph by paragraph, of those sections of Hegel’s
Philosophy o f Right which deal with the constitutional law of the State,
the princely power, the executive power and the legislative power.
(This incomplete manuscript, first published in 1927, I call his first
Hegel critique.) In the later half of 1843, immediately after his marriage
to Jenny von Westphalen and just before their emigration to Paris,
Marx was working on his contributions to the Deutsch-franiosische
Jahrbiicher, published in Paris by Marx and Ruge in February, 1844.
In these contributions Marx proclaims for the first time his espousal of
the socialist cause and his discovery of the proletariat as the class which
will provide the ‘material force’ of revolution and usher in the rational
society and State. By then, as I shall seek to show, Marx had formed
certain philosophical theories and ethical attitudes which continued to
mould and direct his hopes and beliefs.
Throughout the period that ends with the completion of his first
Hegel critique, Marx seems not to have been, in any useful sense of
the word, a socialist. He certainly was a radical critic of the authoritar
ian Prussian State, of its censorship, its privileges, its revival of the
system of estates. He believed firmly in the existence of common human
interests and of rational law, and in their supremacy over class and
individual privileges. He spoke occasionally of a popular will and
warned that the exercise of authority from above might produce revolu
tion from below. He was not unaware of poverty, as his articles on the
wood theft law debates show,1 and interested in socialism as an opposi
tion movement proclaiming his own ideals of freedom and rationality.
But Marx’s fundamental ideals at this stage were intellectual and
theoretical rather than social or practical. ‘His path,’ as Rosenberg
writes,2 ‘had its beginning in his own intellectual and spiritual qualities,
and his choice was influenced by the ideas that Holderlin had implanted
1 M I, i-i, 266-304. See also his emphasis on the material hardships of the
Mosel District in his Vindication o f the Correspondent from the Mosel (M I, i-i,
355- 83)*
2 Arthur Rosenberg, History o f Bolshevism, p. 3.
18
THE P HI L O S O P H Y OF THE C ON C E P T
in the young German intellectuals of the Vormari. He sought to free

himself from the pressure exercised upon him and his intellectual
equals by the mediocre German police state.* Marx’s concern was with
freedom and rationality, not with poor relief or factory legislation. He
judged socialism— of which he confessed he knew little—harshly for
its theoretical woolliness, and he judged it decidedly from outside.
Until the end of 1843, he saw the poor as living examples of the irration
ality of the existing State, not as a special moral indictment of that State
or as vehicles for its overthrow. The separate class or estate was to him
an anomaly to be abolished in the name of the truly popular sovereignty
required by the rational State; he did not yet see it as the ground of a
conflict to be developed until it found its dialectical conclusion. It was
rather the movement of intellectual liberalism— the party of the
concept, as Marx called it in his dissertation— that would usher in the
rational State. That State would come, Marx believed, as the result of
the blossoming forth of the rational and universal human spirit in
history—working through philosophy, i.e., theoretical criticism.
Philosophy was for Marx, even then, practical, in the sense that it
criticised actual states of social affairs, but its function was to expose
their theoretical presuppositions, to lay bare their inner contradictions.
It was by exposing the discrepancy between the ‘truly real* (i.e., the
rational) and the existing state of affairs that philosophy would trans
form society.1 The implication is clearly that the philosophically edu
cated middle classes, and not the theoretically ignorant poor, will be
the vehicles for such a transformation. This, at any rate, was Marx’s
position in his doctoral dissertation and at the beginning of his activity
on the Rheinische Zeitung. His experience on that newspaper, as we shall
see, no doubt helped to open his eyes to other possible allies in the
fight against the Prussian State, but only after the wave of newspaper
suppressions ousted Marx from his post and demonstrated the practical
impossibility of further effective criticism of the Government did Marx
turn to the proletariat.
1 Thus he writes in his dissertation: ‘It is a psychological law, that the theo
retical spirit which has become internally free is turned into practical energy, and
coming forth as will from the shadow kingdom o f Amenthes, turns against the
mundane reality that exists without i t . . . But the practice of philosophy is itself
theoretical. It is criticism/ (M I, i-i, 64.) Cf. Hegel in his letter to Niethammer of
October 28, 1808: ‘I am daily growing more convinced that theoretical work
brings more about in the world than practical work; once we have revolutionised
the kingdom of ideas, actuality can no longer resist/ (Quoted by Hans Barth,
Wahrheit undIdeologic, p. 83.)
!9
THE P R I M I T I V E E T HI C OF K A R L M A R X
If Marx was not a socialist at this stage, he was even more emphati
cally not a ‘scientist’, concerned with ‘brute facts’ rather than logical or
ethical ‘principles’. He did like to think of himself, from the beginning
of his intellectual quest, as an opponent of logical a priorism and
empty speculation. He saw himself as a man who derives logical
principles from reality and not reality from logical principles. As early
as 1837, he wrote in one of his verse epigrams:
Kant und Fichte gcrn zum Aether schweifen,

Suchten dort ein femes Land,
Doch ich such’ nur tiichtig zu begreifen,
Was ich—auf der Strasse fand!
(M I, i-ii, 42.) ^
But what Marx finds in the street is a logical ‘principle’, and generally
one of the most abstract and metaphysical kind. He does, of course,
criticise Hegel for a priorism; at least he does so in the first Hegel
critique if not yet in the dissertation. In the critique he attacks Hegel
vigorously for performing his deduction in the logical mind instead of
the actual mind and for treating world history as a mere illustration of
the mysterious life history of the Idea. He complains tellingly that
Hegel develops the world out of the logical concept, instead of develop
ing the logical concept out of the world. O f Hegel’s discussion of the
constitution, Marx exclaims: ‘Hegel gives us the constitution of the
concept instead of the concept of the constitution’ (M I, i-i, 420). But
it is with the concept of the constitution, or with the ‘concept’ of any
other thing, that Marx himself is concerned at this stage— not with the
actual existing thing itself. Nor is the ‘concept’ for Marx a ‘mere’
recognition of the common features of certain existing things. For him,
as for Hegel, it is their inner principle, the logical essence that deter
mines their development, but which in fact may not yet have broken
through into ‘empirical’ existence.
Marx, in fact, has as much contempt as Hegel for the ‘merely
empirical’, for treating things just as they are or ‘appear’. To do so,
Marx believed with Hegel, would be to see only the outer appearance,
and to see this one-sidedly, with the inevitable result of being caught
in seemingly irresolvable contradictions. True understanding can only
be gained by looking at the concept, the motive power which is in
things and yet outside them as their aim, the ‘energising principle’
which determines their character and development, not by external
compulsion, but as an inner self-realisation.
20
THE P HI L OS O P HY OF THE C ON C E P T
The alleged inadequacy of the ‘mere empirical generalisation’ as

opposed to the speculative grasp and development of the ‘concept’ seen
as energising principle is the fundamental theme of Marx’s doctoral
work. He contrasts Democritus, who saw the atom simply as existent,
with all its contradications, and Epicurus, who allegedly saw it as
absolute concept, grasping its apparent contradictions and giving them
their full speculative development and ultimate reconciliation. For
Democritus, says Marx in his final summing up, ‘the atom remains pure
and abstract1 category, a hypothesis which is the result of experience
and not its energising principle and which therefore remains unrealised
just as it fails to determine subsequent actual science’ (M I, i-i, 52).
It is because of this, Marx took his dissertation to show, that
Democritus’ philosophy of nature is inadequate.
The unresolved contradictions in Democritus’ account of the atom
are epitomised in the two contradictory accounts of truth with which
he is credited. On the one hand, he proclaimed that truth is hidden—
‘it lies at the bottom of a well’. On the other hand, as he says elsewhere,
truth is all that appears. In pursuit of truth in this sense Democritus
travelled throughout the ancient world collecting and ordering facts.
Yet he was never able to resolve the contradiction between the atom
as inaccessible to perception and as yet logically presupposed by the
existence of reality. Epicurus is able to resolve this and other contra
dictions in the concept of the atom because he develops it speculatively,
finds the necessary logical synthesis, instead of wandering off blindly
on the paths of science. He does this in precisely that part of his theory
— the seemingly illogical doctrine that atoms swerve capriciously—
for which he has been most criticised. In the doctrine of the swerve,
according to Marx, Epicurus resolves the contradiction between the
atom as a free point and as a determined line; for the atom moving
mechanically, as in Democritus, is the atom determined from without,
that is, the atom not itself. Epicurus’ doctrine of the swerve thus makes
the atom free and self-determined. His theory of knowledge and of
time, by placing the atom under the form of the inner sense, makes the
atom conscious. Individual self-consciousness thus ‘steps from her
concealment and confronts Nature in the independence she has just
attained’.2 The free spirit’s final obstacle is the heavenly bodies, seen
by thinkers before Epicurus as eternal and unchangeable. These bodies
1 Abstract throughout Marx’s early work has the Hegelian sense of one-sided,
something seen from a specific but inadequate point of view that fails to reveal
the logically relevant whole. 2 M I, i-i, 41-44.
21
T H E P R I M I T I V E E T H I C OF K A R L M A R X
represent abstractly individual matter confronting a self-consciousness

still conceived as abstractly individual. They are the symbols of the
free spirit’s greatest foe, physical necessity. Thus its final step on the
march to freedom is to throw off the yoke of these heavenly bodies
seen1 as independent, as foes of the ataraxia of the human spirit. The
human mind, armed with its own self-consciousness in which the
independence of Nature is reflected and overcome, can now assert its
own freedom and throw off the mechanistic determination imposed by
external physical laws just as it threw off the Gods and divine heavenly
bodies that symbolised man’s subjugation. In their place, it erects its
own ‘natural science of self-consciousness’, whose subject matter is
the march of human self-consciousness toward the rational whole,
independent, free and self-determined.
On this ground, and this ground alone, Marx argues, can the neces
sary contradictions of the Democritan atomic theory be resolved.
Marx proceeds to resolve them with a Hegelian sophistry almost
breath-taking in its substitution of verbal analogies for real connexions.
At least as sophistical as his identification of the atom with self-
consciousness (through its ‘placing under the form of the inner sense’)
is his resolution of the contradictions threatened in Epicurus’ theory by
the problems of the atom’s weight, shape and size. The question
whether the attraction and repulsion between atoms does not destroy
their ‘freedom’ receives similar short shrift. In being repelled or
attracted by another atom, the atom is simply repelled or attracted by
itself, since one atom is indistinguishable from another. It thus remains
self-determined and therefore free.2
The critical position with which Marx is working here, and through
out his earliest writings, is frankly, even aggressively, Hegelian. To
understand the world is to see its energising principle, to grasp the
concept working dialectically through things toward an ultimate
1 Marx, like Hegel, insists throughout his dissertation on equating what is seen
or conceived with our seeing or conceiving it. We are thus left with the impres
sion that when the Greeks changed their theory of the heavenly bodies the
heavenly bodies themselves changed. But this, of course, outrageous as it may
seem, is precisely what the Idealist denial of independence tends to suggest.
2 The above, necessarily brief, outline of Marx’s dissertation emphasises his
philosophical position rather than the mere anti-religious sentiment which it
helped to support and which was strongly expressed in Marx’s ‘Promethean*
preface, where those who rebel against the Gods were treated as the true heroes
of philosophy. For a fuller English summary of the dissertation see H. P. Adams,
K arl M arx in His Earlier Writings, pp. 27-41.
22
T HE P HI L OS O P HY OF T H E C ON C E P T
harmony that represents the truly real come to empirical existence. To

see this, for Marx as for Hegel, is to overcome the apparent conflict
between what is and what ought to be, to see them reconciled in the
rational that is coming to be, the rational which will establish both true
freedom and lasting harmony.
It is clear then, that for the young Marx as for Hegel, philosophy is a
normative study, and that the notion of the ‘rational’ provides them
with a moral as well as an historical end. It is thus that for both of them
the criteria of rationality become at the same time the criteria of what
is ultimately moral or good. These criteria, as we saw, are freedom and
harmony. For Marx, as for Hegel, freedom meant self-determination
in accordance with one’s inner constitution; it meant not being deter
mined from without, by one’s relations to other things, but by the
logical principle of one’s own development. Harmony meant above all
the lack of inner contradiction, in that curious Hegelian sense of
contradiction that confuses it with exclusion and treats it as a character
of—imperfect— existing things, thus holding that two contradictories
may both be ‘partially’ true and both exist. Since contradiction is held
to be the necessary basis of historical change, the truly harmonious is
also the stable, the ultimately durable. It represents the truly real as
against the ‘mere’ dependently existing thing which, by its dependence,
is not itself. To be truly self-determined and free from contradiction
is to be truly real and truly good.1 To exhibit dependence (determina
tion from without), division, instability, and ‘self-contradiction’ is to
fall short, to be evil in a sense that sees evil merely as a negative appear
ance, a one-sidedness, rather than as a positive quality. The conflict
between good and evil, for both Marx and Hegel, is not irreconcilable
or eternal—the evil is simply the partial, a one-sidedness that will be
taken up and dissolved in the inevitable progress toward the rational.
There are certain important differences between Marx and Hegel
even at the time of Marx’s completion of his dissertation. Hegel and
Marx both saw thought as an essence, and not as a relation, but in
Hegel’s doctrine of the thought in things, and in his treatment of the
Absolute Idea as that which ultimately contains all its manifestations,
both social and ‘natural’, thought loses its specifically human character
and the Absolute Idea becomes an impersonal, non-human force, at
1 ‘That which is the Best/ Marx quotes approvingly from Aristotle in his
dissertation, ‘has no need of action but is itself the end/ Like the gods of Epicurus
and of Greek plastic art, it expresses the unlimited freedom of the subject in
dealing and grappling with objects.
23
T H E P R I M I T I V E E T HI C OF K A R L M A R X
once the dynamic form of all reality and its ultimate totality. Marx, on
the other hand, followed the Left Hegelians in identifying thought with
human self-consciousness, and the motive power of history with a
specifically human spirit or essence. We shall see later how Marx, in
consequence, rejects the non-human Absolute Idea as something alien
to humanity and to man, and regards its alleged social manifestations
(e.g., Hegel’s rational State and its organs) as attempts to erect authori
tarian social institutions ‘dominated by a spirit not their own’. This,
too, is why Marx can take the Hegelian criteria of rationality at face
value, and actually use them against Hegel’s complicated structure of
rights and duties. Similarly, Marx rejects Hegel’s notion of philosophy
as Nachdenken, as the passive analysis of the progress of the Idea after
the event. ‘The owl of Minerva’, Hegel had written in a famous passage
in his preface to the Philosophy o f Right, ‘spreads its wings only with
the falling of dusk.’ Marx, on the other hand, by identifying the motive
power of history with human self-consciousness, could see philosophy
as the critical activity of that consciousness, and hence as itself part
of the motive power. For Marx, at any rate when he wrote his disserta
tion, philosophy was thus the force which would change the world,
and not merely register its changes.
Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s attempt to straddle the issue between
immanent self-realisation and external necessity has one fundamentally
important result: it brings out even more clearly the Rousseau-Kantian
strain in Hegel, the emphasis on freedom as self-determination and on
the free will as the universal and universalisable will. To the youthful
Marx, the goal of human history is the free society—the universal
kingdom of ends— and men and institutions are judged by the Kantian
criterion of universalisability, with self-determination strongly
emphasised and the concept of duty entirely omitted. Marx believed, of
course, that, as Hegel had shown, the Kantian dualism must be over
come: the dichotomies of noumenal and phenomenal, of speculative
and practical reason, of duty and inclination, would disappear in the
‘truly human’ man and ‘truly human’ society. But the dualism, Marx
believed, was about* to be overcome— the rational society was hovering
in the wings of the theatre of history. Not until the end of 1843, when
his confidence in the immediate, almost unaided, coming of the rational
society had waned, did Marx pay any serious attention to the dialectic
process that would bring it about. Before that, he was not interested in
tracing historical progress through its succession of partial forms. The
rational society was at hand— it was no longer necessary to study the
24
THE P H I L O S OP H Y OF THE CONC EP T
contradictions of empirical existence. All that needed to be done—and

all that Marx did in his first year of political writing—was to hold up
the truly rational before the empirical, and watch the latter disintegrate.
This is why, in his earliest work, Marx could confidently hold up,
against the perfidy and privilege of the Prussian State, the positive
morality and the natural law of the free man and the free society.
25
2. The Free Individual
that the young Marx took his criteria of freedom and harmony to
establish positive moral and ethical ‘principles’, eternally and immut
ably true, his earliest work leaves no doubt. Thus, in his Remarks on
the Most Recent Prussian Instruction to Censors (one of the Anekdota
contributions, written in January-February, 1842), Marx notes that
the instruction has substituted the words ‘decency, propriety and
external decorum’ for the words ‘morality and the decent proprieties’
in the original law. ‘We see’, writes Marx, ‘how morality as morality,
as the principle of the world, which obeys its own laws, disappears, and
in place of the essential character we have external appearance, a
decorousness imposed by the police, a conventional propriety’ (M I,
i-i, 161). But for Marx, positive morality does not disappear, nor can
it be explained away. After arguing that censorship is evil in all its
aspects, he concludes: ‘That which is in general bad, remains bad, no
matter which individual is the carrier of badness, whether a private
critic or an employee of the Government. Only in the latter case, the
badness is authorised and regarded from above as necessary in order to
bring to realisation the good from below.’ (M I, i-i, 165.) This, for
Marx, is no excuse. ‘We have shown’, he writes in his Rheinische
Zeitung articles on the debates on freedom of the press in the sixth
Rhenish Diet, ‘that the press law is a right and the censorship law a
wrong. The censorship, however, itself admits that it is not an end in
itself, that it is not in itself good, that it therefore rests on the principle:
“ the end makes holy the means.” But an end which necessitates unholy
means is not a holy end.’ (M I, i-i, 211.) Again, when the representa
tive of the knights in the Diet argues that all men are imperfect and
need guidance and education, Marx insists that we cannot abandon
objective standards merely because all things are allegedly imperfect:
26
THE F R E E I N D I V I D U A L
‘If then all things human are imperfect by their very existence, shall
we therefore jumble up everything together, respect everything equally
the good and the bad, the truth and the lie?’ (M I, i-i, 201).
The positive distinction between the good and the bad stems for
Marx from the positive distinction between self-determination and
dependence. In his comment on the Prussian censorship instruction,
Marx emphatically distinguishes true morality from the spurious, evil
morality of religion: ‘Morality rests on the autonomy, religion on the
heteronomy of the human spirit’ (M I, i-i, 161). Again, in the Rhein-
ische Zeitung discussion of press freedom and censorship, he writes:
From the standpoint o f the Idea, it is self-evident that freedom o f the press
has a justification quite different from that o f censorship, in so far as it is
itself a form o f the Idea, o f freedom, a positive good, whereas censorship is
a form o f bondage, the polemic o f a Weltanschauung o f appearance against
the Weltanschauung o f the essence. It is something merely negative in
character.
(M I, i- i, 201.)
The identification of self-determination and good comes out still

more strongly a little later in the same article:
The censored press remains bad, even if it brings forth good products, for
these products are good only in so far as they represent the free press within
the censored press, and in so far as it is not part o f their character to be
products o f the censored press. The free press remains good, even if it brings
forth bad products, for these products are apostates from the character o f the
free press. A eunuch remains a bad man, even if he has a good voice. Nature
remains good even if it brings forth abortions.
(M I, i- i, 205.)
and again when Marx rejects the view that freedom of the press can be
defended as a case of freedom to exercise a craft:
The freedom to exercise a craft is just the freedom to exercise a craft and no
other freedom, because within it the nature o f the craft takes form undisturbed
according to its inner rules o f life; freedom o f the courts is freedom o f the
courts, if the courts follow their own rules o f law and not those o f some other
sphere, e.g., o f religion. Every specific sphere o f freedom is the freedom o f a
specific sphere, just as every specific way o f life is a specific nature’s way o f
living.
(M I, i- i, 221.)
For Marx, as for Spinoza, then, ‘to act absolutely in obedience to

virtue is nothing else but to act according to the laws of one’s own
27
THE P R I M I T I V E E T HI C OF K A R L M A R X
nature.’ 1 As much a determinist as Spinoza, Marx sees quite rightly

that a theory of freedom could not be erected coherently on the basis
of indeterminacy, and no conception is further from his mind when
he is writing about morality than that of absolute, or unlimited, ‘free
dom of the will’. What is for Marx the closest empirical approach to
such a conception, the capricious action not in harmony with man’s
essential being, is as destructive of freedom on his view as ‘passions’
were on Spinoza’s. But freedom, on rather traditional grounds which
Marx never examines thoroughly, is taken by him as necessarily and
exclusively of the essence of man. Freedom distinguishes man— the
potential master of his environment— from the animal— necessarily
the slave of its environment. Thus Marx contemptuously rejects, in the
preliminary notes to his dissertation, Plutarch’s treatment of fear of
the divine as a means of bettering the unjust: ‘In so far as in fear, and
namely in an inner, unextinguishable fear, man is treated as an animal,
then in an animal it is a matter of complete indifference how it is kept
in restraint. If a philosopher does not consider it the height of infamy
to regard man as an animal, then he cannot be made to understand
anything at all.’ (M I, i-i, 114.) For Marx, ‘freedom is so thoroughly
the essence of man, that its very opponents bring it into actuality even
while they struggle against its reality . . . No man fights freedom, at
most he fights against the freedom of others’ (Discussion of press
debates, M I, i-i, 202).
If Marx’s belief in freedom was largely moulded by Hegelian
philosophy and the intellectual climate of the Vormari, it received
powerful reinforcement from his outstanding character trait— his
almost Nietzschean concern with dignity, seen as independence and
mastery over things.2 The strain breaks out already amid the high-
flown idealism of his school examination essay, Reflections o f a Youth
in Choosing a Career:
Dignity is that which raises man the most, which lends to his actions, to all
his strivings, a higher nobility, which leaves him unimpaired, admired by
1 Spinoza, The Ethics, Part IV, Proof of Prop. X X IV (p. 207). Marx’s pre
liminary notes for his dissertation, where he calls Aristotle, Spinoza and Hegel
the more intensive philosophers, make clear the extent to which he is attracted
by Spinoza's ethical views.
2 This trait, I have argued elsewhere, like Marx’s irascibility and contempt for
Judaism and Jews, is connected with the insecurity imposed upon him by his
Jewish origins and the equivocal nature of his status until his baptism at the age
of six. See Eugene Kamenka, ‘The Baptism of Karl Marx’, in the Hilbert Journal,
vol. LV I (1958), pp. 340-51, esp. pp. 344-5.
28
THE F R E E I N D I V I D U A L
the multitude and elevated above it. Dignity, however, can be afforded only
by that position in which we do not appear as servile instruments, but where
we create independently within our circle.
(M I, i —ii, 1 66.)
It is this psychological trait, too, which accounts for the fire in passages
like the following from his discussion of the debates on press freedom:
A country which, like the old Athens, treats boot-lickers, parasites, toadies
as exceptions from the general standard of reason, as public fools, is the
country of independence and self-government. A people which, like all
people of the best of times, claims the right to think and utter the truth only
for the court fool, can only be a people that is dependent and without
identity.
(M I, i- i, 184.)
Time and time again his aggressive independence and his moral
commitment to freedom burst out, in passages that punctuated his
work long after he had ceased to be a Young Hegelian, long after he
had stopped proclaiming a rational morality and had turned from
philosophy to his ‘scientific work’. ‘The social principles of Christian
ity’, he wrote angrily in the Deutsche-Briisseler Zeitung in 1847,1
‘preach cowardice, self-contempt, debasement, subjugation, humil
ity, in short, all the properties of the canaille, and the proletariat, which
does not want to be treated as canaille, needs its courage, its conscious
ness of self, its pride and its independence, far more than its bread/
Six years later Marx was writing in the New York Daily Tribune2 on
the village communities of India:
We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by

distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external
circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances,
that they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing
natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature
exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell
down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the
cow.
Twenty years after that, when one of his daughters handed him a
1 ‘The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter* (September 12, 1847)

M I, 6, 278.
2 ‘The British Rule in India*, published on June 25, 1853, reprinted in M arx and
Engels on Britain, pp. 383-4.
29
TH E P R I M I T I V E E T H I C OF K A R L M A R X
Victorian questionnaire asking him, inter alia, to state the vice he

detested most, he wrote: ‘Servility.’ 1
It was on behalf of the free, self-determined man, then that Marx

rejected the repressive Prussian police State. It was on behalf of the
free man that late in 1843 he became a socialist and joined Ruge and
Bakunin in issuing the Deutsch-franfosische Jahrbiicher of 1844. Ruge
speaks for them all when he writes to Marx in the ‘Correspondence of
1843’, published in the Jahrbiicher as a prefatory statement of the
journal’s raison d'etre: ‘I call revolution the conversion of all hearts
and the raising of all hands on behalf of the honour of the free man, the
free State which belongs to no master, but which is itself public being,
which belongs only to itself’ (M I, i-i, 558). Bakunin, too, speaks of
‘the State, whose principle now finally is really man’ (loc. cit., p. 566),
while Marx proclaims precisely those principles which we have seen
in his earliest work:
The criticism o f religion ends in the teaching that man is the highest being fo r
man, it ends, i.e., with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions
in which man is a debased, forsaken, contemptible being forced into servitude,
conditions which cannot be better portrayed than in the exclamation o f a
Frenchman at hearing o f a projected tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to
treat you like men!
(‘Towards the Critique o f Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right: Introduction*,2
M I, i- i, 6 14 -15 .)
Man’s self-esteem, freedom, must be awakened once more in the heart o f

these men. Only this feeling, which disappeared from the world with the
Greeks and from the blue mists o f heaven with Christianity, can once more
make from a society a fellowship o f men working for their highest purposes,
a democratic State.
(‘Corr. o f 1843’ , M I, i- i, 561.)
For the social conditions that would produce the free man Marx was
to struggle for the next forty years. In the intensity of the struggle he
never again turned to ask what the ‘realm of freedom* might mean.
That problem, he thought, he had solved before the struggle began.
1 The incident is related by E. H. Carr, K arl M arx—A Study in Fanaticism,,

p. 7.
2 This article, published in the D .-f / ., though written shortly after the manu
script criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right which I have called Marx’s first
Hegel critique, is quite distinct from it. I shall refer to it in future as his second
Hegel critique.
30
THE FR EE IND IVIDUAL
From 1844 onward Marx’s primary interest was not in the nature of
freedom, but in the developments by which it would come about.
In his earliest work, this problem does not yet occupy his mind at
all. (The conditions of censorship under which he worked no doubt
helped to keep him away from it.) Against what he believed to be the
disintegrating conditions of servitude around him, he is concerned to
hold up the truly human morality, law and society. His conception of
the latter two we shall now examine.
3i
3. The Natural Law o f Freedom
that Marx should have begun his political activity by upholding

natural law is hardly surprising. We have already seen the strength of
Marx’s rationalism. At Berlin, Marx had attended lectures on jurispru
dence by Gans, the Hegelian opponent of Savigny, and as an under
graduate Marx had planned a major work demonstrating the rational
foundations of jurisprudence— a work which he abandoned as soon as
he had realised that his plan depended upon the separation of what
ought to be from what is.2 Soon after graduation, Marx wrote for the
Rheinische Zeitung a vicious attack on the historical school of juris
prudence and on the morals3 of Hugo, whom Marx regarded as its
real founder. To treat law as an expression of the historical power of
the ‘irrational’, as the tradition of a people or as an organic growth
always true for its society, Marx insists, is to abandon all legal standards,
to treat whatever occurs as legally and morally right. For Marx, law
is Reason— seen not as an abstract faculty, torn out of history, but
as the rational exposition of the necessary rules involved in the very
nature of the activities with which law is concerned. In his discussion
of a new Prussian divorce bill,4 Marx writes confidently:
1 Portions of this chapter are drawn directly from ‘Karl Marx’s Analysis of
Law’, by Alice Erh-Soon Tay and Eugene Kamenka, with the co-author’s per
mission. Cf. The Indian Journal o f Philosophy, vol. I (1959), pp. 17—38, esp.
pp. 23-30.
* Marx, then nineteen, describes the ill-fated project and his reasons for
abandoning it in a letter written to his father on November 10, 1837 (M I, i-ii,
213-21).
3 With special reference to polygamy. See M I, i-i, 251-9.
4 Published in the Rheinische Zeitung in December 1842. For a complete
English translation of this article and some comment see Alice Erh-Soon Tay and
Eugene Kamenka, ‘Karl Marx on the Law of Marriage and Divorce— A Text and
a Commentary’, Quadrant, no. 15 (Winter, i960), pp. 17-29.
32
THE N A T U R A L L A W OF F R EE DO M
The legislator must regard himself as a scientist. He does not make laws,
he does not invent them, he only formulates them, he enunciates the inner
laws of spiritual relationships as conscious positive laws.
(M I, i-i, 318.)
It is this view which a little later—in the first Hegel critique— enables
Marx to give a short answer to the antinomy that worried Hegel: the
fact that the legislator derives his authority from a constitution itself
created by legislators. ‘The legislative power/ Marx retorts, ‘does not
make the law; it only discovers and formulates it’ (M I, i-i, 468).
The process of ‘discovering’ the rational natural law is not one that
Marx is able to describe clearly. As in morality, so in law his position
makes it easier to state what is not moral or truly legal, than what is.
There is much vague talk of ‘concepts’— the ‘concept’ of the press
(which is taken logically to exclude censorship), the ‘concept’ of the
public service, the ‘concept* of marriage— from which positive rules
of law are supposed to flow with logical necessity. Marx’s most serious
attempt at a concrete treatment is in the article on divorce. Marriage,
he argues, is ‘according to its concept’ indissoluble—but some human
relationships no longer correspond to their ‘concept’, i.e., are no
longer marriages. The State may therefore dissolve them in law, but
only because they are already dissolved in fact.
The dissolution of a marriage is nothing but the declaration: this marriage
is a dead marriage, whose existence is a snare and a delusion. It is self-evident
of course, that neither the capricious will of the legislator nor the capricious
will of a private person, but only the essence o f the matter, can decide whether
a marriage is dead or not, for it is well-known that a declaration of death
depends on the facts of the case and not on the wishes of the parties concerned.
But if in the case of physical death you demand precise and unmistakeable
proofs, must not a legislator lay down a moral death only after the most
incontestable symptoms?
(M I, i-i, 319.)
What these ‘incontestable symptoms’ are, how we derive them
logically from the ‘concept’ of marriage, or how we would defend any
particular criterion against those who reject it, Marx is unable to
indicate. Conscious of the deficiency, he falls back on a vague
popularism:
The guarantee that the conditions under which the existence of a moral
relationship no longer corresponds with its essence will be laid down truly,
in accordance with the state of knowledge and of universal opinion, without
33
preconceptions, can be found only when law is the conscious expression o f

the will o f the people, created with the people and through it.
(M I, i- i, 319.)
Fundamentally, Marx is working with the general—truly universal

and truly universalisable— will of Rousseau and Kant. For all the
talk about concepts and specific spheres, both law and marriage become
mere expressions of the human essence and its allegedly universal
will. This indeed is Marx’s basic position:
Where the law is true law, that is, where it is the existence o f freedom, it is
the true existence o f the freedom o f man. The laws, therefore, cannot fore
stall man’s actions, for they are the inner rules o f life o f his activity itself,
the conscious mirror images o f his life. Law hence retreats before man’s life
as a life o f freedom, and only when his actual actions have shown that he has
ceased to obey the natural law o f freedom, does the State force him to be free.
(Debates on press freedom, M I, i- i, 210.)
The apparent assertion of positive codes of natural law is confined to

Marx’s earliest work. We do not meet it again. But his main view that
‘true law’ is freedom, the inner moral consciousness of the truly
human and truly self-determined man, remains at the core of his
mature belief in the withering away of the State and of the official
Communist doctrine that under Communism law will wither away to
be replaced by the inner moral consciousness of the Communist
citizen.1 So does his insistence that man must throw off anything that
determines him from outside. This is why Marx utterly rejects the
intrusion of religious conceptions into law, why he rejects the lawgiver
who ‘does not regard human morality but spiritual holiness as the
essence of marriage, and thus puts in place of self-determination
determination from above, in place of the inner natural inspiration a
supernatural sanction, in place of the loyal submission to the nature of
the relationship a passive obedience to decree.’2 As we have seen,
throughout his life Marx insisted that religion, by seeking to make man
submit to illusions which man himself created, turns the free and self-
determined man into a debased animal, determined from without.
Two years later, in The Holy Family, Marx discusses the penal theory
of moral regeneration which Eugene Sue seeks to exemplify in his
1 Cf., for recent reaffirmations of this view, A. Y . Vyshinsky, The Law o f the
Soviet State, p. 52; P. A. Sharia, O Nekotorykh voprosakh kommunisticheskoi
morally p. 88; A. Shishkin, Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali, p. 38.
2 Marx's editorial note (1842) to another contributor's article on divorce,
M I, i-i, 315.
34
TH E ‘ T R U L Y HUMAN* S O C IE T Y
novel The Mysteries o f Paris and makes this point time and time again.
Each one of Sue’s characters who goes through ‘moral regeneration’,
according to Marx, comes out the less a man (or woman) in a moral
sense. Each ‘criminal’, originally full of vitality, is made dependent or
cringing, robbed of his or her talents, brought to anguish and
submission:
As Rudolph [the moral regenerator] kills Fleur de M arie by handing her
over to a priest and to consciousness o f sin, as he kills Chourineur by robbing
him o f his human independence and debasing him to a bulldog, so he kills
the gangleader by having his eyes gouged out so that he can learn to 'pray *
Marx’s own theory of punishment and regeneration rests squarely
on his belief in the truly human society of the truly self-determined
man. Marx contrasts what he considers to be Hegel’s merely apparent
demand that the criminal become the judge of his own crime with the
genuine fulfilment of this demand under ‘human’ conditions:
Hegel holds that the criminal must as a punishment pass sentence on himself.
Gans developed this theory at greater length. In Hegel this is the speculative
disguise o f the old ius talionis that Kant developed as the only legal theory o f
punishment. Hegel makes self-judgment o f the criminal no more than an
Tdea\ a mere speculative interpretation o f the current empirical penal code.
He thus leaves the mode o f application to the respective stages o f develop
ment o f the State, i.e., he leaves punishment as it is. Precisely in that he shows
himself more critical than his Critical echo. A penal theory which at the
same time sees in the criminal the man can do so only in abstraction, in
imagination, precisely because punishment, coercion, is contrary to human
conduct. Besides, this would be impossible to carry out. Pure subjective
arbitrariness would take the place o f the abstract law because it would
always depend on official ‘honest and decent* men to adapt the penalty to the
individuality o f the criminal. Plato admitted that the law must be one-sided
and must make abstraction o f the individual. On the other hand, under
human conditions punishment would really be nothing but the sentence
passed by the culprit on himself. There will be no attempt to persuade him
that violence from without, exerted on him by others is violence exerted on
himself by himself. On the contrary, he will see in other men his natural
saviours from the sentence which he has pronounced on himself; in other
words the relation will be reversed.
(M I, 3, 356; cf. H F 238-9.)
Marx began, as we have seen, with a positive conception of rational

law and rational legal rules, which courts could and should apply.
1 All the passages quoted here were written by Marx.
35
TH E P R I M I T I V E E T H I C OF K A R L M A R X
Yet, almost in the act of stating this conception, he finds it disintegrat

ing in his hands. For if law is the expression of freedom, if the criminal
must suffer no violence from without, then, under truly human condi
tions, law must simply disappear. This, indeed, is what the mature
Marx believed would happen. He was able to do so because he saw
true freedom as necessarily requiring the truly co-operative, truly
human, society.1
1 Marx reverts to the problem of law and punishment on two subsequent
occasions: in his review of Peuchet’s book on suicide, which he wrote for Moses
Hess* Gesellschaftsspiegel in the latter half of 1845 (M I, 3, 391-407), and in an
article published in the New York Tribune in 1853 (cited in French by Maximilien
Rubel in his translation and selection of K arl M arx: Pages Choisies pour une
Ethique Socialiste, pp. 117 -18 , from Gesammelte Schriften von M arx und Engels,
edited by Riazanov, pp. 80 et seq.). In the former he is concerned to show the
pointlessness of discussions whether suicide is the product of bravery or cowardice
and of a moralism which constantly speaks of man's social duties without ever
mentioning his social rights. The true lesson we can learn from the prevalence of
suicide is quite clear to Marx: ‘What sort of a society is it, in truth, where one
finds several millions in deepest loneliness, where one can be overcome by an
irresistible longing to kill oneself without anyone discovering it. This society is
not a society; it is, as Rousseau says, a desert populated by wild animals.' (M I,
3, 394.) In the New York Tribune article Marx again rejects Kant and Hegel's
theory of punishment as the lex talionis in philosophical guise. Their argument
that the criminal, in denying other people's rights, calls down on himself the
denial of his own, has the merit of treating him as a being worthy of respect. But
it treats the whole question abstractly; it considers only the ‘free-will' of the
criminal and the violation of rights in general; it does not consider the motives
and temptations of the criminal as a specific human being in a concrete social
situation. The conclusion is thus the same as he reached in his review of Peuchet:
‘Punishment, at bottom, is nothing but society's defence of itself against all
violations of its conditions of existence. How unhappy is a society that has no
other means of defending itself than the executioner.' (Cf. Acton, The Illusion o f
the Epoch, pp. 2x0-11.) Marx, as many critics have noted, seems to hold that
every criminal is driven to crime either by economic necessity or by a ‘truly
human* feeling of protest against the pressures of the class society. Hence, on this
basis he could again believe that law and crime would wither away once economic
necessity and class pressures had disappeared.
&
4. The ‘Truly Human’ Society
nowhere in Marx’s early discussion of rational morality and rational

law do we find Marx treating these as means, as principles of conduct
meant to ensure the production of the maximum ‘good’ possible in
any given situation. He was not interested in the ‘moral’ problems of
the individual faced with inherently ‘evil’ situations, conditions in
which someone must suffer, have his desires thwarted, be dominated
or constrained. The fear of a Burke that sound moral intentions, in
political life, could produce evil results, the problem of a Godwin
forced to choose between saving Archbishop Fenelon or his mother,
would have seemed to Marx nothing but an attempted piece-meal
accommodation with evil. As long as such ‘contradictions’ were
possible, Marx would have retorted, society is not yet rational, man is
not yet free, true morality is still impossible. There can be no rational
principles for dealing with ‘contradictions’ except by resolving these
contradictions. ‘Rights and duties’, Marx writes in the German Ideology
(M I, 5, 192), ‘are the two complementary sides of a contradiction
which belongs only to civil society.’
For Marx, morality and law represented the unflowering of man’s
essential being ( Wesen) and an essence, according to Marx, is always
truly universal. The human essence or spirit is what is common to
all men: their eternal nature. It must therefore express itself above all
in the unity of men, in overcoming the divisions created by their
empirical particularity. Conflict for Marx stems from the empirical
particularities and distinctions among men; but these distinctions for
Marx are secondary, destined to be overcome by the unflowering of
the human essence. ‘What is the kernel of empirical evil?’ asked Marx
in the preliminary notes for his dissertation. ‘That the individual locks
himself into his empirical nature against his eternal nature.’ (M I, i-i,
37
TH E P R I M I T I V E E T H IC OF K A R L M A R X
h i.) No doubt, traditional moralists and legal theorists, with their

dualism of facts and standards, had sought to erect moral and legal
norms based on an attempted accommodation between man’s empirical
divisiveness and rational unity. But such an accommodation, Marx
firmly believed, was pointless, necessarily incoherent and unstable,
doomed to be swept away in the historical progress toward rational
freedom. Only with the full fruition of the- human spirit or essence
could morality arise. Since the essence is universal, its first and primary
condition is the rational society, in which the traditional problems of
morality and law are entirely resolved. The true basis of morality is
not individual conduct, but social organisation. On this ground Marx
proclaimed the rational society, ‘the concretisation of human freedom*
(M I, i-i, 248). ‘Philosophy,’ he said in the same article— an attack,
written in July, 1842, on the editorial opinions of the rival Kolnische
Zeitung—‘interprets the rights of man, it demands that the State shall
be the State of human nature’ (M I, i-i, 247).
In such a rational State, a universal ‘political intelligence’ rules:
The question is whether special interest shall represent political intelligence

or whether political intelligence shall represent special interest. Political
intelligence will regulate the ownership of land according to the maxims of
the State,1 it will not regulate the maxims of the State according to the
ownership of land; it will enforce the ownership of land not according to
its private egoism, but according to its civic nature; it will not determine the
universal being according to this or that particular being, but it will determine
this or that particular being according to the universal being.
(Article on ‘The Committee of Estates in Prussia*,
M I, i-i, 333-)
The divided State, the unfree State, stands to the rational State just
as the unfree animal stands to the rational man:
The unfree condition of the world demands rights of bondage, for while
human right is the existence of freedom, animal right is the existence of
bondage. Feudalism in the broadest sense is the spiritual kingdom of animals,
the world of divided humanity in contrast with the world of self-distinguish
ing humanity, whose inequality is nothing but the spectrum of equality.
(Discussion on wood theft laws, M I, i- i, 272.)
1 Just what these maxims are, or what precisely the ‘civic nature* of the State
is, never appears. At best, one might treat the passage above, like Kant's univer-
salisability principle or Mill's statement of liberty, as creating a presumption
against certain actions.
38
THE ‘ T R U L Y H U M A N ’ S O C IE T Y
In the first Hegel critique Marx takes up the same point. The Middle
Ages, which represented the form of bondage, which divided man from
his universal being, he says, ‘are the animal history of humanity, its
zoology’ (M I, i-i, 499).
Civic morality and the criticism of the State, then, reveal the same
ethical categories as Marx’s examination of the individual, whom Marx
indeed sees as above all a universal, social being. In the rational State,
man, as individual and as universal essence of the State, is self-deter
mined—the State is harmonious, stable and free from self-contradic
tion. ‘A State, which is not the concretisation (Verwirklichimg) of
rational freedom, is a bad State’ (M I, i-i, 248). The imperfect or bad
State is characterised by incomplete self-determination, division,
instability and self-contradiction.1
Above all, the rational State is the State of a truly unified humanity.
Its chief enemies, for the young Marx, are special interests, privileges
and the estate or class, all of which elevate social divisions into a
principle of social organisation:
In general, the significance of the estate is that it treats difference, separation,

as the existential content of the individual. Instead of making him a member,
a function, of society, his manner of life, activity, etc., make him an exception
from society; they constitute his privilege. The fact that this difference is not
merely an individual one, but entrenches itself as a common way o f being
(Gemeinwesen), as estate or corporation, not only fails to dissolve the
exclusive nature of the difference, but is actually its expression. Instead of
each individual function being a function of society, this makes the individual
function a society in itself.
Not only is the estate based on the separation of society taken as a govern
ing principle, but the estate separates man from his universal being, it makes
him an animal . . .
(M I, i- i, 499.)
Similarly, Hegel’s rational monarchy is for Marx the very reverse of

rational or truly free, for ‘in monarchy, a part determines the character
of the whole’ (M I, i-i, 434). Monarchy represents a State divided
against itself, just as the class represents man divided against himself.
Privilege is for Marx the most obvious expression of such division.
1 One must not forget that within the imperfect State, however, division is also
the condition of progress to the higher form. Thus Marx writes at the end of his
polemic with the Kolnische Zeitung: ‘Without parties, no development, without
division, no progress* (M I, i-i, 250). To the actual mechanism of the social
dialectic Marx had at this stage devoted no serious attention.
39
In his contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung, especially in his discus

sions of the debates on press freedom and the wood theft laws, it
becomes a synonym for lawlessness, for apparent freedom as opposed
to true freedom, for man divided against himself (i.e., against another
man, which for Marx is the same thing). ‘The customary rights of the
privileged in their content rebel against the form of the universal law.
They cannot be formed into laws, because they are formations of
lawlessness.’ (M I, i-i, 273.) Even in a small footnote to a contributed
article advocating protective tariffs because of their success in England,
Marx finds the philosophical criterion applicable:
The example o f England refutes itself, because it is precisely in England that
we see the appearance o f the pernicious results o f a system which is not the
system o f our times, but which corresponds rather to the conditions o f the
Middle Ages, conditions which were based on separation and not unity,
which had to give special protection to every special sphere because they
did not have the universal protection o f a rational State and a rational system
o f individual States.
(M I, i- i, 308-9.)
Now in this concept of the rational State as the State of the human
essence, of truly unified humanity, there are obvious difficulties.
Basically, they resolve themselves into the general difficulty of deter
mining and describing the relationship between men as individuals,
as particular, empirical beings, and the State that is supposed to be a
form of their essence, the concretisation of their freedom. Marx himself
draws attention to the way this difficulty arises in paragraph 261 of
Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right, the paragraph with which Marx begins
the extant portions of his first Hegel critique. In that paragraph Hegel
says:
In contrast with the spheres o f private rights and private welfare (the family
and civil society), the State is from one point o f view an external necessity
and their higher authority; its nature is such that their laws and interests
are subordinate to it and dependent on it. On the other hand, however, it is
the end immanent within them, and its strength lies in the unity o f its own
universal end and aim with the particular interests o f individuals, in the fact
that individuals have duties to the State in proportion as they have rights
against it.
Here, according to Marx, we already have a crucial antinomy, the

conflict between the State as external necessity acting on men and as
immanent principle within man. To speak of the State as external
40
T H E ‘ T R U L Y HUMAN* S O C IE T Y
necessity is to imply that in a conflict between public and private inter

est, private interest must give way. Admittedly, Hegel does not speak
of such a conflict, he portrays the situation rather as a relationship of
spheres. But even so, Marx insists, Hegel’s use of words like ‘subordi
nate’ and ‘dependent’ implies clearly that the character of the lower
sphere is constrained from outside—we are still left with the unresolved
antinomy between external necessity (for Marx, though not so simply
for Hegel, normally a sign of evil) and immanent purpose.
In the rest of the critique, Marx does not go on to tackle the antinomy
directly, but gets drawn into a more detailed criticism of Hegel’s
‘systematic’ exposition of politics, in which he is able to show well
enough how Hegel’s careful logical deductions are consistently empty,
the formal premises providing no real ground for the empirical content
of the institutions he pretends to deduce from them. Soon, however,
we begin to see that this antinomy forms the crux of the political issue
between Marx and Hegel, and that the whole of the first Hegel critique
is in fact an attempt to resolve that antinomy. Already Marx has re
jected the Absolute Idea, because, like God and the external physical
laws of a mechanical science, it marked the subjugation of man to an
external determination, to something that was not a form of his essence.
Now, for that same reason, he wants to reject a State that is not entirely
human, not solely a form of man’s essence, but also a form of the non
human Absolute Idea, an external necessity acting on man from outside.
Marx obviously feels that there are no major difficulties in the way
of resolving that antinomy once we reject the Absolute Idea as a meta
physical form logically outside man and the world, and accept instead,
as the motive power of history and the logical concept that manifests
itself in the rational State, the universal spirit or essential being of man.
Thus for Marx the State is not the concretisation of an empty, non
human, metaphysical, rational will, but the concretisation of essential
human nature. It is immanent principle, and it is not external necessity
at all.
Marx still has to give an account of that obvious basis of social
conflict which makes Hegel treat the State as also representing external
necessity: the conflict between private interests, divisive groups, all
that which Hegel calls civil society, and the unified system which Marx
and Hegel call the rational State. Hegel, despite the not unjustified sneer
by Marx and Feuerbach that he makes the State the subject and society
the predicate, does begin with the divisiveness of particular interests,
with the assumption that civil society by itself never rises above
particularity, dependence and necessary contradiction, and deduces

from this its necessary logical completion by the State, which brings
order, universality and freedom where there was instability, particu
larity, dependence and increasing misery. Admittedly, Hegel wants to
say that civil society is ‘taken up’ into the rational State, and that the
resultant order is in some sense its own order. But the very emphasis on
external necessity, dependence and subordination which Marx criticises,
the concern with the individual’s ‘rights’ and ‘duties’, make it clear
that Hegel does not simply dissolve the particularity of interests, but
tries to mould them into a rational system. The whole Philosophy o f
Right becomes a study of the methods and institutions by which the
State can keep civil society in check.1 Marx, on the other hand, in
making the rational State the State of the human essence, and thus
ultimately completely identifying it with civil society in a way that the
later Hegel did not, does not even try to grapple with man’s ‘particu
larity’, with the relationship of specific activities, interests and strivings
to man’s ‘human essence’. For Marx, once the essence has come to its
full self-determination, the conflicting, divisive, features of human
activities simply disappear— in place of division comes the distinction
that is ‘the spectrum of equality’.2 We have seen how Marx had solved
in his doctoral dissertation the apparent antinomy of the free Epicurean
atom which is nevertheless determined from the outside because it is
repelled by other atoms. In being repelled by another atom, said Marx,
it is simply related to another atom, that is, to itself; hence it is not
unfree at all. Similarly, Marx obviously feels, in the rational State, man,
in being related either to other men or to the State, is simply related to
the human essence, that is, to himself.
1 Marx is quite right, however, in insisting that ‘the only “ final consequence”
of Hegel’s assertion of the ultimate unity of individual and universal being, of
citizen and State, ‘is the harmony of discord with harmony* (The German
Ideology, M I, 5, 465).
2 Here, as in many other places, Marx is unconsciously supporting a view held
by the younger Hegel against the view held by the older Hegel. Marx’s position
against the Philosophy o f Right was put admirably by the twenty-six-year-old
Hegel himself in his Erstes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (1796),
where he wrote: ‘I shall demonstrate that, just as there is no idea of a machine,
there is no idea of the State, for the State is something mechanical. Only that
which is an object of freedom may be called an idea. We must, therefore, transcend
the State. For every State is bound to treat free men as cogs in a machine. And
this is precisely what it should not do; hence the State must perish.* (Quoted by
Herbert Marcuse in Reason and Revolution, p. 12 from Dokumente {U Hegels
Entwicklung, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Stuttgart, 1936, pp. 219b)
42
T H E ‘ T R U L Y H U M A N ’ S O C IE T Y
Neither in the first Hegel critique nor anywhere else in his work does
Marx make any real attempt to get to grips with the problem of relating
and distinguishing man’s universal essence, his JVesen, and his exist
ence as a particular, empirical, being. He does take up in the critique,
however, a political question connected with this problem: the question
of the relationship between the State as a concrete manifestation of
human freedom and the individual person within the State. Marx
rejects sharply Hegel’s view that the ‘rational will’ can be embodied in a
single individual (the Monarch) and argues instead that the rational
State, to be free, must be democratic. What Marx means by democracy,
however, must be examined carefully.
In his relatively popular polemical work for the Rheinische Zeitung
Marx was constantly fighting against the conception that civic affairs
could be the prerogative of a certain class or group. Often he sounded
as though he were demanding democratic control as something
requiring merely representative control. This was emphatically not his
conception. Like Rousseau, he would have conceded that the will of
the majority and the rational will are not necessarily identical, though,
again like Rousseau, he was not always anxious to stress the differences.
But the notion of representation Marx rejects emphatically, both on
the grounds that to be free is to be active, self-determining, and on the
grounds that representation undermines the truly universal character
of the State.
To be represented is in general something miserable; only the material,
spiritless, dependent, insecure need representation; but no element of the
State can be permitted to be material, spiritless, dependent, insecure.
(‘On the Committees o f Estates in Prussia’, M I, i- i, 334.)
In the first Hegel critique Marx reinforces this with a more general
point—representation converts civic affairs into sectional affairs, into
special interests, and thus destroys the very basis of the rational State.
It is the product of the divorce between political or civic affairs and
human affairs in general, of the gulf between the State and civil society.
This divorce, this ‘abstraction’ (in the Hegelian sense) of the political
State, Marx sees as a modern phenomenon. The medieval State, even
though the State of human nature in bondage, was nevertheless a State
of human nature, though not in its rational form. ‘Folk life and civic
life were identical’ (M I, i-i, 437.)1
1 Marx’s development of this point and his general conception of the relation
ship between civil society and political State will emerge more clearly in the
following Part. In the material dealt with here, his views are still sketchy.
43
Hegel, however, had posed the problem in the form of an antinomy:

If citizens are not to participate in the State through representatives
then each citizen must take part as an individual. This would be
impossible:
T o hold that all persons should share, as individuals in deliberating and
deciding on political matters o f general concern on the ground that all
individuals are members o f the State, that its concerns are their concerns and
that it is their right that what is done should be done with their knowledge
and volition, is tantamount to a proposal to put the democratic element
without any rational form into the organism o f the State, although it is only
in virtue o f the possession o f such a form that the State is an organism at all.
(Philosophy o f Right, para. 308).
Marx seeks to solve the problem by cutting through and rejecting both
alternatives:
The antinomy in its essential form is: all the individuals do it, or the indivi
duals do it as some, as not-alL In both cases allness remains only external
multiplicity or totality o f individuals. Allness is not an essential, vital, actual
quality o f the individual. Allness is not something through which he loses
the character o f abstract individuality; allness is only the full number o f
individuality. One individual, many individuals, a ll individuals. The one,
many, all— none o f these descriptions changes the essential being o f the
subject, o f individuality.
(M I, i- i, 539-40.)
The contrast here is between universality as a mere collection,

universality treated extensionally, and universality as an intrinsic
character, universality treated intensionally. It is the same distinction
as the distinction between Rousseau’s ‘truly general’ will and what is
merely the common will of a majority, or even of an entire totality.
The rational State is the State of this intensional universality. Its
universality rests on the fact that it is a form of the human essence, of
man’s essential being, which is, in virtue of its character as an essence,
common to the entire species. Its universality does not rest on any
voting by its members, on any counting of supporters and opponents.
What then is the relationship of particular, empirical men to their
universal essence and to the rational State? The essence and State,
according to Marx, ultimately permeate their entire being: social life
and citizenship, civil society and State, become one; man’s every
action is an expression of the universal essence, and a part of his civic
being. Thus, immediately after rejecting representation, in his article
44
THE ‘ T R U L Y H U M A N ’ S O C IE T Y
on the Prussian Committees of Estates, as something required by the

spiritless and insecure, Marx writes:
Representation must not be understood as the representation of some stuff,
which is not the people itself, but only as the self-representation of the
people. It must be understood as a civic act which differs from the other
expressions of the people’s civic life only by the generality of its content; it
must not be understood as the people’s only, exceptional civic act. Repre
sentation must not be regarded as a concession to defenceless weakness, to
impotence, but rather as the self-confident vitality of the highest power. In
a true State there is no landed property, no industry, no gross stuff, which,
as such raw elements, could make a bargain with the State; there are only
spiritual [geistige] powers, and only in their resurrection in that State, in
their political re-birth, do the natural powers qualify for a voice in the State.
The State pervades all of nature with spiritual nerves, and at every point it
must become apparent that what dominates is not matter but form, not
nature without the State but the nature of the State, not the unfree thing,
but the free man.
(M I, i-i, 335-)
According to Marx, when
civil society is the true political society, it is nonsense to make a demand
which arose only from the conception of the political State as having an
existence divorced from that of civil society . . . In these circumstances the
significance of the legislative power as a representative power disappears
wholly. The legislative power is representative here in the same sense as
every function is representative, in the sense, for instance, that the cobbler,
in so far as he fulfils a social need, is my representative, in the sense that
every specific social activity, as a species of activity, represents only the
species, i.e., a character of my own being, in the sense that every man repre
sents the other. He is a representative in this case not through something
else, which he symbolises, but through that which he is and does.
(M I, i-i, 542.)
This, then, is Marx’s vision of the moral and historical end of man:
the rational State which is the State of a human essence that is qualita
tively and essentially universal. As such, it is self-distinguishing, but
absolutely precludes separation or conflict. We do find in it a division
of functions, but one that arises ‘naturally’ and spontaneously. Since
each function is a manifestation or activity of the human essence, since
each truly represents man’s universal being, all functions are naturally
harmonious components of a united social life. There is no call for an
external power to apportion or to harmonise their various roles; there
45
T H E P R I M I T I V E E T H IC OF K A R L M A R X
is no need for a coercive political State outside or above the society

that rationally arranges itself. The conflict of rights and duties, of
‘private* and ‘public’ wills, of individual and society, disappears from
the arena of history.
The first Hegel critique, written soon after Marx’s resignation from
the Rheinische Zeitung and just before his emigration to Paris and
Brussels, marks the end of one brief period of relatively popular writing
by a very young man and forms the beginning of the new stage of
intensive work and thought which was to make Marx a Communist.
In the critique, Marx had to make clear to himself why he rejected the
coercive State envisaged by Hegel and on what grounds one could
proclaim the free society of the truly human man. Marx believed that
he had done so. From then on, the problem that occupied him was how
that society would necessarily come about. Its final nature occupied
him less and less. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and in the German
Ideology two years later he presents a detailed view of the rational
society of Communism for the last time. His language is already in
creasing economic, but his metaphysical assumptions remain: ‘The
fully realised society produces man in the full richness of his being, it
produces the rich man, genuinely equipped with all his senses \der tief
allsinnige M enschy 1 Wants and enjoyments lose their egoistic nature
and utility becomes human, universal, social utility. Man is united not
only with himself but even with Nature, which he makes part of his
being and function.
The radicalism of Marx’s position, as well as its concrete merits,
which are discussed in Part III below, is somewhat obscured by the fact
that Marx so far still speaks of rational law and a rational State— i.e., of
freedom as a system of rules. Certainly, he cannot give such a position
any concrete content. He cannot show on what ‘rational’ basis a court
would decide precisely the point where a marriage ceases to be one; he
cannot show what are the rules of ‘political intelligence* by which a
truly rational society would be dominated. It seems to me that there is
little point in driving these arguments home against Marx at length.
The conceptions of rational law and of a rational State which he pro
claims at this period are confused versions of his position— residues of
a moralism he is soon to abandon entirely. The view he is working
toward is a far subtler and sounder view. A true ‘marriage’— i.e., a
genuine love between two persons—unifies the persons involved,
brings them together in a co-operative relationship that transcends
1 Paris Manuscripts, M I, 3, 12 1; cf. German Ideology, M I, 5, 185-217.
46
THE ‘ T R U L Y H U M A N ’ S O C I E T Y
concern with purely individual ends. Such a relationship is not created

by laws or rules and cannot be maintained by them when it has ceased
to exist. (Marx’s talk of ‘caprice’ only confuses this issue and reduces
his position to the vulgar moralism he decries in theology.) Again, a
truly free and co-operative society is one in which people participate
in free and co-operative activities: a system in which people ‘participate’
only through representatives is not a free and co-operative society, but
one in which people are in dependence, in which they lack the enter
prise characteristic of freedom. What Marx means by the ‘rational’
State, then, is no State at all; what is implied by his conception of
‘rational’ law is no law at all. As long as either law or the State remain
‘necessary’ society is neither truly co-operative nor truly free. This is
the view at which Marx was soon consciously to arrive.
47
P A R T TW O
Karl Marx’s Road to Communism

5- The New Social Dialectic
i n the first Hegel critique Marx, following Hegel and an eighteenth-

century tradition, had decomposed social life into civil society—the
material and economic life of man, the divided and conflicting world
of his private desires and activities— and the political State, which
represents man’s recognition of social interdependence and his striving
for unity. Hegel, according to Marx, had sought to impose the latter
on the former. Marx, on the other hand, insisted that the entire dualism
would have to disappear in the rational society which would be at once
spontaneously co-operative and materially all-embracing. Precisely
how such a rational society would come about, Marx, as we have seen,
had not yet asked. Between his resignation from the Rheinische Zeitung
in March, 1843 and the publication of the Deutsch-fr<m{dsische Jahr
biicher in February, 1844, he was both to ask the question and to emerge
-
with an answer that was to direct and canalise the whole of his subse
quent thought. The rational society would come about through the
dialectical conflict, ultimate dissolution and ‘taking up’ of civil society
and the political State. The bearers of the transformation, its ‘material
base’, would be the proletariat: the class which is within civil society
and yet outside it.
For Marx in his earliest writings, philosophy was the activity that
finally overcomes man’s empirical nature and the divisive, incoherent
institutions based on this nature. It brings about the rational State.
In the final stage, Marx had argued in his dissertation, philosophy is
‘fired with the drive to make itself concrete’; it turns, in the form of
will, against the empirical world. The resultant conflict ends, and can
only end, in that final rational reconciliation in which the world
becomes philosophical and philosophy worldly.
At the opening of his career, philosophy becoming worldly meant
K A R L * M A R X ’ S R O A D TO COMMUNISM
two things to Marx. Firstly, it meant that philosophical concepts would

ultimately become concrete existences. The rational reality which
philosophy discovers as the necessity behind the one-sidedness of
current empirical reality would itself burst into empirical being. The
actual would become also the rational or truly real. Secondly, philo
sophy becoming worldly meant that even before this rational recon
ciliation philosophy enters the fray against the one-sided empirical
reality. It turns on ‘the world itself’ and struggles to change it. ‘But
the practice of philosophy’, Marx had insisted, ‘is itself theoretical. It
is criticism.’ (M I, i-i, 64.)1 Philosophy becoming worldly thus did not
mean for Marx, at this stage, that philosophy abandoned the philo
sophic method of criticism for some other form of struggle. It meant
simply that philosophy turned from the discussion of abstract, meta
physical issues and took actual worldly institutions for the objects of
its criticism. In the first two years of his critical writing, as we saw,
Marx appeared to believe that it was sufficient to expose the ‘contra
dictions’ of empirical reality and to hold up against them the truly
rational. The growing reaction in Prussia, culminating in the wave of
newspaper suppressions that lost Marx his job in March, 1843, was to
show Marx that it was not enough. The ‘party of the concept’ had been
proved utterly powerless when faced by the material forces of the
State.2 On most of the ‘philosophical radicals’ the situation had a
politically shattering effect. It drove them back into the examination of
individual consciousness, of religion and theories of culture, and away
from a practice of politics that showed all the signs of leading to
nothing but despair. Only Marx, Ruge and Hess threw themselves with
new energy into political effort. Marx, above all, with his pugnacious
belief in freedom and dignity, was not the man to shrink from the
struggle. On January 25, 1843, immediately on hearing that the
Rheinische Zeitung is to be suppressed, he writes to Ruge:
I see in the suppression of the Rh. Z. a step forward for political conscious
ness and am therefore resigning. Apart from that, the atmosphere had become
too oppressive for me. It is bad to perform servile tasks, even for freedom,
and to fight with pins instead of clubs. I am tired of the hypocrisy, stupidity
and bullying authority, and of our capping and cringing, our evasion and
1 See also Marx’s preliminary notes for his dissertation at M I, i-i, 131-2.
For a similar interpretation of Marx’s position at this stage see H. Barth, Wahrheit
und Ideologie, pp. 81-6 and H. Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch, pp. 5-7.
2 For a brief account of the relevant events, see Nicolaievsky and Manchen-
Helfen, K arl M arx, Man and Fighter, esp. pp. 61-2.
5*
THE N E W S O C IA L D I A L E C T I C
hair-splitting with words. In other words, the Government has set me free
again.
(M I, i-ii, 294.)
Typically enough, Marx was already on the look-out for possible

allies. Thus on March 13, 1843, the eve of his retirement from the
paper, he writes again to Ruge:
The head of the local Israelites has just come to me seeking my signature for
a petition to the Landtag on behalf of the Jews, and I shall give it. Repellant
as I find the Israelite belief, Bauer’s notions1 seen too abstract to me. We
must riddle the Christian State with as many holes as possible and smuggle
in the rational. . . We must at least try this—and bitterness grows with every
petition rejected amid protests.
(M I, i- ii, 308.)
By the end of that year Marx had proclaimed an ally more powerful
than these poor Rhenish Jews— the proletariat.
‘The weapon of criticism’, Marx had discovered, ‘can certainly not
supplant the criticism of weapons: material force must be overthrown
by material force.’2 Thus, in the D eutsch-franfosische Jah rbiicher 9
Marx proclaims his new political programme, the necessary union of
philosophic criticism and class agitation, the alliance of thinking
humanity which suffers and suffering humanity which thinks.3
Revolutions need a passive element, a material basis . . . It is not enough that
the thought strives to be made real, reality itself must strive toward the
thought.
(Second'Hegel critique, M I, i- i, 6 15-16 .)
Where, then, lies the positive possibility of German emancipation? Answer:
In the formation of a class with radical chains . . . the proletariat. . . Philos
ophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons.
(Ibid., pp. 619--20.)
1 That disfranchisement of the Jews is perfecdy logical in a Christian State,
and that the emancipation of Jews can therefore only follow the emancipation of
the State from Christianity.
2 Toward the Critique o f Hegel's philosophy o f Right: Introduction (the second
Hegel critique, published in the D .-f / .) , M I, i-i, 614.
3 Compare his second letter to Ruge, dated May 1843 and published in the
‘Correspondence of 1843*: ‘The existence of a suffering humanity which thinks
and of a thinking humanity which is oppressed will necessarily be unpalatable
for the passive animal world of the Philistines . . . The longer circumstances
give thinking humanity time to reflect and suffering humanity time to rally, the
more finished when bom will be the product that the world carries in its womb*
(M I, i- i, 565-6).
53
K A R L MARXES ROA D TO COMMUNISM
Marx had discovered that he needs the proletariat, but he has not
abandoned philosophy:
Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the

proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the
lightning o f thought has penetrated thoroughly into this naive popular
ground the emancipation o f the German into a man will be complete . . .
The head o f this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat.
Philosophy cannot translate itself into reality without taking up and dissolv
ing the proletariat, the proletariat cannot rise and dissolve itself without
making philosophy real.
(Ibid., pp. 620-1.)
Unquestionably, Marx was pushed toward the proletariat and to

ward the study of the concrete conditions of social development by his
realisation of the impotence of a struggle that used ideas alone. But if
the search for ‘material* allies and foundations arose out of the practical
climate in which Marx worked and out of his own aggressive tempera
ment, it was equally necessary to him as part of a more detailed working
out of the views he had sketched in his dissertation, his contributions
to the Rheinische Zeitung and his first Hegel critique. He did there,
and still does to some extent in the passages quoted immediately
above, portray the climax of history as the confrontation of, and
ultimate reconciliation of the ‘contradiction* between, an unphilo-
sophical world and an unworldly philosophy. He had begun by
emphasising that philosophy, in the final stage, sheds its unworldliness
and enters the dialectical struggle by seeking to make itself con
crete. Now, political events had made Marx realise that the thought
striving toward reality was not enough. Reality would also have
to strive toward the thought. Marx’s strong realisation of this at
this particular stage may have stemmed mainly from the practical
situation, but it enabled him to come to grips with what had been in
any case a major weakness in his earlier position. For the dichotomy
of thought and reality which runs through Marx’s earliest views is a
weak expression of what he himself believed. Philosophical criticism
was for him the manifestation of man’s universal, generic being in
conflict with the one-sidedness and egoism of man’s particular, empiri
cal being. Such a conflict is not merely a conflict between ‘thought’
and ‘reality*. It is a conflict within (social) reality between public and
private being. To that conflict Marx now devotes his attention.
In his first Hegel critique Marx, following Feuerbach, had insisted
54
TH E N E W S O C IA L D I A L E C T I C
that all thought is social or ‘natural’ in content, that that which is

allegedly above ‘the world’ can always be reduced to a reflection of
something within ‘the world’. In the Deutsch-franidsische Jahrbiicher
he is able to develop this view. ‘Material’ life is something which he
still sees as distinct and separate from the ‘theoretical’ life of men;1 but
he insists— quite rightly—that the supraterrestrial is always reducible
to the terrestrial.2 Thus he treats religion as expressing on the one
hand real misery and on the other the protest against real misery
(second Hegel critique, M I, i-i, 607), and insists that in dealing with
philosophy we are dealing with ‘a copy, not an original’ (ibid., p.
608).3 Marx, who had constantly seen philosophy as an expression of
man’s real essence, now plants it firmly in its social context and ceases
to treat it loosely as conquering reality from outside. From now on he
treats the fundamental conflict and movement toward rationality as
taking place within society, as a necessary consequence of social features
and forms of development.
Although Marx has turned to the proletariat for succour, he does not
yet see the dialectical conflict in society primarily as a conflict between
economic classes. The central feature of modern society for him, at
this stage, is not the separation between various economic groups in
society. It is the separation, within each man himself, between his
empirical being and his generic, social being, between his civil,
1 Thus, in the ‘Correspondence of 1843*, Marx writes: The whole socialist
principle is . . . only one side that affects the true human existence. We must
concern ourselves just as much with the theoretical existence of man, i.e., make
religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism/ (M I, i-i, 573-4.)
2 ‘We do not convert questions about the world into theological questions.
We convert theological questions into questions about the world/ (‘ On the
Jewish Question', M I , i-i, 581.)
8 Here we already find that unfortunate metaphor of reflection which has
raised the well-known difficulties in interpreting Marx's mature views on the
character of ideologies and the social ‘superstructure'. The insistence that the
supraterrestrial (i.e., that which claims to be non-empirical) can only be made
sense of in terms of the ‘terrestrial' (i.e., the empirical) implies neither an un
tenable economic reductionism nor a doctrine that ideologies are purely passive;
the word ‘copy' tends to suggest the latter here and both in Marx's later work.
Yet if Marx were really upholding the view that ideologies are purely passive, it
would be difficult to see why he should think it important not to neglect criticism
of the ‘theoretical existence of man'. Much of the difficulty here, I think, is caused
by the fact that Marx had not entirely emancipated himself from a Lockean
representationalism; he had certainly not considered carefully either the nature
of belief or the social role of beliefs. In spite of the generality of his later doctrines
on this subject (considered in Part IV, Chapters 12 and 13) he was never to do so.
55
K A R L M A R X ' S R OAD TO COMMUNISM
material life and his political life. It is the separation between civil
society and the political State, between private, egoistic interest and
common interest:
The consummate political State is in its essence the generic life o f man in
contrast with his material life. All the presuppositions o f this egoistic life
remain in civil society, as properties o f civil society outside the sphere o f
the State. Where the political State has reached its true form, man leads a
double life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, not only in thought, in
consciousness, but in reality, in life itself. He leads a life within the common
unity \Gemeinwesen\, in which he is himself a common or generic being, and
he leads a life in civil society, in which he acts as a private person, regarding
other people as means and demeaning himself into a means, so that he
becomes the football o f alien powers.
(On the Jewish Question’, M I, i- i, 584.)
Here, then, is Marx’s new social dialectic—the hostile confrontation

of civil society and political State, each of them abstracted, one-sided,
unstable and logically incomplete, powerless, within its present form,
to express its ‘true nature’ or to achieve logical completion. In the
Hegelian destruction of these forms, and in the raising of their respec
tive contents into a new form where both are harmoniously reconciled,
the rational society will be born:
Every emancipation consists o f leading the human world and human relation
ship back to man him self. . . Human emancipation will be complete only
when the actual existing individual man takes back into himself the abstract
citizen, when, as individual man, he has become a generic social being
[Gattungsweseri\ in his everyday life, in his individual work and in his
individual relations, when man has recognised and organised his own forces
[forces propres] as social powers, and thus no longer severs this social power
from himself in the shape o f political power.
(‘ On the Jewish Question, M I, i- i, 599.)
The conflict between civil society and political State, then, is seen
primarily as the expression of a conflict within man himself, as an
example of that alienation which Hegel sees as an essential step in the
development of mind, and which Feuerbach strikingly developed in
the field of religion. Just as Hegel had argued in the Phenomenology o f
M ind that the feeling of estrangement between man and certain of his
own externalised powers becomes particularly acute at certain periods
of history, so Marx argued that the hostile confrontation of civil
society and political State is a modern phenomenon, the necessary
56
TH E N E W S O C I A L D I A L E C T I C
precondition of the final rational society and the product of political

emancipation from feudalism. In his first Hegel critique he had already
argued that in medieval times the strict division between civil society
and political state did not exist. The whole of man’s material life was
pervaded by religious and political forms. Men carried on their
‘private’ pursuits in guilds, estates, corporations. ‘The material content
of the State was determined by its form, every private sphere had a
political character, or was a political sphere’ (M I, i-i, 437).
Now, in his essay on the Jewish question, Marx proceeds to develop
the point and to show how history has set the stage for the final
dialectical conflict:
Political emancipation is the dissolution of the old society on which the
sovereign power, the alienated political life of the people, rests. The political
revolution is the revolution of civil society. What was the character of the
old society? One word describes it. Feudalism . The old civil society had a
directly political character, i.e., the elements of civil life, such as property,
the family and ways of earning a living, were raised to the level of being
elements of civic life in the form of seignorial rights, estates and guilds.
In this form they determined the relationship of the single individual to the
State as a whole, i.e., they determine his political situation, i.e., his separation
or exclusion from the other constituent parts of society. For this organisation
of the life of the people did not raise property or labour to the level of social
elements. It rather consummated their separation from the civic whole and
formed them into particular societies within society. Nevertheless, the
functions and conditions of life in civil society remain political, even if
political in the feudal sense, i.e., excluding the individual from the civic
whole, transforming theparticular relationship between his guild or corpora
tion and the civic whole into a general relationship between the individual
and social life, just as they transformed his private, particular activity and
situation into a general activity and situation. In consequence, the State as a
unity, and the consciousness, will and activity of the State—the general
political power—appear as the particular concern of a ruler separated from
the people and of his servants.
The political revolution which overthrew the power of these rulers and
made affairs of state affairs of the people, which made the political State a
matter of universal concern, i.e., which made it a true State, necessarily
smashed all estates, corporations, guilds and privileges as just so many
expressions of the separation of the people from its communal life. The
political revolution thus destroyed the political character o f civil society. It
smashed civil society into its simple constituents: on the one hand, individuals,
on the other, the material and spiritual or cultural elements which form the
life-content, the social situation, of these individuals. It liberated the political
57
K A R L M A R X ’ S ROA D TO COMMUNISM
spirit, which, distributed in the various blind alleys of feudal society, had
been worn down and decomposed; it gathered together the scattered frag
ments, liberated the political spirit from its amalgamation with civil life and
constituted it into the sphere of common social being [Gemeinwesen], of
universal public affairs, theoretically divorced from the particular elements
of civil life. Specific activities and specific social situations sank to merely
individual significance. They no longer constituted the universal relationship
between the individual and the State totality. Public affairs as such became
the universal affair of every individual; the political function became his
universal function.
This perfection of the idealism of the State was at the same time the
consummation of the materialism of civil society. Shaking off the political
yoke meant at the same time shaking off those bonds which held fast the
egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same time
the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a
universal content.
Feudal society was broken up into its basic element, into man. But [it was
broken up] into man in the shape in which he really was its basic element,
into the egoistic man.
(M I, i-i, 597-8.)
Here, then, is the basic structure of Marx’s new social dialectic. The
struggle between the particular, empirical nature of man and his
rational, universal essence is the struggle between his private, material
pursuits in civil society and the unity and universality expressed in the
political State. In feudal society the struggle was still unclear. Man’s
material life and his political life were welded together, everything he
did was treated as legitimately coming wTithin the sphere of religious
and political life. As a result, the feudal structure did to some extent
inhibit and suppress the naked divisiveness and individual conflict of
civil society, of man’s economic and material life. It tolerated no
economic ‘freedom’ to indulge openly in the helium omnium contra
omnes; it bound serfs to the land, fettered the ‘free’ land-holder in the
political chains of homage and fealty, controlled retail prices and
standards of workmanship through the guilds, forbade usury as an
offence against the Christian faith. But the unity and universality pro
claimed by feudalism were not the unity and universality of free men,
co-operating spontaneously. Feudal unity was an artificial, illusory
unity: a unity in bondage. Instead of overcoming division, feudalism
elevated it into a political principle and temporarily stabilised it by
force. Precisely because feudal society had not yet split human nature
into two, because the rational universal being of man had not yet
58
T H E N E W S O C IA L D I A L E C T I C
liberated itself from man’s particularity and division, man under

feudalism could not yet recognise his potentialities. The struggle was
not yet clear. Then came the political revolution against feudal tyranny
which ushered in modern society. It overthrew the political bondage
of feudalism; but at the same time it also overthrew feudalism’s political
and religious control of economic life. It liberated man as a political
citizen; it also liberated man as a self-seeking economic unit. The
contradiction in social life thus emerged openly for all to see: on the
one hand, the unified, universal political state, the fellowship of man
as a citizen: on the other, the divisive, conflicting civil society, the
material world of greed and competition, the bellum omnium contra
omnes. ‘The word “ civil society” ’, Marx writes in the German Ideology
(M I, 5, 26), ‘emerged in the eighteenth century, when property re
lationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and
medieval communal society \Gemeinwesen]. Civil society as such
develops only with the bourgeoisie.’
59
6. The Critique o f Politics
i n the Deutsch-fran^dsische Jahrbiicher, as we have seen, Marx does not

yet treat his social dialectic as consisting simply of the struggle of
economic classes or as arising from economic ‘contradictions’. His
detailed investigation of civil society, of the world trade and industry,
is only about to begin. For the moment, his analysis of civil society is
still fairly perfunctory, particularly in relation to his far more detailed
critique of the political State. But he does, in his article on the Jewish
question, take the all-important step of connecting the evils of modern
civil society specifically with the power of money, thus both laying the
foundation for his coming critique of economics and bringing out
clearly once more the ethical categories with which he works. Civil
society, he insists, is ‘the world of riches’, and mon.ey is that power
which turns man into a servile, dependent being, determined from
without. It makes man into a commodity. Precisely in that, for Marx,
lies its absolute moral evil.
Money lowers all the gods of mankind and transforms them into a com
modity. Money is the universal, self-constituting value of all things. It has
therefore robbed the whole world, both the human world and Nature, of
its own peculiar value. Money is the essence of man’s work and existence,
alienated from man, and this alien essence dominates him, and he prays to it.1
(‘On the Jewish Question’, M I, i-i, 603.)
Marx is able to bring these points into a review of Bruno Bauer’s
pamphlets on Jewish emancipation because he treats Judaism as the
1 Here we have Marx’s first economic application of Hegel and Feuerbach’s
doctrine of alienation. For Marx it simply means that man takes one of his own
powers or functions, objectifies or reifies it by infusing it into an object or
treating it as though it has separate existence from himself and then, instead of
dominating it, allows it to dominate him.
60
TH E C R IT IQ U E OF P O L IT I C S
religion of money,1 as the practical expression of the egoism of the

world of riches. Christianity he regards as the witting or unwitting
partner of Judaism, as the religion which puts all of man’s moral and
social relationships into heaven, makes them external to his social
being, and thus enables civil society to achieve its current arrogant
independence:
Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society; but
civil society consummates itself only in the Christian world. Only under the
sway of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral and intellectual
relationships external to man, could civil society separate itself entirely from
the life of the State, rend all social bonds [Gattungsbande] of men, put
egoism, self-interested wants, in place of social bonds and break up the
human world into a world of atomistic mutually hostile individuals.
Christianity arose out of Judaism. Once again it has flown back into
Judaism.
Christ was patently the theorising Jew; the Jew therefore is the practical
Christian and the practical Christian is become Jew again.
Christianity overcame actual living Judaism only in appearance. It was
too respectable, too spiritualistic, to overcome the brutality of practical
needs except by raising itself into the sky.
Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism and Judaism is the mean
practical application of Christianity, but this practical application can
become universal only after Christianity as the consummated religion has
completed in theory man’s self-alienation from himself and from Nature.
Only then could Judaism gain universal dominion and turn externalised
and estranged [entaussert] man and externalised and estranged Nature into
objects fallen into servitude to egoistic needs, into objects of barter.
Making things saleable is the practical side of alienation. Just as man, so
long as he is still caught within the limitations of religion, can only objectify
his essential being by making it into an alien, phantastic being, so under the
domination of egoistic wants he can only act practically, he can only create
objects in practice, by putting his products as well as his activity under the
domination of an alien being and giving them the significance of an alien
being—the significance of money. . .
As soon as society succeeds in destroying the empirical essence of Judaism,
buying and selling and its presuppositions, the Jew will become impossible
because his consciousness will no longer have an object, because the sub
,
jective basis of Judaism, practical wants personified, and the conflict of the
individual-sensual existence with the existence of man as a member of the
species will have disappeared.
1 He was not the first Jew to display jiidischen Selbsthass—Jewish self-hate.

61
K A R L M A R X ’ S R O A D TO COM MUNISM
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from

Judaism.
(‘ On the Jewish Question’, M I, i- i, 604-6.)
Such, then, for Marx is modern civil society— egoistic, atomic,

particular, logically precluded by its form from true universality and
leading inevitably to servility, self-alienation, dependence and increas
ing internal tensions and misery. It is the animal world from which
there can be no further development but to negate its basis and pass
over to the ‘human world of democracy’ (‘Corr. of 1843’, M I, i-i,
564).
The modern political State— Marx means by this the constitutional

democracies established by the French and North American revolu
tions— suffers from a similar incoherence. According to Marx, it does
embody the demands of reason, it points to the future, but only with
the inevitable limitations imposed by its form and by its separation
from civil society.
Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. The critic
can therefore seize upon any form of the theoretical and practical conscious
ness and develop out of the special forms of existing reality the true reality
of that which ought to be, of that which is reality’s final aim. So far as actual
life is concerned, it is just the political State>even where it is not consciously
permeated by socialist demands, that contains in all its modern forms the
demands of reason. And it does not rest there. Everywhere it supports
reason coming to be reality. Equally, however, it falls everywhere into the
contradiction of its ideal characters with its presuppositions.
(‘Corr. o f 1843*, M I, i- i, 574.)
For Marx at this stage the political State is not yet merely an instru
ment of class control, nor is it a mere reflection of the state of civil
society. On the contrary, like religion, it is not a reflection of civil
society but a compensation for it, an ideal completion of it. Just as
Marx regards Christianity as expressing not only real misery, but also
the protest against real misery, a ghostly rationality in another world
(second Hegel critique, M 1, 1 —i, 607), so he treats the political State as
an ideal assertion of the universal human essence, of that striving
toward universality, self-determination and natural co-operation
which has been entirely banished from modern civil society.
Just as religion is the table of contents of the theoretical struggles of man,

so the political State is that of his practical struggles. The political State
62
within its form therefore expresses sub specie rei publicae all social struggles,
needs, truths.
(‘Corr. of 1843’, M I, i-i, 574.)
The political State, however, is fatally limited by its form, by its
separation from civil society and from the actual, empirical being of
man with that society. It remains an ideal expression of his universal
being, powerless to conquer the actualities of man’s existence. It is
hence one-sided, logically incomplete and incoherent in precisely those
principles which it professes to apply to human society. The proof of
this, says Marx, can be seen in the French and American revolutions.
Professedly, they achieved the political emancipation of mankind. They
proclaimed man’s freedom, independence from religion and his ration
ality—as a political citiien. But as a man, they left him in bondage, thus
contradicting their own basis, bringing out their one-sidedness and
incoherence:
The boundary of political emancipation reveals itself immediately in the
fact that the State can free itself of a certain limitation1 without men becoming
truly free of this limitation, in the fact that the State can be a free State
without man being a free man.
(‘On the Jewish Question*, M I, i-i, 582.)
Thus, Marx argues, men proclaim themselves atheists politically by
declaring the State to be secular yet guarantee themselves the ‘right’ of
worship and so remain in religious bondage. Man decomposes himself
into the man, follower of a specific religion, and the citizen, member of
the atheistic State. The resultant tension expresses the real, this-worldly
tension between civil society and the political State, between the
bourgeois and the citoyen, between the private interest and the common
interest (M I, i-i, 583-91). Nor is this product accidental. It arises
from the very character of political emancipation, which robs religion
of even that limited connexion with man’s universal being which it
had in the feudal State and transforms it into an expression of the very
spirit of civil society. The same considerations apply to private
property:
The political annulment of private property [through the removal of property
qualifications for voters and candidates] does not destroy private property
1 Marx uses the word ‘limitation’ [Schranke, Beschranktheit] here and elsewhere
in the D .-f.J. to mean both the limitation or narrowness that prevents a subject
from being truly ‘universal’ and the limitation that sets limits to the subject
from without and thus makes it determined and not truly free. Both meanings
are essential to his argument.
63
K A R L M A R X ’ s R O A D TO COMMUNISM
but presupposes it. The State destroys distinctions of birth, estate, education
and occupation in its own way, when it takes distinctions of birth, estate,
education and occupation to be unpolitical distinctions, when it makes every
member of the people an equal participant in the sovereignty of the people
without reference to these distinctions, when it treats all elements of actual
civil life from the point of view of the State. For all that, the State nowise
prevents private property, education and occupation from acting and making
their specific being felt in their own way, i.e., as private property, as educa
tion, as occupation. Far from resolving these distinctions o f fa ct, the political
State exists only by presupposing them, it sees itself as a political State and
imposes its universality only in opposition to these, its elements.
(Op. cit., M I, i-i, 583-4.)
This contradiction, says Marx, runs through the whole doctrine of

human rights, fundamental to the political State in its modern form. It
breaks out clearly in the distinction made between political rights, the
droits du citoyen, and the rights of man or natural rights, the droits de
Vhomme:
Who is the homme, as distinguished from the citoyen? No one but the member
of civil society. Why is this member called ‘man*, simply man; why are his
rights called the rights of man? How shall we explain this fact? By the
relationship of the political State to civil society, by the essential character
of political emancipation.
Above all, we assert the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de
Vhomme, as opposed to the droits du citoyen, are nothing but rights of the
member of civil society, i.e., of egoistic man, of man separated from man
and from the common life and being.
(Op. cit., M I, i-i, 593.)
We can see this clearly, says Marx, if we examine the rights of man and
of the citizen as laid down in the most radical constitution, the French
Constitution of 1793, which names the rights of freedom, property,
equality and security.
Freedom [if we examine the definition given in the Constitution] is therefore
the right to do everything which harms no one else. The borders within
which every man can move harmlessly are determined by the law, just as
the border between two fields is determined by a fence. The concern is with
the freedom of man as an isolated monad withdrawing into itself. . . The
human right of freedom is not based on the connexion of man with man but
rather on the separation of man from man. It is this right of separation, the
right of the limited individual, limited unto himself. . .
Man’s right of private property is the right to enjoy one’s property and to
64
THE C R IT IQ U E OF P O L IT I C S
dispose over it arbitrarily son gri], without considering other men, inde
pendently of society. It is the right of self-interest. Such individual freedom,
like this application of it, forms the basis of civil society. It allows every
man to find in other men not the realisation, but the limitation, of his
freedom . . .
Egaliti, in its non-political sense, is nothing but the equality of the liberty
described above i.e., that each man is* regarded equally as such a monad,
based on itself. . .
Security is the highest social conception of civil society, the conception
held by the police force that all of society exists only in order to guarantee to
each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property
Civil society does not through the concept of security raise itself above its
egoism. Security is rather the guarantee of egoism.
None of these so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man,
beyond man as a member of civil society, as a man severed from the common
social life and withdrawn into his private interests and private caprice. Far
from man being conceived in these rights as a generic being [Gattungswesen],
the life of the genus itself [Gattungsleben], society, appears in them as a
frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence.
The sole thread that keeps them together is natural necessity, needs and
private interest, the preservation of their property and of their egoistic
person.
(Op. cit., M I, i-i, 593-5. 1 have omitted in this and in many subse
quent quotations those of Marx’s over-frequent italicisations which
seem to me merely pointless.)
This, then, is the result of a political emancipation confined to the
realm of politics, an emancipation based on the separation of political
State and civil society:
A people which is just beginning to free itself, to tear down all the barriers
between various members of the people and to found a common political
fellowship [politisches Gemeinwesen] . . . solemnly proclaims the vindication
of the egoistic man, severed from his fellow-man and from the common
fellowship . . .
The political emancipators lower the citizen and the common political
fellowship to the level of a mere means for preserving these so-called human
rights, so that the citoyen is made the servant of the egoistic homme. The
sphere in which man conducts himself as a universal, social being is degraded,
put below the sphere in which he conducts himself as a sectional being and,
finally, man as a bourgeois and not man as a citoyen, is taken for the essential
and true man.
(Op. cit., M I, i-i, 595.)
6j
K A R L M A R X ’ S R O AD TO COMMUNISM
Thus egoistic man, the member of civil society, now stands revealed
as ‘the basis, the pre-supposition of the political State, which recognises
him as such in the rights of man’ (op. cit., p. 598). The political man,
on the other hand, remains only ‘the abstracted, artificial man, man as
an allegorical person’ (ibid.). Because the political State is such an
allegory, such an ideal construct, based on the factual presupposition of
egoistic man in civil society, it is in fact powerless before civil society.
This is why, according to Marx, the Jews who are denied the right to
vote in the smallest European hamlet control the bourses of the great
European capitals.
The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his
political rights is the general contradiction between politics and the power
of money. In thought, the former stands above the latter, in fact it has
become the latter’s slave.
(Op. cit., M I, i- i, 602.)
We have seen, then, the formal, logical, necessary limitations of

political emancipation and the political State. Both deny civil society,
yet rest upon it. The historical reason for this ‘contradiction’ Marx
suggests in his second Hegel critique, where he approaches his later
class doctrine most closely:
Upon what does a partial, merely political revolution rest? Upon this, that a
part of civil society emancipates itself and attains universal dominion, upon
the fact that a particular class, working from a situation particular to itself,
undertakes the universal emancipation of society. This class does free the
whole society, but only under the proviso that the whole society find itself
in the situation of this class, i.e., for instance, that it possess money and
education or that it can at least attain these.
(M I, i- i, 617.)
There are, indeed, moments of political enthusiasm when the

demands of reason, embodied in limited form within the political
State, seek to fulfil themselves. They press, within the form of the
political State for the dissolution and supercession of such cardinal
symptoms of man’s bondage as religion and private property. But
within the form of the political State this proves impossible:
In the moments of its specific feeling for itself, political life seeks to suppress
its presuppositions—civil society and its elements—and to constitute itself
as the true, contradictionless generic or social life of man. It can do this only
through the forcible negation of its own conditions of existence, through
66
declaring the revolution to be permanent; the political drama therefore

necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, of private property
and of all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.
(‘On the Jewish Question*, M I, i-i, 586-7.)
A few months later, in his article ‘Critical Glosses on the Article:

“ The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian** *,* Marx
again insists on the necessary impotence of the political State:
The State cannot overcome the contradiction between the good intentions
of the administration on the one hand and its means and possibility of action
on the other without overcoming and destroying itself, for the State rests
on the contradiction. It rests on the contradiction between public and private
life, between universal interests and special interests. The administration
therefore has to confine itself to formal and negative action, for where civil
life and its work begin there the power of the administration ends. Impotence
vis-a-vis the consequences which spring from the unsocial nature of civil
life, from private ownership, trade, industry and the mutual plundering
engaged in by the various bourgeois circles is the natural law governing the
administration. This fragmentation, this oppression, this slavery to civil
society, is the natural foundation on which the modem State rests, just as
the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation on which the ancient
State rested . . . If the State wanted to overcome and destroy the impotence
of its administration, it would have to overcome and destroy the private
life of to-day.
(M I, 3, 14-5.)
Thus, according to Marx, we can see the necessary incompleteness,

the merely illusory character, of political emancipation. But he still
believes with that Young Hegelian optimism that sees the rational
society about to burst upon the world that the chain of events begun by
political emancipation cannot be halted. Its own logic drives it relent
lessly forward at tremendous pace. Because each class that presses for
political emancipation liberates society only from its own point of
view, the role of emancipator in spirited countries like France, if not
in Germany, passes in dramatic sequence from one class to another.
Finally it reaches the class which no longer realises social freedom under
the presupposition of particular conditions that lie outside man but were
1 The original article by ‘a Prussian* was written by Arnold Ruge and pub
lished in Vorwarts (Paris) on July 27, 1844. Marx’s reply appeared in the same
paper on August 7, 1844. Ruge’s text is reprinted in MI, 3, 587-9 and Marx’s
article in M I, 3, 5-23.
67
K A R L M A R X ’ S R O A D TO COMMUNISM
yet created by human society. This class on the contrary organises all the
conditions of human life under the presupposition of social freedom.
(Second Hegel critique, M I, i-i, 619.)
In France, Marx believes, such a class might be activated by enthusiasm.
In Germany the French revolution took place only in ideas, in the
philosophy of Kant, and not in reality; the middle classes remained
powerless; here such a revolutionary class will be activated only by
needs. But there is such a class—
a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which
represents the dissolution of all estates, a sphere endowed with universal
character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular rights
because the wrong it is made to suffer is not a particular wrong but simply
wrong as such . . . a class which represents the utter loss of humanity and
which can therefore regain itself only by fully regaining the human. This
dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat. . . When the
proletariat announces the dissolution of the social order that has existed
hitherto, it thereby only expresses the secret of its own existence, for it is
the effective dissolution of this order. If the proletariat demands the negation
of private property, it is only making into a principle of society that which
society has made into a principle of the proletariat.
(Op. cit., 619-20.)
I f Marx turned to the proletariat from practical considerations,
through realising the impotence of the German middle classes, he has
here given it the ‘speculative development’ which he claims Epicurus
gave to the atom. He sees in it not just the empirical existence, but the
logical category. The proletariat occupies a necessary place in the
dialectical schema; it is driven by ‘the secret of its own existence’ to
accomplish the dissolution and raising up into a new form of the old
order. And just as contradictions in the atom could not be resolved
without treating it as free, so the contradictions of the proletarian’s
position cannot be resolved without restoring to mankind its freedom,
its ‘universal soul’.
The fellowship [Gemetnwesen] from which the worker is isolated is a fellow
ship of a scope and order of reality quite different from that of the political
fellowship. The fellowship from which his own labour separates the worker
is life itself, physical and intellectual life, morality and customs, human
activity, human satisfaction, being human. Being human [Das menschliche
Wesen] is the true fellowship of men. Just as irremediable isolation from this
fellowship is incomparably more pervasive, unbearable, horrible and full of
contradiction than isolation from the political fellowship, so the dissolution
68
of this isolation from being human, or even a partial reaction or uprising

against it, is as much wider in scope as man is wider in scope than the political
citizen, as human life is wider in scope than political life. Thus, no matter
how sectional an industrial uprising, it carries within it a universal soul; a
political uprising, no matter how universal, hides in the hugest form a
narrow soul. . .
A social revolution therefore takes place from the standpoint of the whole,
even if it takes place only in one factory district, because it is the protest of
man against the dehumanised life, because it starts off from the standpoint of
the single, real individual, because the fellowship against whose separation
from himself the individual is reacting is the true fellowship of man, the
fellowship of being human. The political soul of a revolution, on the other
hand, consists in the tendency of a politically uninfluential class to break
asunder its isolation from the State and the ruling power. Its standpoint is
that of the State, an abstracted whole which arises only through separation
from empirical life, which is unthinkable without the organised contradiction
between the universal idea and the individual existence of man. A revolution
permeated with the political soul therefore organises, in accordance with its
limited and dualistic nature, a ruling circle in society at the cost of society . . .
Revolution in general—the overthrowing of the existing power and the
destruction of old relationships—is a political act. But without revolution
socialism cannot be carried out. Socialism needs this political act in so far
as it needs destruction and dissolution. But as soon as its organising activity
begins, as soon as its essential purpose, its soul, steps forward, socialism
tosses away the political shell.
(‘ Critical Glosses’, M I, 3, 2 1-3.)
69
7. The Critique o f Economics
h i s critique of politics, as we have seen, led Marx to the conclusion

that the universality of the political State was contradicted by the
egoism of economic life. He is not content, however, to develop the
inevitability of the rational society out of the ‘dialectical* conflict
between the political State and economic life alone. For though he
does not yet treat politics as a mere reflection of productive relations,
he does already ascribe to it a certain impotence. He sees the political
State as dominated by civil society, by the naked, atomic economic
man. It is for this reason, no doubt, that Marx now turns to an examina
tion of civil society itself and seeks to find within economic life the
dialectical motive force toward change which political life alone is too
weak to provide. For the first time, Marx plunges into detailed econ
omic studies. He makes copious excerpts from de Boisguillebert,
Eugene Buret, Lord Lauderdale, John Law, Friedrich List, Mac-
Culloch, James Mill, Osiander, Ricardo, Say, Schiiz, Skarbek and
Adam Smith. The Economico-Philosophical {Paris) Manuscripts of
1844 were the first results of this work. In them, Marx sought to show
the dialectical break within economic life itself, the inescapable contra
dictions which made its continuance or free development within the
same ‘form* impossible. He sought to do so by submitting the entire
structure of contemporary political economy, its categories and its
fundamental laws, to the most searching philosophical criticism.
Philosophical criticism, for Marx, still meant logico-ethical criticism.
It did not mean patently normative criticism. Marx expounds no moral
‘principles* or standards according to which political economy is tried
and found wanting. But logical ‘contradictions*, to Marx, are the
inevitable result of evil; they are part of the very nature and way of
working of the egoistic, the alienated, the unfree. Engels, who had
70
T H E C R I T I Q U E OF EC O N O M IC S
acquired from the Young Hegelians roughly the same views, had
already preceded Marx in the task of subjecting political economy to
such criticism by publishing in the single issue of the Deutsch-fran[d-
sische Jahrbiicher of February, 1844 his ‘Outlines of a Critique of
Political Economy’. Marx thought highly of the article and became
interested in Engels, whom he knew only slightly, as a result. Yet a
comparison of Engels’ article with Marx’s manuscripts brings out how
much more thorough-going is Marx’s conception of the relation be
tween logical and ethical criticism. For Engels, political economy is
something he attacks both morally and logically; for Marx, these
attacks are not complete until they have been brought back to a single
base. Thus Engels begins with a moral-advocative onslaught: ‘Political
economy, or the science of becoming rich, arisen out of the mutual
envy and greed of merchants, carries on its brow the marks of the most
revolting self-seeking’ (M 1, 2,379); he ends (M 1, 2,400) by seeing in
man’s dependence on private property, competition and conflicting
interests his most complete degradation. His logical indictment is
complementary but distinct, mostly untinged by moral or ethical
overtones. It rests on the necessary vacillation in economic theories of
value, the ‘contradiction’ between a high ‘national income* and the
overwhelming poverty of the nation as a set of individuals, as well as
on the contradiction between the allegedly harmonious operation of
the laws of supply and demand and the increasing number of trade
crises. Marx, on the other hand, insists that ethical deficiency and
logical contradiction are necessarily connected. The criticism is not
complete until they have been shown to arise from a single cause, from
a ‘one-sided’ treatment of man or from a failure to see the human
content of social institutions which have been illegitimately ripped
out of their human context and treated as dead things. His whole
tour de force in the Paris Manuscripts is to proclaim that political
economy cannot be an ethically neutral study of so-called ‘objective’
relations between non-human things or laws and to bring it back into
the ethical sphere by reducing it once more to its human content. The
fundamental categories of political economy, Marx insists, are not
labour, capital, profits, rents, land. The fundamental category is man,
man and his human activities. These activities cannot be abstracted
from man; they must be seen as integral expressions of his humanity.
The categories of which traditional political economists speak are
nothing but abstractions (in the Hegelian sense) from the true essence
of society—man. The economists objectify, reify, set up in limited
7i
K A R L M A R X ’ S R OAD TO COMMUNISM
and abstracted shape, as dead objects, what are vital human activities,
activities that can only be grasped and correctly developed as part of
the whole social man.1
It is because Marx rejects the conception of ethical criticism as being
the application of ‘ideal’ standards and treats his ethico-logic as
grounded in the way things occur, that he can insist that his criticism
is purely empirical. ‘My results have been gained through a wholly
empirical analysis, founded on a conscientious critical study of political
economy’ (M I, 3, 33; cf. EPM 15-16). The first thing such a study
reveals to Marx is the utter inadequacy of the abstract(ed) laws of
political economy which fall into necessary contradictions and fail to
grasp the fundamental principle that makes these contradictions neces
sary. The political economist says that originally and by its nature the
entire product of labour belongs to the worker; at the same time he
grants that in fact the worker receives nothing but the smallest and
most unavoidable part of this product. He says that everything is
bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labour;
yet he grants that the labourer cannot buy everything but must sell
himself and his human qualities. He says that labour is the only un
changeable value of things; yet nothing is more contingent than the
value of labour; nothing is exposed to greater variations. The division
of labour, according to the political economist, increases the productive
power of labour and the wealth of society; yet it impoverishes the
worker. According to their own nature, land rent and capital profit
are deductions suffered by wages; in actual fact, wages are a deduction
which land and capital permit to the worker. While the political
economist claims that the interests of the worker are never in opposi
tion to the interests of society , society stands constantly and necessarily
opposed to the interests of the worker. (M I, 3, 4 3 - 5 ; EPM 28-9.)
By means of the political economist’s own words, then, Marx has
striven to show that labour, in so far as it increases work, is harmful.
This is the paradoxical result of the abstracted laws of political econ
omy. The worker sinks to the level of the most miserable commodity,
his misery standing in inverse relationship to the size and power of his
production. On the side of capital, the necessary result of competition
is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, i.e., the frightful re
imposition of monopoly. Thus the distinction between capitalist and
1 Two years later, in the Poverty o f Philosophy, Marx attacks Proudhon for
not seeing this: ‘The economist's material is the active, energetic life of man; M.
Proudhon's material is the dogmas of the economist' (PP 117).
72
TH E C R IT IQ U E OF EC O N O M IC S
landed proprietor and between peasant and industrial worker finally

disappears and the entire society must inevitably break apart into the
two classes of property owners and propertyless workers. (M I, 3, 81;
EPM 67.)
Here, then, we have the first version of what is undoubtedly Marx’s
best-known contribution to intellectual endeavour: his analysis of
society based on private property in the stage of commodity-produc-
tion. It is shot through with ‘contradictions’: the more the worker
produces, the less he earns and enjoys; the more the capitalist competes,
the more capitalists are ruined. At the very beginning of his venture
into political economy, Marx has thus satisfied the requirements of his
dialectical critique of society: he has shown to his own satisfaction that
civil society (i.e., political economy)1 is necessarily, by its very
essence, self-contradictory, working by its own logic toward inevitable
break-up and collapse. But Marx wants to go further than this. He
wants to display the basic ground of the ‘contradictions’ in political
economy. This ground cannot be displayed, or even understood, if we
remain within the abstracted laws of political economy, if we follow the
political economist in simply assuming the existence of private property
and inventing fanciful primitive qualities, such as Adam Smith’s
tendency to barter, which simply assume what they are supposed to
explain. But we can discover the basic ground of the whole movement
of political economy if we begin, not with mythological prehistory,
but with a contemporary fact:
The more riches the worker produces, the more his production increases
in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. The more commodities a worker
produces, the cheaper a commodity he becomes. The devaluation o f the
world o f men proceeds in direct proportion to the exploitation2 o f the
world o f things. Labour not only produces commodities, but it turns itself
and the worker into commodities and does so in proportion to the extent
that it produces commodities in general.
(M I, 3, 82; EPM 69.)
This fact is the fundamental fact of political economy for Marx.
It can be explained, explained in its very essence, as a necessary
1 Like Hegel in the Phenomenology, Marx brings together the theory of a sub
ject (here political economy) and the subject itself (here economic life or civil
society), just as he had earlier identified the theory of the heavenly bodies and
the bodies themselves.
2 Marx is punning here on the words Entwertung (devaluation) and Verwertung
(using, or gaining value from, a thing— i.e., exploiting it in the non-pejorative
sense in which we speak of exploiting natural resources).
73
K A R L M A R X ’ s ROAD TO COMMUNISM
phenomenon, by careful logical analysis. If the worker is impoverished

by producing riches, this can only be because production under the
existing economic conditions takes away from the worker something
that is part of him. This is what the fundamental fact of political
economy expresses:
The object which labour produces, its product, confronts it as something
alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour
which has congealed in an object, which has become material; it is the objecti
fication of work. The bringing of labour to reality (its realisation) is its
objectification. Under the conditions of political economy, the realisation of
labour, making it into a reality, appears as loss of reality by the worker,
objectification appears as loss of the object, as bondage to it; appropriation
appears as estrangement, as alienation.
(M I, 3, 83; EPM 69.)
Here, then, we have Marx’s first detailed exposition of his theory of
alienation in economic life. In the Phenomenology o f Mind, Hegel had
argued that mind or spirit passes historically through the stages of
Entausserung (externalising or projecting itself into objects) and
Entfremdung (the estrangement or alienation that follows when mind
treats its own extemalisations as independent and even hostile objects
confronting it). Feuerbach had strikingly applied the concept of
alienation to religion, in which he saw man projecting his own powers
into the blue mists of heaven and then falling on his knees to worship
them as the powers of an alien, external being. Marx in the Paris
Manuscripts pays strong tributes to the importance of Feuerbach’s
‘revolution in philosophy’; the historical background of Marx’s
thought and his debt to previous thinkers need not detain us here. The
importance of alienation for Marx is that it can be used to show that
the worker’s misery is logically inescapable under the conditions of
economic life as we have known it. Alienation is the fundamental fact
of political economy. Political economists have been able to conceal
this only by failing to examine the direct relationship between the
worker (labour) and his product. Because of this alienation ‘the more
the worker produces, the less he has to consume, the more values he
creates, the less value— the less dignity—he himself has; the better
shaped the product, the more misshapen the worker, the more civilised
his product, the more barbaric the worker*. Thus, ‘labour produces
wonders for the rich, but strips the worker. . . It produces culture,
but idiocy, cretinism for the worker.’ (M I, 3, 84-5; EPM 71.)
So far, Marx has emphasised only the alienation of the worker’s
74
TH E C R I T I Q U E OF E C O N O M IC S
product from the worker, but this alienation is possible only because
alienation is enshrined in the very activity of production, in the wor
ker’s labour itself. In what does this alienation within labour consist?
Firstly, in the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not
belong to his essential being, in the fact that he therefore does not affirm
himself in his work, but negates himself in it, that he does not feel content,
but unhappy in it, that he develops no free physical and mental energy but
mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Therefore the worker feels himself
only outside his work, while in his work he feels outside himself. He is at
home when he is not working and when he works he is not at home. His
work, therefore, is not voluntary but coerced; it isforced labour. It is, there
fore, not the satisfaction of a need but only a means for satisfying needs
external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as
there is no physical or other compulsion, labour is avoided like the plague.
External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is labour of self-
sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of labour for the
worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but somebody else’s, that
in his labour he belongs not to himself, but to someone else . . . The worker’s
activity is not his own activity. It belongs to another, it is the loss of his self.
The result, therefore, is that man (the worker) no longer feels himself
acting freely except in his animal functions, eating, drinking and procreating,
or at most in his dwelling, ornaments, etc., while in his human functions he
feels more and more like an animal. What is animal becomes human and
what is human becomes animal.
Drinking, eating and procreating are admittedly also genuinely human
functions. But in their abstraction, which separates them from the remaining
range of human functions and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they
are animal.
(M I, 3, 85-6; EPM 72-3.)
We thus see alienation, says Marx, to have two aspects. Firstly, we

have the worker’s relationship to the product of his work, which is
for him an alien object ruling over him. This alienation, according to
Marx, is accompanied by a similar relationship to Nature, to ‘the world
of the senses*. Nature should be the stuff on which the worker’s labour
makes itself real, through which it is active. But in being alienated
from the product of his work, the worker is also alienated from
Nature. Secondly, we have the worker’s alienation of his own activity
and therefore of his personal life— ‘for what is life other than activity,
than doing things* (M I, 3, 86). This, in other words, is the worker’s
self-alienation. Marx now wants to show that these two forms of aliena
tion imply and create two further forms: man’s alienation from his
75
KARL M A R X ’ s ROAD TO COMMUNISM
own universal being as a man and from other men, which may be
brought under one head by treating them as two aspects of man's
alienation from his genus or species.
The actual argument is more than somewhat metaphysical. It
depends upon a conception which Feuerbach expounds at the very
beginning of his Essence o f Christianity (pp. 1-5) and which we have
already met, in slightly different form, in Marx’s earliest works. Marx,
as we have seen, took man’s freedom and self-determined activity to
be the specifically human characteristic that distinguishes man from
the determined and conditioned beast. Feuerbach treats this freedom as
consciousness9 especially as consciousness of man’s generic being. The
animal has limited consciousness of itself as an individual, but that is
all; its inner life is one with its outer life. Man, on the other hand, has
both an inner and an outer life. ‘The inner life of man’, says Feuerbach,
‘is the life which has relation to his species— to his general, as distin
guished from his individual, nature.’ It is on this consciousness of
himself as a general, generic being that the functions of thought and
speech depend when they are performed alone, without another being
present. Marx, in the Paris Manuscripts makes this conception some
what more concrete. Both men and animals live from inorganic nature.
But the animal, according to Marx, ‘is directly one with its life-
activities. It does not distinguish itself from them. It is they.’ To be
sure, the animal, like man, is able to produce— a nest, a home, etc. But
it produces only what it needs directly for itself or for its young. It
produces only under the domination of direct physical needs. It pro
duces only itself—in the sense that it can produce only according to the
measure and the need of the species to which it belongs. Man, in con
trast, ‘makes his life-activities themselves an object of his willing and of
his consciousness. He has conscious life-activities.* It is because of
this and only because of this that his activity is free activity. When
man produces, he can produce even in the absence of physical needs;
indeed, he produces truly only in the absence of physical needs. In his
production, man is not bound by the measure and need of his own
species alone; he does not merely produce himself but reproduces the
whole of Nature. He can create according to the measure of all species
and knows how to fashion each object according to its own inherent
measure; hence he creates according to the laws of beauty. But man’s
consciousness of himself as a generic being depends upon his being
able to appropriate and dominate Nature and to see his own reflection
in it:
76
It is precisely in working on the world o f objects that man first genuinely

proves himself to be a generic being. This production is his active generic
life. Through it and because o f it Nature appears as his work and his reality.
The object o f labour is therefore the objectification o f the generic life o f man,
in so far as man duplicates himself not only intellectually, in consciousness,
but practically and therefore recognises himself in a world which he himself
has made. Hence, in so far as alienated labour tears from man the object of
his production, it tears away from him his generic life, his real and actual
objectification as a species, and transforms his advantage over the animal into
the disadvantage that his inorganic body, Nature, has been taken away from
him.
(M I, 3, 88-9; EPM 76.)
Marx’s ‘proof’ that man’s alienation from his species is implied by
his alienation from the product of his labour (and not merely displayed
in the helium omnium of economic life) consists of nothing more solid
than these metaphorical transitions, but he concludes emphatically:
Alienated labour therefore:
(3) turns the generic being o f man, both Nature and the intellectual wealth o f
his species, into a being alien to him, into a means for his individual
existence. It alienates his own body from man, it alienates from him both
Nature outside him and his intellectual being, his human nature.
(4) A direct consequence o f the fact that man is alienated from the product
o f his labour, from his life activity, from his generic being, is the alienation
o f man from man . . .
(M I, 3, 89; EPM 76-7.)
How then, Marx goes on to ask, does this concept of alienated labour
express itself in real life? To whom do the worker’s product and
activity belong? They cannot belong to the gods; they can only
belong to another man, a not-worker, to whom the worker’s activity,
a torment to the worker himself, is a delight and joy (M I, 3, 90). Even
in religious alienation we find that alienation can appear only in a
relationship among men, in the relationship between the layman and
the priest, for only man can dominate over man. But the not-worker,
the capitalist, is as subject to self-alienation as the worker, only he
is not as conscious of suffering from it: ‘Everything which appears in
the worker as the activity o f alienation, o f estrangement, appears in the
non-worker as the condition or state o f alienation, o f estrangementZ1
(M I, 3, 94.)
• • • •
1 A year later, in The Holy Family, Marx was making the same point more
clearly: ‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same
77
K A R L M A R X ’ S R O A D TO COMMUNISM
We have seen how Marx in his article ‘On the Jewish Question*
already treated money as the power which turns man into a servile,
dependent being, into a commodity. In the Paris Manuscripts he
devotes a special section to money as the very essence of man’s
alienation. He quotes (M I, 3, 146) Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust:
Wenn ich sechs Hengste zahlen kann
Sind ihre Krafte nicht die meine?
Ich renne zu und bin ein rechter Mann
Als hatt ich vierundzwanzig Beine.1
and Shakespeare’s Timon apostrophising gold:
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant. . .
Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds
Among the rout of nations.
(Timon of Athens, Act IV, scene iii.)
Marx elaborates the same theme:
That which money can create for me, that for which I can pay (i.e., what
money can buy)—that 7, the possessor of the money, am. The extent of the
power of money is the extent of my power. The properties of money are the
properties and essential powers of me—its possessor. Thus what I am and
what I am capable of is in no way determined by my individuality. I am
ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Therefore I am not ugly,
for the effect of ugliness, its power of repulsion, is destroyed by money. I—
according to my individual nature—am lame, but money gives me twenty
legs, therefore I am not lame. I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid
man; but people honour money, and therefore also its possessor. Money is
the highest good, therefore its possessor is good. Besides, money saves me
the trouble of being dishonest; therefore I am presumed to be honest; I am
stupid, but money is the real mind of all things; how can its possessor lack
mind?
(M I, 3, 147; cf. EPM 138-9.)
1 . . . When to my car
My money yokes six spankers, are
Their limbs not my limbs . . .
Mine all the forces I combine —
The four-and-twenty legs are mine.
(John Anster’s translation).
human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self-alienation its con
firmation and its good, its own power: it has in it a semblance of human existence.
The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its
own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence* (M I, 3, 206).
78
TH E C R IT IQ U E OF E C O N O M IC S
From Shakespeare, says Marx, we can see the two leading character
istics of money:
(1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural
properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning
of things; it binds together impossibilities.
(2) It is the common whore, the universal pimp, of men and nations.
The confounding and overturning of all human and natural qualities, the
coupling of impossibilities—the divine power—achieved by money arise
out of its essence as. the alienated, externalised generic being of man, which
.
has conveyed itself to another. It is the alienated ability or wealth1 ofmankind
(M I, 3, 147-8; EPM 139.)
The analysis of economic conditions and of money then, according

to Marx, reveals the inadequacy of traditional political economy and
of the presuppositions of economic life. It reveals that the contradic
tions of political economy and of economic life are not accidental, but
necessary, results of the fundamental presupposition on which they
rest— that alienation of man’s labour and man’s products from man
which is expressed in private property. Until political economy grasps
its own essence as alienated human activity, and through the super
cession of private property reunites man’s activities and products with
man as an undivided social and generic being, these contradictions
cannot be resolved and overcome. Because of its failure to do this,
political economy, instead of being a science of man, ends by negating
man. It is based on a simple, inhuman, moral principle: eat less, drink
less, practise self-denial, give up as many human needs as possible and
save more. ‘Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the
ascetic but productive slave’ (M I, 3, 130).
The fact that political economy rests on abstracted laws arising from
man’s alienation comes out particularly clearly, for Marx, in its relation
to morality. It is a feature of systems based on alienation, he argues, that
each system has its own self-sufficient laws and falls into contradiction
with other systems. Each system studies a particular sphere of aliena
tion; none studies the whole, undivided man. Thus, what is utter
depravity to morality is entirely consonant with the laws of political
economy:
If I ask the political economist: Am I obeying the laws of economics if I
draw money from selling and surrendering my body to another’s lust? (The
1 Marx, no doubt deliberately punning, uses the word Vermogeny which can
mean either ability or wealth.
79
K A R L M A R X ’ S RO A D TO COMMUNISM
factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters
the xth working hour, which is literally correct.)—Or am I acting contrary
to political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? . . . Then the
political economist answers: You are not transgressing my laws, but see
what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say. My political economic
ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but—But whom am
I to believe now, political economy or ethics?
(M I, 3, 131; EPM 120.)
It is thus, according to Marx, that political economy ignores the un
employed labourer, the man behind the work in so far as he is outside
the relationship of labour. ‘The thief, the swindler, the beggar, the
unemployed, the starving, miserable and criminal working man—
these are figures that do not exist for political economy, but only
for other eyes: for the eyes of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger
and the bum-bailifP (M I, 3, 97).1
This, then, is Marx’s critique of economics and the doctrine of
alienation in terms of which he seeks to explain the necessary contra
dictions of ‘civil society’ or economic life. The fact of alienation—
the estrangement of nature and of such human functions as the political
power or State from man—had already been postulated by Hegel in the
Phenomenology o f Mindy as Marx emphasises; but Hegel develops the
concept of alienation only in the sphere of ideas, while Marx seeks to
show its practical nature in the concrete social and economic life of man.
The metaphysical foundations and empirical ethical content of the
concept of alienation we shall examine shortly, in Part III. The under
lying conception of man’s products as in some sense ‘truly part of
1 Marx concedes that there has been a partial revolution in the theory of
political economy, an attempt to bring some human content back into the field.
But the attempt was only partial, it failed to overcome the basic alienation on
which political economy rests. It thus parallels the Lutheran revolution in
religion. The Catholics, the fetish-worshippers of political economy, according
to Marx, were the mercantilists, who worshipped private property in its material,
symbolic, nonhuman, form— in the precious metals. Luther overcame the
objective extemalisation and estrangement of religion and made it subjective
by bringing it, through the doctrine of faith, back into the heart of the layman.
Similarly, Adam Smith overcame the external materialisation of wealth and
incorporated private property into man himself by translating wealth into its
subjective form, into labour. But to do this is not genuinely to overcome aliena
tion. Private property is not reduced to its human content as a function of man
— in taking private property into himself, man is himself reduced into a form of
private property. Thus Ricardo, quite consistently with the nature of political
economy, treats man as nothing more than a machine for consuming and produc
ing and man’s life as nothing more than a form of capital.
80
man’, of nature as something which man ‘appropriates’, of conscious

ness as presupposing man’s ‘universal and generic being’, of labour as
something that ‘congeals’ in the object it produces— all this, we shall
seek to show, must be rejected. Yet the concept of alienation, the
indictment of money, we shall suggest, has empirical content and
ethical relevance over and above its merely suggestive power (its
focusing of attention on the social background of economic operations,
its evocation of the interdependence of all social phenomena). But for
Marx himself the concept of alienation has a further significance, a
significance that gave it a fundamental role in his social dialectic. In
seeing alienation as the ‘essence’ of economic life in its ‘political
economic’ form, he had sought to reduce all the ‘contradictions’ of
economic life to a single fact: the human self-alienation expressed in
private property. If he is right, then the removal of that basic ground
— of human alienation and private property—will inevitably result in
the removal of all the contradictions that stem from it. It will, accord
ing to Marx, usher in the rational society of the complete, unalienated
man.
81
8. Communism and the Complete,
Unalienated Man
a c c o r d i n g to Marx, as we have seen, the laws of political economy

and the facts of economic life rest on the uncriticised presupposition
of private property, which conceals and accepts the fact of man's
self-alienation. This alienation, Marx had sought to show, necessarily
breaks out at every turn:
(1) The product of mans work, and ultimately the whole outer world of
sense-experience, all of nature, are alienated from man and confront him as
hostile, independent forces seeking to dominate him.
(2) Mans own activity, the process of labour itself, is alienated from him,
made into an independent object, and similarly dominates man instead of
being dominated by him.
,
(3) The alienation of nature from man means the alienation of man from
his own universal generic social being. His generic social existence, instead of
representing his essential nature becomes a mere means for satisfying his
narrow, individual demands.
(4) The alienation of man from his universal being means also his alienation
from other men. Instead of being expressions of his own universal essence,
they confront him as hostile beings.
Political economy cannot escape or resolve these contradictions
because it does not criticise private property, because it does not see
that the true basis of private property is human alienation. But in the
Paris Manuscripts, at least, Marx insists on the logical priority of
alienation: it is not enough merely to criticise or reject private property
without recognising and resolving the human alienation that underlies
it. Thus he emphasises (somewhat obscurely) that instead of asking
‘What is the origin of private property?’, we should ask ‘How can we
82
COMMUNISM A N D TH E C O M P L E T E , U N A L I E N A T E D M AN
explain the alienation that broke out in the course of human develop
ment?’ 1 (M I, 3,93). Instead of studying laws of economic development
from the abstracted standpoint of private property, from within
alienation, we should ask: ‘What is the relationship between the general
nature of private property, as it has developed out of alienated labour,
and truly human and social property? Four years later, Marx (with
Engels) was to attack scathingly in the Communist Manifesto this treat
ment of alienation as something distinct from and more basic than the
economic facts supposed to follow from it:
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the
manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French
literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French
original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions
of money, they wrote ‘Alienation of Humanity* and beneath the French
criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote, ‘Dethronement of the Category
of the General*, and so forth . . .
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the
struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome
‘French one-sidedness* and of representing not true requirements, but the
requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests
of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality,
who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
(SW I, 55.)
In 1844, without question, Marx still believed in the requirements of
‘Human Nature, of Man in general’, still insisted on alienation as some
thing more than a series of economic facts. It is hardly surprising that
the concrete value of his insistence that questions about private
property should be converted into questions about alienation remains
obscure. He does, however, in somewhat metaphysical form seek to
derive one concrete point from it—a criticism of the ‘crude Com
munism’ which fails to see the alienation behind private property.
1 To substitute the latter question for the former, according to Marx, is already
to advance a fair way toward the solution. But in point of fact he does not take
this question any further in the Paris Manuscripts. His subsequent comments in
the Poverty o f Philosophy (p. 36) and in Capital (Book I, chapter 1) give no
account of the origin of alienation but merely link it with commodity production
and emphasise that the acute form of alienation is a product of modem capitalism.
In the German Ideology alienation is traced beyond private property to the
division of labour, seen as the common ground from which both alienation and
private property arise. See infra, iv, 14.
83
Marx’s point seems to be that if we regard private property purely as

such we will think that the contradictions of political economy can be
overcome by converting private property into public property,
whereas in truth they can only be overcome by a thorough-going
rejection and overcoming of all aspects of alienation, including the
very concept of property and the very distinction between the ‘individ
ual’ and ‘society’.
Marx seeks to develop this theme by drawing a parallel between
the successive stages through which alienation passes in establishing
itself and the stages through which the overcoming of alienation must
pass. He has already argued that the progress of man’s self-alienation
passes through an objective stage, when private property is worshipped
in its material, non-human form, and a subjective stage when private
property is seen as human labour, but still alienated from man. The
overcoming of self-alienation, according to Marx, takes the same
form. (What follows, however, reveals a fact often to be noted in
Marx’s later works; as he develops a position in detail, allegedly to
illustrate an outline he has summarised, the detailed position does not
quite match the architectonic with which he began.) Thus, in the first
stage, the socialists, though recognising labour as the essence of
property, still see private property only in its material and sectional
form. They therefore seek only the overcoming of capital ‘as such’
(Proudhon) or ascribe the harmfulness of private property to some
special form of work—agricultural labour being taken as at least the
most important form of unfree labour in Fourier and the physiocrats,
industrial labour in Saint-Simon. Communism takes us a stage further:
it is the positive overcoming of private property. But Communism,
too, has its stages. Unlike socialism, it sees private property in its
universality, but in the first stage it seeks merely to universalise private
property. This desire appears in a dual form: ‘on the one hand Com
munism is so much under the sway of material property, that it wants
to destroy everything which cannot be owned by everybody as private
property; it wants forcibly to cut away talent, etc.’ (M I, 3 , 1 1 1 - 1 2 ) . On
the other hand, ‘it regards direct physical ownership as the only aim of
life and existence’; it thus continues the relationship of private property
but stretches it to cover all men by converting it into the property of
‘society’. The ‘animal’ expression of this emerges clearly in its treat
ment of women. To marriage (admittedly a form of exclusive private
property), it contraposes the common ownership of women, which
turns women into common, social property. This, indeed, shows us
84
COMMUNISM A N D TH E C O M P L E T E , U N A L I E N A T E D MAN
the particular secret ‘of this still utterly crude and thoughtless Com
munism. Just as woman steps out of marriage into universal prostitu
tion, so the entire world of riches, of the objectified being of man, steps
from its exclusive marriage with private owners into the relationship
of universal prostitution with society. This Communism, in its univer
sal negation of the personality of man, is merely the consistent expres
sion of private ownership, which is the negation of human personality.
Universal envy constituting itself as power is only the hidden form in
which greed reappears, satisfying itself in a different way . . . How little
crude Communism’s overcoming of private property is a genuine
appropriation is shown by its abstract negation of the whole world of
education and civilisation, by its return to the unnatural simplicity of
the poor man without needs, who has not passed beyond private
property but has rather not even reached it yet.’ (M I, 3, 112.)
In the second stage, according to Marx, we have Communism still
political in nature—whether democratic or despotic— or Communism
already concerned with the dissolution of the State. In both forms,
Marx claims (again somewhat obscurely) that Communism already
recognises itself as standing for human re-integration, for the dissolu
tion of alienation, but it still has not grasped the positive essence of
private property or the human character of needs. Thirdly and finally
we have:
Communism as the positive dissolution and transcendence o f private propertyy
o f human self-alienation, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human
[
essence by and for man; therefore as the complete and conscious return o f
man to himself as a social gesellschaftlichen\, i.e., human, man— a return
fashioned with the whole wealth o f his past development. This Communism
is the consummated naturalism = humanism, the consummated humanism =
naturalism, it is the genuine resolution o f the conflict between man and
Nature and between man and man— the true resolution o f the strife between
existence and true being [Existen^ und Wesen], between objectification and
self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual
and the species. Communism is the riddle o f history solved; and it knows
itself to be the solution.
(M I, 3, 114 ; EPM 102.)
The same point, Marx insists, applies to religion, family, State, juris
prudence, morality, science, etc.; they are all only particular forms of
production and fall under the general laws governing the transcendence
of alienation within production. The positive transcendence of private
property ‘through the appropriation of human life* is therefore the
85
positive overcoming of all alienation, the return of man from religion,

family, the State, etc., into his human (i.e., social) existence (M I, 3,
115). Society thus becomes the ‘consummated unity in being of man
and Nature, the true resurrection of Nature, the thorough-going
naturalism of man and the thorough-going humanism of Nature
(M I, 3, 116). Above all, we must avoid once more treating ‘society’
as an abstraction to be opposed to the ‘individual’; the individual is the
social being, under these conditions his individual life and his generic,
social life become one, even if the existential form of individual life
must necessarily remain a more particular or general form of the
generic life.
Here then is the ‘rational society’ which Marx sees as the solution
to the riddle of history. It is not merely the society in which private
property has been abolished; it is above all not a society in which
property has simply passed to the control of the State or to ‘social’
control. It is the society in which any opposition between individual
and social demands has disappeared, in which wants and enjoyments
lose their egoistic nature, in which utility becomes human, universal,
social utility. Man appropriates Nature, makes it part of himself; his
senses thus become true, truly human senses; man himself becomes the
true, truly human, man.
86
PA RT TH REE
Critical Resume:
Ethics and the Young Marx
9» Ethics—Positive or Normative?
t o preach morality is easy, to give ethics a foundation is difficult. The

difficulty stems from the contradiction that has lain at the heart of most
traditional ethical theories and continues to lie at the heart of popular
moralism. This contradiction is the uncritical mingling of science and
advocacy in the illogical concept of a normative science, the attempt
to give ethical judgments the objectivity of scientific descriptions and
the imperative, exhortative force sought by prohibitions, recommenda
tions and commands. The imperative side of ethical theory is essential
to those who see ethics as a prescriptive theory of conduct and morality
as the theory of obligation. The scientific, descriptive side is essential
to those who want to save the objectivity of ethical judgments and to
escape the conclusion that ethical disagreements are nothing more than
the conflict of competing authorities, attitudes or demands.
The conflict between scientific and advocative conceptions of ethics
is closely linked with the conflict between treating ‘good’ as a quality
and treating it as a relation. The objectivity of ethical judgments can
be most easily established if ‘good* is a quality, an intrinsic character
common to those things or activities we correctly call goods. The
assertion that a thing or activity has a certain quality raises in logic a
clear, unambiguous issue; the truth of the assertion is logically inde
pendent of any relations into which the thing or the activity or the
assertor may enter. A table is either red or not red, painted or not
painted; whereas it may be to the left of the bookshelf and to the right
of the door. But whether the table stands to the left of the bookshelf or
not, whether I like it or dislike it, has no logical bearing on the ques
tions whedier it is red or painted. Qualities do not logically depend on
relations; nor do qualities by themselves imply relations. The assertion
that this table is red does not, by itself, imply that I am attracted to it;
89
C R I T I C A L R E S U M E : E T H I C S A N D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
the assertion that X has the positive quality ‘good* would not imply
that I necessarily seek, commend or require it. To treat ‘good* as a
quality would be to open the way to making ethics a science and to
clarifying the distinction between ethical and non-ethical fields; but
it would also be to shear ethics of its advocative and its normative
pretensions. It would be to investigate the common characters, the
ways of working, of goods and the relations into which they are able
to enter as a result of these characters;1 but it would be to destroy the
illusion that such goods logically imply or require support or pursuit.
The question whether they are supported or pursued and by whom
would be logically independent of their character and could be raised
only after their common characters had been established.
The traditional moralist cannot afford to see ‘good’ as ‘merely* a
quality which some display or seek and others lack or reject. For him
it must also be a relation, something demanded, pursued, required,
which it is illogical— or ‘wrong*— to reject. A vicious attempt to
straddle the issue, to confuse and amalgamate quality and relation,
reveals itself in the popular traditional conception of ‘good’ as that
whose nature it is to be demanded or pursued. This is to treat a relation as
constituting the character or quality of a thing. But things cannot be
constituted by their relations: a thing must have characters before it
can enter into a relation; it must be jwragthing before it can be com
mended, rejected or pursued. I f we treat ‘good* (or ‘piety’ in Euthy-
phro’s case) as standing for a relation that anything may have, i.e., like
the word ‘burden’, for instance, then, as the Euthyphro shows, our
commendations would be entirely arbitrary, there would be nothing to
prevent anything from being treated as ‘good’, or as pleasing the gods,
just as there is nothing to prevent anything from becoming a burden.2
Normative conceptions of ethics with positive, scientific pretensions>
then, require the confusion or the amalgamation of qualitative and
relational treatments of good. This confusion is facilitated by the
1 While a quality cannot by itself imply a relation, relations which are not
purely spatio-temporal relations like ‘down*, ‘before’ or ‘left’ can and do imply
qualities in the terms that enter into these relations. Thus marriage implies the
sexual characteristics of the partners and only men can be uncles. But the fact
that X is a man implies neither that he is a husband nor that he is an uncle.
2 Cf. the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth's ‘Second
Sermon’: ‘Virtues and holiness in creatures . . . are not therefore good because
God loveth them, and will have them to be accounted such; but rather God
therefore loveth them, because they are in themselves simply good’ (cited in
J. A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth9 pp. 83-4).
90
E T H I C S — P O S I T I V E OR N O R M A T I V E ?
possibility of framing statements with incomplete relations as terms.

‘John is taller’, we say; ‘Mary is much sought after’; ‘Pork-eating is
abhorrent’. In each case the sentence is logically incomplete. It does not
raise a single unambiguous issue until we have filled in the additional
term required by the relation: ‘John is taller than Robert’; ‘Mary is
much sought after by those young people in her set who are interested
in girls’; ‘Pork-eating is abhorrent to pious Muslims and Jews.’ In
ordinary speech, we often save time by omitting the second term of
the relation and relying on our hearer to fill it in for himself from the
context in which we have uttered the phrase. Mostly this works
satisfactorily; occasionally it leads to ambiguity and fruitless argument
in which the contestants are not discussing the same issue and there
fore not contradicting each other. ‘Mary is popular’ and the rejoinder
‘No, she is not’ are perfectly compatible with each other if the first
speaker means ‘popular with her friends’ and the second speaker
‘popular with her parents’ friends’.
Relations, then, require two terms: the demander as well as the
demanded, the pursuer as well as the pursued, the obligor as well as
the obliged. What is made obligatory or demanded by one code, moral
tradition or person may be forbidden or rejected by another. The
concept of absolute obligation, of unconditional codes and duties, is
thus revealed as a contradiction in terms, while the illusion of a single
binding morality has to be replaced by the empirical recognition of
competing ‘principles’ and ‘authorities’— i.e., of competing demands
and codes that cannot be brought before a common tribunal or under
an ‘ultimate’ law. The conditional character of duties and obligations
comes out, to some degree, in the terms ‘right* and ‘wrong’. Their
relational character is evident; what is right in terms of one morality
may be wrong in terms of another. But the moralist has an interest in
preventing this recognition; he requires both the imperative force
and the vagueness of terms like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and the suggestion
of absolute, unconditional, qualitative distinctions conveyed by the
terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
The normative function of moralism, then, has partly depended
on the adoption of a moral language particularly suited to obscuring
the sources of the demands it makes by dealing in incomplete relations.
‘You ought to do this’, ‘Stealing is wrong’, ‘Children must obey their
elders’ all suggest authority without specifying it: in many cases they
thus successfully invoke the terrors of an anonymous authority, or of
one filled in by the hearer himself, simply by leaving the relation
9i
incomplete. Ethical discussion and enquiry, on the other hand, require

the completion of the relation and thus threaten the foundations of
moral obedience much as a close acquaintance with officers and the
general staff threatens the foundations of military obedience. It is
here that the moralist is driven back on hierarchical, anti-empirical,
conceptions of reality. I f ethical propositions are to have prescriptive
force, the source of moral demands must be elevated above ‘the world'
to which the demands are addressed. It is thus that the relational,
prescriptive treatment of ‘good’ leads inevitably to a dualism of ‘facts*
and ‘standards*, ‘actions* and ‘principles*, ‘apparent interests* and
‘true interests’. This is patently obvious where the source of moral
obligation is treated as supra-empirical, as god, soul, or an unhistorical
faculty of reason or conscience. It is equally true, however, where the
source is allegedly ‘natural*—human nature, human interests or social
demands. These, too, have to be given a primacy in which moral
advocacy masquerades as logical priority, and left imprecise to avoid
conflict and incoherence. It is here that we find the reappearance of
constitutive relations to protect the source of moral authority from
criticism. Just as ‘conscience* becomes that whose nature it is to
approve of good, so ‘principles* become that whose nature it is to be
obeyed. For the empirical study of goods, or for the social and historical
investigation of moral attitudes, we find substituted the attempt to
bind conduct with seeming tautologies.
It is fashionable in certain circles these days to say that if one does
abandon the claim to absolute moral obligation, or to ‘objective*
distinctions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong*, a coherent relational treatment of
‘good’ is possible. To say something is ‘good*, on this view, is to say
nothing more than that it is commended, or commanded, or approved
of, and while people may in fact share moral principles arid attitudes,
there is no logical way of resolving disagreements or of showing one
set of attitudes or ‘principles’ ‘better* than another. Commands and
attitudes may conflict, but they do not contradict each other. Once we
recognise that ‘good* is not a quality,1 there is not necessarily a
1 The purely relational use of ethical terms might still invest them with a
qualitative content implied by the context of their use, but such a content would
be derivative and inconstant. It would vary with the context and source of the
demand and would not itself distinguish the moral use of ‘good' from non-
moral, instrumental uses of the word. It is this derivative content which has been
emphasised— against the ‘crude’ subjectivists— in C. L. Stevenson’s Ethics and
Language and R. M. Hare’s The Language o f Morals. When the village parson, as
Hare puts it, calls Mary ‘a good girl’ we may be able to deduce some of Mary's
92
contradiction between your calling X good and my calling it not

good.
If this view is sound, there can be no genuine study of the ethical
content and contribution of Marx’s thought. There can also be no
ethical science. We might make some logical criticism of past illusions
that there was an ethical science, we might consider whether any of
these apply to Marx, and we would then draw up a list of the things
Marx advocates, of the moral preferences he displays. About the
soundness of his ethical views we could say nothing, for to us there
would be no ethical field with which his views are concerned. But how
then do we tell which are his ethical views, how do we distinguish his
ethical demands from other demands? This is precisely what the
ethical relativist cannot do. He cannot distinguish ‘approval’ from
‘liking’ except by a circular reference to goods; he cannot show how
ethics, seen as a system of demands, is to be distinguished from
economics, the science of demands in general;1 he cannot explain how
ethical distinctions came to be made or moral judgments came to
maintain themselves. For if we pass ethical judgments, it is because we
1 J. O. Urmson, taking this type of view in his paper ‘On Grading*, seeks to
distinguish moral from non-moral uses of ‘good* by arguing that moral grading
‘affects the whole of one*s life and social intercourse*, while non-moral grading
deals with ‘dispensable* qualities (Logic and Language, Second Series, ed.
A. G. N. Flew, p. 159 et seq., esp. p. 184). Apart from the fact that both ethical
and psychological understanding would involve not ‘judging a man as a whole*,
Urmson*s criterion presupposes a moral distinction on the basis of which ‘we*
distinguish being a bad father from being a bad cricketer; his criterion follows
from this distinction instead of creating it. Hare*s attempt to distinguish moral
principles from non-moral commands by arguing that commands are always
particular and principles always universal is certainly more sophisticated, but it
leads him into the well-known difficulty that any particular proposition can be
converted into a universal one by limiting its subject and to the curious view
that ‘no person shall smoke in any train anywhere* is always a moral injunction
and never a non-moral command.
intrinsic characteristics from our knowledge of the parson’s moral preferences,
just as we can deduce certain features of a motor-car from our friend’s description
of it as ‘jolly good* and from our knowledge of his taste in motor-cars. Both
Stevenson and Hare would reject the suggestion that underlying the moral uses,
of ‘good’ is an implicit if obscure recognition of positive ethical qualities in
dependent of one’s attitudes to them. The main difficulty of such a position,
apart from its utter neglect of the empirical material contained in traditional moral
distinctions and traditional moral psychology, is how to distinguish ethical
demands from non-ethical demands, approval from liking, moral ‘principles* from
commands.
93
suppose there are ethical facts; if there are no ethical facts, there is
nothing to show that these judgments are ethical.
Anacharsis the Scythian, who came from the plains north of the
Black Sea some two centuries before Plato, is reputed to have said:
Nature is almost always in opposition to the laws, because she labours for
the happiness of the individual, without regard to other individuals who
surround him, while the laws only direct their attention to the relations
by which he is united to them, and because Nature infinitely diversifies our
character and inclinations, while it is the object of the laws to bring them
back to unity.
This tension between conflict and co-operation, discord and harmony,

to which Anacharsis refers, has formed the underlying theme of most
moral and political philosophy. Ethical and political theorists have
portrayed it in different guises: as the struggle between egotism and
altruism, self-love and love of the State, civil society and the political
State, evil and good, chaos and harmony, Nature and civilisation or
(alternatively) civilisation and Nature. The concrete empirical material
here, however, has been obscured and distorted by a naive individual
ism (reflected in the false dichotomies of ‘individual* and ‘society*,
‘egotism* and ‘altruism*) and by the normative hopes and pretensions
of moral and political theorists, leading them to the postulation of
social and logical hierarchies.
The young Marx, as we have seen, also takes this struggle between
discord and harmony, between necessary conflict and true co-operation,
as the central theme of human history and social life. But he rejects
flatly the attempt to impose harmony by appealing to supra-empirical
powers, ‘principles’ or ideals. He sees that this would involve an
insupportable dualism, that we could never connect these powers,
‘principles* or ideals with empirical occurrences without robbing them
of their supra-empirical pretensions and treating them as natural,
historical events. He sees clearly that the supra-empirical can only be
formulated and understood in terms of the empirical— that god,
conscience and reason can have meaning only in so far as these words
convey an empirical, historcal content. It is from historical experience
that these conceptions arise; it is only in terms of historical experience
that they can be understood. What hangs on the Cross, as Feuerbach
said, is not God but man.
The dualism implicit in normative theories is not always a patent
94
appeal to non-natural, supra-empirical powers. The logico-ethical

hierarchy may be established seemingly within historical experience:
‘true interests’ may be singled out as having a more fundamental, more
real, reality than ‘apparent interests’; ‘purposes’ may be elevated above
‘mere capricious desires’ (especially if the purposes I strive for are
confused with the question-begging notion of the purposes for which I
exist); ‘essential nature* may be contrasted with ‘mere empirical
nature’.
Marx was not a utilitarian. He recognised the incoherence and
conflict of actual, existing human demands within existing societies,
recognised that they sought no common end and could not be brought
to a common market. He recognised— explicitly in his later work,
tacitly in his earlier—that human demands are not ultimates: that we
might as well judge a society by the demands it creates as by the
demands it satisfies. But in his acceptance of the Hegelian view that
history is working toward rationality, Marx was not able to come
down unequivocally on the side of positive ethics against normative
morality. He was not able to escape the dualism required by normative
theories; he could not excise either individualism or the upholding of
‘ends* from his thought. ‘Reason,’ we have seen Marx writing to Ruge
(supra II, 6), ‘has always existed, but not always in a rational form. The
critic can therefore seize upon any form of the theoretical and practical
consciousness and develop out of the special forms of existing reality
the true reality of that which ought to he, of that which is reality s fin a l
aim (my italics). The normative conception ‘which ought to be’ is
linked, as always in normative theory, with the dualistic hierarchical
conception of a ‘true reality’ opposed to a mere ‘empirical reality*.
‘What is the kernel of empirical evil?’ we have seen Marx ask {supra,
I, 4 ); ‘That the individual locks himself into his empirical nature
against his eternal nature.’ Marx needs the distinction between ‘eternal*
and ‘empirical’ to lend the terms he sees as ethical a higher status, to
elevate them as ‘ends’ towards which history is working. The dualism
breaks out everywhere: between ‘will’ and ‘caprice’, between ‘true
law’ and positive, empirical law, between Wesen and E x is te n t Reason
and Actuality. Characteristically, Marx’s dualism leads inescapably to
monism. The ‘true reality’ in which empirical conflict and discord are
destined to disappear must finally absorb every distinction; it is* thus
that all differences, between State and society, law and morality,
Nature and man, one man and other men, one social function and
another, must all disappear. All become ‘expressions’ of the truly
95
C R I T I C A L R E S U M E : E T H I C S AN D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
human, truly self-determined man. How we could distinguish one

expression from another is something Marx could not coherently
explain; the concrete content of ‘the truly human’, too, must be left
vague lest the suppressed distinctions and conflicts break out once
again.
These, then, are the inevitable results of Marx’s failure to rid himself
entirely of normative conceptions, the outcome of his attempt to
mingle logic and ethics in a metaphysic of history. But it would be
cavalier and to a significant extent false to regard the ethical distinctions
he seeks to make as mere confused and unsupported advocacy of some
metaphysical ‘true reality’ against empirical occurrences. As we have
seen, he does link the distinction between good and evil with one of
the traditional themes of moral and political philosophy—with the
distinction between harmony and discord, freedom and dependence.
It is not enough to say merely that these are ‘advocative’ terms; they
may have an empirical content, they may point to real ethical distinc
tions. It would be surprising, at any rate, if these terms had maintained
themselves so long without any objective empirical content.
Marx was a determinist., He recognised that there could be no

question of distinguishing a realm of ‘freedom’ in the sense of in
determinacy from the realm of ‘physical causation’. Human action
and social events were as much determined, and determined in the
same way, as all other events. It was primarily on this ground that
he rejected the conception that ethics is concerned with ‘guiding’
human behaviour in those realms where human beings are ‘free’ to act
in a number of possible ways. It is for this reason that he rejects the
notion that morality is concerned with ‘obligation’. A person cannot
be ‘obliged’ to act contrary to the course his character and circum
stances inevitably determine him to take, and there is no point in
obliging him to act in accordance with this course, for he will do so
in any case. Nor are the ‘principles’ of obligation themselves ‘freely’
established; their content and the time of their appearance is also
strictly determined by human character and social circumstance. Any
conflict between moral ‘principles’ and human actions will thus not be
a conflict between ‘what ought to be’ and ‘what is*, but a conflict
within human nature and social reality between different ways of work
ing and different forms of striving. (The emancipation from moralism
in the teeth of a moralistic upbringing and of a moralistic society takes
time. In his earliest work, Marx was perhaps still prone to proclaim
96
the ‘principles’ dictated by rational development and to see Law or

the State as ‘enforcing’ them; at the least he seemed to see an irrational
reality disintegrating when confronted by the ‘principles’ of reason.
But this was even then a confusion— or possibly a concession to his
journalistic aims—incompatible with his main view. By the end of
1843 he had certainly expunged this tendency from his work, and it
was never to reappear. Few men have been as consistent as Marx in
their refusal to attempt the binding of causality by confronting actions
and habits with ‘principles’. It is often argued, however, that the mere
fact of Marx’s political activism, his proclamation of party programmes
and his appeals to the proletariat, themselves constitute a refutation of
his thorough-going determinism. This seems to me false. Marx would
have conceded that his own activities, his proclamations and his
appeals, were as much determined as anyone else’s. It would be as
pointless to tell him not to engage in them as it would be to ‘oblige’ him
to engage in them. As far as the influence of his appeals went, he would
have insisted that they would be taken up only by those whose nature
and circumstances determine them to do so. What Marx was inclined
to overlook is that his appeals would be part of their circumstances.
But while this would certainly raise difficulties for any economic
reductionism implicit in Marxism, it raises no difficulties for Marx’s
determinism.)
What, then, can a determinist make of freedom? The young Marx,
following a line laid down in Spinoza and Hegel, treats freedom as
self-determination. To be free is to be determined by one’s own nature.
To be unfree is to be determined from without. Marx links this, as we
have seen, with harmony and discord, co-operation and conflict. The
self-determined activity, governed or determined by the rules of its
own being, is necessarily harmonious; dependence is the result of
conflict and leads to further conflict.
The difficulty here strikes at the very heart of Marx’s position.
The self-determined can have neither history nor environment. The
passage from cause A to effect B is not some sort of physical concretisa-
tion of direct implication, by which A produces B from out of itself.
The production of an effect, the occurrence of change, requires more
than a single, preceding cause. It requires causal action, and the cause
cannot act on itself. It is only in the action of one thing upon another,
in the impact of a cause on a field,1 that effects can be produced. To
11 adopt the terminology suggested by Professor John Anderson in his ‘The
Problem of Causality*, A .J.P .P ., vol. X V I (1938), p. 127 et seq., where the
97
C R I T I C A L RESUME.* E T H I C S A N D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
speak of the self-determined is to assert that the effect was its own
cause; that is, to say that there has been no change.1 The young Marx
and Hegel, in seeing the rational both as the end or ultimate effect of
history and as the original and ever-present cause of historical develop
ment, run squarely into this difficulty. Marx speaks of reason having
always been present but not in ‘a rational form’; it is difficult to see in
this anything but an attempt to have it both ways, to assert that reason
changes and is yet the same. The same difficulty arises for Marx
regarding his conception of an essential human nature. I f this nature
is the determining cause of all historical development, he cannot show
why there should be any development at all. If, on the other hand,
history is a series of transactions between this essential human nature
and its environment, then both will be affected in the process, then
there is nothing more ‘essential’ about the human Weseti than about
the occurrences on which it acts and which act upon it. Marx, indeed,
in seeking to maintain the distinction between the human essence and
empirical human interests, desires and ‘caprices’, is forced to disconnect
the two entirely, till there is no significant sense in which the two are
part of the same person or of the same development.
The attempt to establish the self-determined does not only imply
that it can have no history. It also implies that it can have no environ
ment. It must become, as Spinoza saw, the single, all-embracing
substance. It is no accident that Marx is forced to take all social institu
tions, even non-human objects, into man himself, forced to reconcile
Subject and Object by obliterating the distinction between them. But
the distinction will not be obliterated and in his view that man will
‘appropriate’ nature, will determine it instead of being determined by
it, Marx clearly reveals the anti-empirical, anti-deterministic, character
of the belief in self-determination. His anthropology, his human reduc-
tionism, is the inescapable outcome of his metaphysical assumptions.
In the name of determinism, of the continuity of human and non
human events, Marx has reduced everything to Man.
For the sake of self-determination, Marx had to destroy the distinc-
1 A certain superficial plausibility is lent to the notion of self-determination
by the observation of change and development within a system. But such change
is not the result of the system acting upon itself, but of the interaction of the
minor systems within the whole, acting upon each other externally. The changes
in the relationship between the minor systems, of course, will always be depen
dent upon external exchanges with the environment of the entire system.
view of causality I am putting is more fully argued. The logical material in this
section generally owes much to his work.
98
tion between the human and the non-human. For the sake of self-
determination, he has also to destroy the distinction between one man
and another. If man is to be truly self-determined, he cannot be
determined by Nature, he also cannot be determined by other men.
Marx requires a human community in which not only conflict, but
even the very distinction, between one man and another has dis
appeared. This is the significance of his insistence that in the truly
human society each man represents every other, that every activity
carried out in this society is my activity. He bases this, as we have seen,
on a seemingly metaphysical notion of the human essence as truly
universal in a qualitative, intensional sense and not in a merely dis
tributive sense.
As metaphysical doctrines, the belief in self-determination and in a

universal which is yet not particular and resolves all particular differ
ences will not do. But are we simply to dismiss them as Hegelian con
fusions that make the whole of the young Marx’s position quite value
less, or can we find in them an empirical content, the significance of
which can survive the rejection of Marx’s false logical presuppositions?
There is a great deal of material in Marx’s early work pointing to the
conclusion that Marx’s distinction between goods and evils, the self-
determined and the dependent, the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ is
connected with concrete distinctions in ways of working. Thus he
argues that the free press is free, its activity is internally coherent, while
censorship is necessarily incoherent and unstable, parasitic upon the
press and unable to develop its presuppositions without inconsistency.
Similarly, his whole distinction between the political spirit and civil
society rests on this conception of goods as being able to work and
co-operate coherently, while evils conflict not only with goods, but
with each other. Now, this is a distinction which ethical theorists
have repeatedly stumbled upon. We find traces of it in the great
psychological studies underlying the theological imperativism of the
Old Testament.1 We find it clearly suggested— though subsequently
obscured—by Socrates in Book I of the Republic. There are traces of
F 1 Professor C. A. Simpson, in his article ‘Old Testament Historiography’

(Hibbert Journal, July 1958, pp. 319-32, esp. pp. 324-6), for instance, seeks to
show that the story of David was in fact first told as a purely empirical study of
the self-destructive character of evil motives, and that the attempt to ascribe his
fate to God’s intervention is a later accretion which ruins the whole point of the
story.
99
C R I T I C A L RESUME.* E T H I C S A N D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
it in the moral psychology of Aquinas; it emerges as the only empirical

content of Kant’s principle of universalisability and of Rousseau’s
universal and universalisable general will. We find it again in Schopen
hauer’s early, not very thorough-going, attempt to create a scientific
ethics—his Grundprobleme der Ethik, where co-operating motives,
however, are confused with motives that aim at co-operation, where
love, for instance, is merged with altruism.
The divisiveness, the internal incoherence, of evils is vividly por
trayed in Marx’s analysis of the ‘rights’ of civil society and in his
exposure of the ‘contradictions’ of political economy in the Paris
Manuscripts. But his reductionism, his concern to treat divisiveness as
temporary, prevents him from connecting it with the positive char
acters of the processes involved. He wants to see conflict as the result
of ‘external’ determination. From this, as we have seen, nothing' can
escape. Alternatively, as in the Paris Manuscripts, he treats conflict and
division as the result of ‘abstraction’, that is, of the fact that things
have their own characters and are not all ‘expressions’ of a single
underlying whole. But such ‘abstraction’ cannot be overcome; the
reality of differences and distinctions cannot be made to disappear.
Yet however much Marx’s account of the reasons for incoherence
may suffer from metaphysical confusions, the incoherence remains.
Goods co-operate and form a harmonious system; evils conflict not
only with goods, but with each other. Much, perhaps most, of tradi
tional ethical theory since the seventeenth century has concerned itself
with the metaphysical constructions and the logical analysis forced
on it by its normative form; but this was not always so. Where positive
questions of ethical character have arisen, this distinction between
co-operation and conflict, assistance and resistance, has been the
leading empirical content of the distinction between goods and evils.
An important subsidiary question, of course, has been whether ethical
distinctions are to be made between motives or the things that motives
aim at; but if we are to take assistance and resistance as central, we
will hardly be able to work out a position unless we take as the material
of ethical enquiry motives (and the social movements associated with
motives) and not objectives or non-mental, non-social occurrences.
Taking it that assistance means that a certain motive brings about
circumstances in which another will act, and resistance that it brings
about circumstances which prevent another from acting, we have the
suggestion that assistance is the mark of good motives and resistance
the mark of bad motives. With the qualification that Marx makes no
ioo
reference to motives, but to human actitivies and social institution,

this seems to be the position underlying much of his early work. It is
also, as Anderson has pointed out in an article worth citing at length:
Substantially the view put forward by Socrates in Republic, I. He makes it
clear, o f course, that this distinction is not to be taken as a simple and final
criterion, by pointing out that, while goods assist one another, they oppose
bads; whereas bads oppose both goods and one another. There is no question
then, o f founding ethics on abstract attitudes o f assistance and resistance
(although, as Socrates develops the argument, this point is considerably
obscured), any more than on abstract attitudes o f altruism and egoism. The
position may be expressed by saying that a good motive will always assist
another o f the same kind, so that that particular good can be communicated
to an indefinite extent within the field o f human activities. Love o f truth,
for example, will indefinitely communicate the spirit o f discovery, and will
assist the development and operation o f that spirit wherever it appears and
with whatever materials it may deal; a true investigator in any field will
always encourage investigation in that or any other field. We do not, o f
course, define goodness by means o f that relation, but if we decide, as I think
we may, that it is common and peculiar to goods, then we can employ it as a
criterion in particular cases. The same facts will show that a good motive
will sustain itself in a particular mind by providing the materials for its
continued operation, as one discovery leads on to another and the solution
o f one problem to the formulation o f a new problem.
Bad motives, on the other hand, can never get rid o f an element o f resist
ance and repression, and, though they may co-operate to a certain limited
extent, will eventually be found in opposition, and will always involve a
certain friction. Hate, it may be said, breeds hate; but it also fights with hate
and tries to destroy it, and in the individual it exhausts itself. So ignorance,
though it may breed ignorance, fights with ignorance, and obscurantism
defeats its own end. The degree o f co-operation possible to motives which
are not good is represented in the State sketched by Glaucon in Republic, II.
Here the assistance is o f an external or extrinsic sort, the utilization o f com
mon means to diverse ends, as contrasted with participation in common
activities in which the distinction between means and ends is unimportant.
We note in the compromise referred to (which is, o f course, a fact o f common
experience) the absence o f a common spirit and the recurrence o f friction,
and also, as Glaucon points out, the element o f repression in that some
demands are given up in order that others may have a sure satisfaction . . .
We may further illustrate the operation o f assistance by reference to the
process described by Freud as ‘transference’ . Freud is referring primarily to
‘pathological’ cases, but we may consider the matter more broadly. What
occurs in transference is that one person, e.g., the patient, makes use o f the
powers o f mind o f another person, e.g., the analyst; ‘identifies’ himself with
IOI
the latter, adopts his views and his ways o f dealing with situations. In this
way the patient’s previously pent-up motives find outlet. But the same may
take place within one person’s mind, when a conflict is resolved and a new
type o f activity emerges by the aid o f certain abiding motives or sentiments.
This is the process o f ‘sublimation’, where one motive finds for another a
means o f expression, provides it with a language, puts its own ‘ideas’ before
it as objectives. This is also the process o f education. It may be argued, then,
that all good motives have this power o f transference or conversion, whereby
from hitherto dissociated material a new motive is formed which can co
operate with the good motive. Goodness is associative, evil is dissociative;
goods have a common language, evils have not.1
On the basis of suggestions made by Anderson in this and other

articles,2 we can have an account of the distinction between freedom
and compulsion—such as Marx requires—which would not come
down to an anti-deterministic one, which would not end by putting
ethical processes outside causality and the interaction it requires.
Following Anderson, we might say that goods are those motives
which are free or enterprising, which do not require internal repression
or external protection or compulsion. They are activities which are
disinterested, which do not fear knowledge or require error. Freedom
would thus be seen as an ethical quality, bound up with the way in
which goods work. It would not be seen as any metaphysical illusion
of being undetermined or ‘self-determined’ or as the ‘freedom from’
external pressures. The point might be illustrated by considering what
is a free love. It is not made free by the multiplicity of its objects, by
its readiness to embrace every woman, or by the absence of external
impediments. The free quality of a love lies in the fact that it does not
require external restraints or internal illusions and repressions in order
to continue as ‘love’. Similarly, the fact that a man is externally ‘free*
to think, does not make his thinking free. The freedom of thought
would lie in the fact that it does not itself strive to protect certain
interests or support certain ‘authorities’, in that it does not subordinate
itself to other ends. Further, as we have seen, goods communicate
themselves with a spontaneity radically distinct from the enforced
imitation enjoined by evils. (Compare the communication of know
ledge with the inculcation of obedience. In the former case, the appeal
1 ‘Determinism and Ethics’, A .J.P .P ., vol. VI (1927), pp. 251-3.
2 Published in the A .J.P .P . from 1927 onwards. Besides the article already
cited, see especially his ‘Realism versus Relativism in Ethics’, vol. X I (1933),
p. 1 et seq., and ‘The Meaning of Good’, vol. X X (1942), p. 1 1 1 et seq., on which
I draw in the account that follows,.
10 2
is to the same motive, so that communication consists in producing a

situation in which that motive is free to act; in the latter case, the
appeal is to a different motive and its objective will be different. It is
this which distinguishes the alliance, in a common activity, of genuine
teacher and genuine pupil from the temporary submission of the pupil
to an external ‘authority’.) Goods co-operate with each other and
display internal progress and development in a way that evils cannot
co-operate and progress.1 They have a certain ‘universality’, which
Feuerbach and the young Marx dimly perceived when they distin
guished man from the animal by reference to his ability to take any
thing for his object, to create consciously in all forms. This is the
ability of goods to work under all conditions and take anything as their
material: the universality of science, for example, lies in the fact that
anything may be investigated scientifically.
Evils, on the other hand, though ineradicable, are parasitic upon
goods. They conflict not only with goods but also with each other;
they are interested as opposed to disinterested, repressive as opposed
to free, consumptive as opposed to productive. Goods carry with them
a characteristic devotion to movements ‘transcending the individual’,
to ways of living in which he is ‘caught up’; evils elevate the particular
and produce such egoistic attitudes as hope, guilt and despair. The
qualities characteristic of goods are displayed in love and courage, in
the scientific, artistic and productive spirit, in the enquirer’s and
creator’s honesty, detachment from self and immersion in his work.
Goods require no censorship, no punishments, no protection as part
1 Compare the history of science with the history of religion or tyranny.

The conception of science, art or industry as progressive does not entail the
vulgar conception that the scientific knowledge, the art or industrial production
of any age is superior to that of the age preceding it; the conception means that
science, art or industry are progressive in the sense that they can always build
directly on previous achievements in their fields, can take up where a previous
age left off, even if there have been intervening periods of ignorance or mediocrity.
The suggestion that religions or tyrannies may progress, on the other hand,
where it is not mere advocacy of the merits of a later tyranny over an earlier one,
always resolves itself into the recognition of progress in the scientific, industrial
or artistic material a religion or a tyranny may seek to appropriate, but which is
intrinsically incompatible with it. Subjectivists, of course, may claim that they
recognise ‘progress* in tyrannies in the sense of increased efficiency—in which
case any distinction between ethical and instrumental uses of ‘good* (‘this is a
good poison*) disappears completely. With it, however, there also disappears
any possibility of accounting for the differences in the history of science and of
tyrannies noted above.
103
of their ways of working. Evils, on the other hand, display their

characteristics in obscurantism, superstition, the demand for censor
ship, luxury, commercialism, tyranny, leading to the ‘sexual entangle
ments, cross-purposes, dissatisfactions, terrors [that] are an important
feature of the hell of bourgeois existence’.1 They require censorship,
suppression, punishment and protection; they seek prior guarantees of
security; they display a fundamental instability and incoherence.
Moralism itself, on this view, is the product of evil motives, of that
search for security which is the characteristic of unfree activities. The
necessary instabilities or moralistic theories which we have noted, and
which Marx recognised, are typical of the instability of evils in general.
Goods require no protection or commendation and do not seek it as
part of their way of working; the question whether any person, move
ment or activity supports goods is irrelevant to their character. In
actual fact, the extent to which men display goods and engage in good
activities will depend not on exhortation, but on the goods they
already have and their communication with other goods. Their
support of goods— in so far as they do support them— is not some
thing that precedes their pursuit of goods, but something that follows
from the goods they have and display.
Ethical distinctions, on this view, occur among motives and the
social activities with which these motives are connected. They do not
occur characteristically among the objectives which motives or activi
ties pursue. Traditional moral theorists have vacillated over the
question whether ethical qualities should be ascribed to mental habits
or to the things which these habits pursue: to the love of beauty, for
example, or to beauty itself, to the love of truth or—whatever that may
mean— to ‘truth’ itself. The issue has been much confused by the
moralist’s attempt to discover a realm of indeterminacy in order to
‘justify’ praise and blame. But in general, following Anderson again,2
we might say that it is only through confusion with the goodness of
the motives that pursue them that objectives come to be called posi
tively and qualitatively good— a confusion that might often arise from
the unjustified assumption that ends are superior to that which strives
for these ends, that an objective must be better than the motive that
pursues it.
Whatever the logical confusions on the opposing side, this question
1 John Anderson: ‘Art and Morality’, A .J.P .P ., vol. X IX (1941), pp. 253
et seq., p. 264.
2 ‘Determinism and Ethics’, loc. cit., p. 251.
104
and that of the nature of ethical distinctions and of the meaning of

‘good* cannot be resolved by logic alone. It will be an empirical
question whether we find distinctions in ways of working, differences
in the manner of communication and forming alliances, in mental and
social fields that we do not find in non-mental and non-social fields;
it will also be an empirical question what these distinctions are and to
what extent they provide the basis for a coherent science of ethics,
divorced from its normative confusions. What I have striven to show
is that certain of the traditional themes of moral philosophy can be
given coherence and concrete empirical content if we treat goods in
the way I have outlined. We can then also see why one feels a con
siderable strength in Marx’s youthful doctrines despite the meta
physical confusions with which they are overlaid. But there can be no
question of establishing ethical qualities by purely logical argument.
At best, they can be exhibited for those who have felt them and seen
them operate to recognise and recall, or offered as illuminating develop
ments and distinctions that seemed obscure before. For if ethical
qualities do exist, if they account for some of the alliances and discords,
for the progress and regression in history and social life, then to
neglect these qualities will be to fall seriously short in one’s under
standing of human history and social life. Without them, I would
argue, we would see fully neither Marx’s strength nor his weakness.
105
io. The Rejection o f Moralism,
o f ‘Rights’ and o f Normative Law
m a r x ’srejection of moralism, of abstract rights and of normative law

is commonly connected with his determinism. There is, as we have
seen, some basis for this. He rightly insists that moral ‘principles’,
constitutional rights and legal enactments are not rational and eternal
‘norms’ that logically precede society and determine its character from
above. He sees correctly that principles, codes and rights follow from
ways of living, from social activities and pursuits, and not vice versa,
that it is to a specific function or movement, activity or class, that
rights belong. As the character or social distribution of functions,
classes and movements changes, the ‘accepted’ moral principles,
constitutional rights and legal systems will also change.
The young Marx, however, is also concerned to make a more funda
mental criticism of moralism, of the erection of rights and duties and
of the compulsive application of law. This is an ethical criticism.
Moralism, the postulation of rights and duties and the application of
legal punishments and sanctions seek to bind men from outside. They
are therefore forms of bondage and not of freedom. As such, they
cannot produce freedom. This, we may remember, was his criticism
of Hegel’s conception of a coercive State that was nevertheless ‘the
rational form of freedom’. These things, in their coercion, are evils
and cannot be productive of good.
The ethical theory outlined above enables us to make sense of this.
Though Marx is content to rest on the confused opposition of ‘self-
determination’ and coercion, his position depends on the implicit
recognition of the distinction between spontaneous co-operation and
communication characteristic of goods and the only apparent harmony,
the eliciting of no more than external compliance, characteristic of the
106
THE R E JE C T I O N OF M O R A L ISM
repression practised by evils. The position might be illustrated by

means of Marx’s distinction between coercive punishment and punish
ment under ‘truly human’ conditions—punishment passed by the
criminal oh himself (supra, I, 3). Marx is unable to put his view
coherently precisely because he is still working with the conception of
human self-determination and thus with the conception of the whole
individual. But he is able to show that retributive punishment is
radically different in its effects from the spontaneous co-operation
elicited by goods— the state when the criminal sees ‘in other men his
natural saviours’. Thus goods operate by liberating the capacities
that are themselves good within the criminal, placing before these the
material required for their development. The ‘regeneration’ of the
criminal would then be self-regeneration in the sense that it is the goods
within him, strengthened by assistance and not by repression, which
would have overcome the evils within him. While there would be no
guarantee that the regeneration, the dominance of good motives, was
permanent, no reason to suppose that evil motives could be entirely
eliminated from any human mind, there would be an obvious sense in
which the regeneration was true regeneration, was a genuine develop
ment of the goods within him. The regeneration practised by Sue, on
the other hand, would be of a different character. Here, though the
emphasis is still moral, still on producing certain mental habits within
the criminal, the appeal is to evil motives. It is the longing for security,
for comfort and consolation which Sue seeks to arouse and to utilise.
But these motives will not establish genuine and lasting co-operation.
They are by their very nature divisive; they rest on that elevation of
the particular which is commonly called egoism. They must constantly
be protected and sheltered from the operation of goods. Vitality, free
dom and sincerity will be their enemies, knowledge and productive
capacity will threaten them. It is, as Marx sees, no accident that the
gangleader’s eyes have to be gouged out so that he can learn to pray.
The same point, as Marx also saw, applies to the ‘ethic’ of Christian
ity. It, too, has to weaken goods in order to utilise evils. It has, in
fact, no conception of the productive forces that operate within
individuals, no conception of freedom, of spontaneous co-operation.
It preaches the subordination of man to ‘higher powers’ and—
ultimately— to egoistic ends.
Marx is wrong in thinking that vitality, freedom, sincerity and the
capacities for production and spontaneous co-operation are somehow
more truly human than the search for security, than avarice, the
107
C R I T I C A L RESUME.' E T H I C S AN D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
demand for protection, the longing for comfort and consolation. But
he sees correctly that these evils are unable to overcome goods entirely
and that they can neither form a coherent, stable system of their own
or reach a stable and coherent accommodation with goods. It is thus
that he can point to the contradictions in ‘the rights of the citizen* and
‘the rights of man* {supra II, 6). The accommodation of political State
and civil society becomes a harmony of discord with harmony; the
freedom of evils becomes their ‘right* to seek to destroy each other.
‘The human right of freedom is not based on the connexion of man
with man, but rather on the separation of man from man . . . Man’s
right of private property . . . is the right of self-interest. . . It allows
every man to find not the realisation, but the limitation, of his freedom
. . . Security is the guarantee of egoism.’ (‘On the Jewish Question’,
supra II, 6.)
If we accept as the foundation of moral theory the utilitarian concern
with ends and neglect the character of the motives and activities
pursuing these ends, then— as Marx saw—we are necessarily driven
into incoherence. Acquisitiveness conflicts with acquisitiveness, greed
interferes with greed, security threatens security. Even if it were true
that all persons display these demands, the fact that they are common to
all still establishes no single common interest, no genuine basis for
co-operation. This, I should argue, is the empirical content of Marx’s
distinction between mere numerical universality and a qualitative,
intensional universality. For the utilitarian, with his elevation of
divisive demands, ‘society . . . appears as a frame external to indivi
duals, as a limitation of their original independence. The sole thread that
keeps them together is natural necessity, needs and private interest, the
preservation of their property and of their egoistic person.’ {Supra,
II, 6.) Thus— though Marx did not go on to say this explicitly— the
‘principles’ of civil society and of the utilitarian elevation of individual
ends cannot be formulated: the divisiveness of the ends accepted by the
utilitarian is reflected in the incoherence of his principles. The ‘right
to liberty’, for instance, cannot be proclaimed as such: it becomes the
right ‘to liberty that does not interfere with the liberty of others’,
and thus establishes as principle that I may not interfere with the liberty
of others, but their liberties may interfere with mine. Subsidiary shifts
have to be resorted to: we are exhorted to avoid unneccessary interfer
ence with people’s liberty, where what is ‘necessary’ can never be
established; we are told that the principle of liberty is after all not a
principle, but a defeasible presumption, the operation of which is
108
TH E R E J E C T I O N OF M O R A LISM
dependent on moral climate and political, legal and social policy.

Whilst these devices might serve in the operation of a compromise
legal code, helping to mitigate some conflicts and to make oppression
more palatable, beside allowing the system to respond to changes in
the balance of social forces, they establish neither a common interest
nor a scientific foundation for ethics. Their very instability is a mark of
the evils with which they seek compromise. The granting of ‘liberty’
to an activity, as Marx also saw, does not make it free.
Marx’s contrast between the ‘rational society’ and the political
structure of ‘civil society’, then, might be seen as a sound perception of
the contrast between what we might call ‘ethical justice’ and ‘political
justice’. ‘Political justice’ is a compromise, a temporary working
arrangement among hostile and divergent movements. Because these
movements do diverge, because even the seeking of common ends does
not imply the common, co-operative seeking of these ends, Marx has
been able to show, the ‘principles of political justice’ cannot be deve
loped coherently or established as permanent.
‘Ethical justice’, on the other hand, is rooted in the spontaneous
co-operation of goods— a co-operation that we shall now turn to
examine*
109
ii. Ethics and the ‘Truly
Human’ Society
m a r x ’ s vision of the truly human society under Communism, it has
been said, is the vision of a society of artists, engaged in creative

production. The overcoming of alienation visualised by Marx, it is
claimed, is an aesthetic conception, referring to the bond between the
artist and the work. He shapes it and forms it and in doing so makes its
materials his own. The roots of the conception may be found in the
aesthetics of German romanticism, in the philosophy, for instance, of
the young Schelling.
The parallel is apt, but to regard Marx’s exposure of alienation and
his postulation of activities in which it is overcome as the application
of artistic or aesthetic ‘criteria’ is completely to miss the point. The
parallel is apt because artists, qua artists, do habitually display freedom
from alienation in their artistic activity. Their activity is not sub
ordinated to ends outside the activity. In so far as their motives are
artistic, they are not working for reward, or fame, or any other non-
artistic end. They are working for the sake of the activity itself. They
create, or seek to create, according to the laws of art, not according to
laws dictated from outside the activity by non-artistic or anti-artistic
motives and ends. There is no significant sense in which artistic
activity overcomes— as Marx seems to think— the distinction between
man and the objects on which he is working. The sculptor who creates
a statue does not thereby obliterate the distinction between man and
bronze. He may bruise his toe or break his neck on the statue the fol
lowing morning. He may discover in it things he did not know were
there; he may be influenced by it as the material was moulded by him.
But it is true that in the process of production he and his material
become part of a single process; that the exchanges between him and
no
E T H IC S AN D TH E ‘ T R U L Y HUMAN* S O C IE T Y
the material on which he is working come to him not as externally

imposed means to a different end, but as part of the very activity
which is his ‘end’. The fact that this activity is not merely an activity
‘governed’ by aesthetic ‘criteria’, but is an activity displaying ethical
qualities, an activity which is not merely artistic but also good, comes
out in the relations it creates for him with other artists. In so far as
he is an artist, he sees other artists not as hostile competitors, but as
men whose work assists and inspires his work, whose artistic motives
kindled and continue to strengthen his.
The fact that this relation, and the underlying quality of the activity,
are not simply aesthetic is sufficiently illustrated by the occurrence of
similar relations in other, non-artistic, activities. What has been said
of artists is true, in every particular, of scientists and of anyone dis
playing the spirit of disinterested enquiry in general. It is true not only
of the artistic producer, but of anyone seized with the productive
spirit. The activities of other producers are to him a source of en
couragement, not a threat of competition. He is stimulated by them; he
is assisted by their methods and their discoveries; he seeks to emulate,
and not to destroy or expropriate, their results.
A characteristic of goods, we have noted, is their rejection of
individual ends and desires. They thus confer ‘freedom’ in another
sense: they give the individual the capacity of transcending himself, of
devoting himself to a movement of which he is merely a vehicle,
which existed before him, exists in others beside him and will continue
to exist after him. In so far as these goods exist within him, he feels no
tension, no conflict, between him and others possessed by the same
spirit. It is in this sense that Marx is rightly able to say that the opposi
tion between individual and ‘social’ demands disappears, that wants
and enjoyments lose their egoistic nature (see supra, II, 8).
In the working of evils we have a totally different situation. Here, as
Marx himself suggests,1 we find substituted for the creative, productive,
enquiring interest the desire for possession. Here we find the elevation
o f‘ends’ to which activities are subjected. Here we find the elevation of
particular, individual satisfactions and the conflict of one demand with
another. What co-operation exists is in the form of utilisation of
common means to diverse ends. There is thus a gulf between the
activity undertaken for an end and the end desired; the activity can
become distasteful, unwanted, forced. Marx sees clearly this aspect
1 Paris Manuscripts, M I, 3, 118: ‘In place of all physical and intellectual
senses has come the simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of possession/
III
of labour under conditions where the work is performed merely for

gain, that is, for an extrinsic object:
[Alienation consists] firstly, in the fact that labour is external to the worker,
i.e., it does not belong to his essential being, in the fact that he therefore
does not affirm himself in his work, but negates himself in it, that he does not
feel content, but unhappy, in it, that he develops no free physical and mental
energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Therefore the worker
feels himself only outside his work, while in his work he feels outside him
self. He is at home when he is not working, and when he works he is not at
home. His work therefore is not voluntary but coerced, it is forced labour.
It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying
needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon
as there is no physical or other compulsion, labour is avoided like the plague.
External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is labour of self-
sacrifice, of mortification.
(M I, 3, 85-6; supra, II, 7.)
Marx’s insistence that this alienation cannot be overcome by making

the products of labour the property of the worker, or social property,
but only by superseding the whole conception of property, shows how
close he was to an appreciation of the true basis of alienation in the
concern with ends, with consumption instead of production, character
istic of evils. And in his critique of political rights and legal justice we
have seen his appreciation of the necessary conflict underlying the
limited co-operation of evils.
The difference in the organisation and co-operation possible to
goods and to evils may be brought out by considering the role of
‘rules’ in the two systems. Both goods and evils will, in the process of
their working, formulate certain rules and policies. These may be
called their respective moralities. Now, in the operation of goods we
find that such rules are subsidiary to the activity itself; they are not
required to protect the activity, as a social movement, from the
inevitable conflict and dissension within it; they can be flexible and
loose. Indeed, as Anderson has stressed,1 a good— such as enquiry—
‘will be weakened unless it sits loosely to its rules and, for the most
part, forgets about them. This, I think, would be admitted by many
with regard to education, and it should not be hard for these people to
admit it with regard to cultural communication in general. Policy, as
we may put it, has to play second fiddle to spontaneity, and goods
continue because of their own character— and emphatically not be-
1 ‘Ethics and Advocacy’, A .J.P .P ., vol. X X II (1944), p. 184.
E T H I C S AN D THE ‘ T R U L Y HUMAN* S O C IE T Y
cause they are wanted.* Neither can they be made to continue by being
prescribed. In the case of evils, on the other hand, the attempt to impose
prescriptive norms and the resultant appeal to hierarchical conceptions
of ‘authority* is a necessary condition for the allaying of internal dis
sension and conflict— dissension and conflict which, in fact, can only
be concealed but not suppressed. It is here that we find the subordina
tion of activities to ‘rules’, the substitution of ‘loyalty’ to institutions
and persons for ‘loyalty’ to movements and ways of life and the attempt
to shelter rules, ends, institutions and persons from discussion or
criticism.
Marx’s vision of Communism, then, is in no sense an ‘artistic’
vision; it rests on his sound, if unworked-out, perception of the
characteristic organisation and ways of working of goods; it rests,
that is, on an ethical and not on an aesthetic distinction. The real
reason his vision has been called artistic, it seems to me, is not because
it embodies aesthetic conceptions, but because the society he portrays
seems possible, to his critics, only as a society of artists. Immersion in
activity, neglect of rewards, spontaneous co-operation and disinterested
appreciation and emulation— the theory runs— are possible only to
those engaged in the ‘higher levels’ of creative activity, in ‘pure’
science and art. This seems to me patently false. Artists, as people, can
display hatred, envy and greed. They can be found subordinating their
work to ‘popular taste’, to religious requirements or to the demands
of the market; they can plagiarise, steal and intrigue. Soldiers, fisher
men, farmers and artisans can be found exhibiting love or courage,
displaying attachment to their activity for its own sake, co-operating
spontaneously with their fellows and neglecting all thought of the
‘rewards’ of their work. The distinction between the morality of goods
and the morality of evils is rather linked—as Georges Sorel suggests—
with the distinction between the morality of the producer and the
morality of the consumer. The producer emphasises activities, a way
of life, a morality; he is stirred by production everywhere and brought
together by the productive spirit with other producers. The consumer
emphasises ends, things to be secured; he subordinates himself and his
activity to these ends; his sentiments are not productive but proprietary
and consumptive; his relations with other consumers involve friction,
hypocrisy and envy.
The linking of ethical distinctions with productive and consumptive
moralities in history does not imply that men can be classified into
those who are producers and those who are consumers, or that the
u3
C R I T I C A L R ESU M & : E T H I C S A N D TH E Y O U N G M A R X
consumptive outlook can be eradicated from human life.1 Just as the

productive, the artistic and the enquiring spirit that enters into men
cannot be accounted for by adding the motives of the participants, so
it cannot be treated as seizing a ‘whole’ man. Devotion to enquiry can
co-exist, in the one person, with proprietorial sentiments or the
longing for security, for instance. The former sentiment cannot
strengthen or be strengthened by the latter sentiments; the divisiveness
of the latter will interfere with the co-operation and admirations
spontaneously displayed by the former. But men do display internal
conflicts; they are tom by the struggle of goods and evils within them;
they recognise both as part of their nature. Nor is there anything in that
nature to show that goods must triumph, that evil will be eradicated.
I f evils are divisive and unstable, goods can also be destroyed or
weakened, either by the operation of natural conditions or by the force
of evils.
There is no ground, then, for Marx’s optimism, for his belief in
the inevitable coming of a society completely given over to goods.
He is able to maintain his optimism only by sliding into a confused
individualism and an unempirical doctrine of ontological hierarchies.
This is exemplified in his attempt to treat conflict and division as the
result of society’s ‘abstraction’ into the individual, in his failure to see
conflict as the clash of social movements and ways of living, and in his
belief that evils are the result of ‘external’ determination and incom
patible with the ‘truly human’ essence of man. The motives Marx
unwittingly strengthens in his conception of a society made safe for
goods are evil motives: the desires for security and protection, for
guarantees that the end striven for will be obtained. Yet these tenden
cies toward security-seeking, this desire for assurance of rewards and
ultimate success, this withdrawal from the view that goods are strength
ened in the continuous struggle with evils, are something that Marx
helped to liberate in others. They are not something that he valued or
needed himself. He himself lived the ‘perilous, fighting life’ (Croce)
engaged in by goods; he himself despised the life of prudence and
precaution as a base and mean existence.
• # #
The ethical position outlined above is sufficiently radical to cause con
siderable unease in the minds o f most persons confronted by it for the first
1 It does, however, mean rejecting Marx’s claim (Grundrisse, pp. 11-16 ) that
production and consumption are identical, or the even more naive claim that all
production is for the sake of consumption.
114
E T H I C S AN D TH E ‘ T R U L Y HUMAN* S O C IE T Y
time. In my own experience, the intelligent objections raised against it have

tended to come down to a few basic arguments. A brief attempt to meet
these arguments may help to clarify the position a little further.
Many modem philosophers would concede that ‘good’ cannot be both a
quality and a relation and that the insistence that qualitative ethical distinction
establish no obligations whatever meets most o f their arguments against a
qualitative treatment o f ‘good’. But to treat ‘good* as a quality that carries
no recommendations, they would say, is to fly presumptuously in the face
o f usage. ‘Good* is an adjective o f commendation; to treat it as anything
else is to talk about something other than ‘good*.
T o this one can only reply that there is no coherent usage, and that the
moral philosopher, in clearing up the confusions, will have to reject some
usages and establish others. We are not confronted by one moral usage, but
by many; these usages do not provide the ‘ultimate facts* o f moral theory,
but embody the often mistaken conclusions o f various moral theories. We
can, o f course, study the history and determining conditions o f the normative
conceptions and moral attitudes which people have often tried to express
through ethical terms; to do this would be to do anthropology, history and
sociology, but not ethics. Even such a study could hardly be carried out with
out having to consider— as a question independent o f moral attitudes—
whether ethical distinctions exist. I f the insistence that ‘good* is a quality
results in the ‘presumptuous* rejection o f ethical ‘norms’, the insistence that
‘good* is a relation results in the equally ‘presumptuous’ denial o f the reality
o f ethical distinctions. Both the postulation o f ‘norms’ and the belief in the
reality of ethical distinctions have played an important role in the history o f
moral speculation; but we cannot consistently uphold both. The former, I
have suggested, leads to incoherence and the subversion o f any possibility
o f ethical science, the latter, it seems to me, not only provides a coherent
basis for ethics but illuminates social and mental life.
A second objection is that the things 1 treat as goods or characteristics
of goods— enquiry, immersion in an activity, neglect o f reward— are not
possible to all human beings, and come most easily in fact to those who
through class position or occupation are freed from economic need. I have
already suggested that I do not accept the view that disinterested enquiry
or artistic production is possible only to those whose livelihood is assured.
But even if this were in fact so, it would not be an argument against my
position. ‘Ought*, says the moralist, ‘implies can*. But I am not a moralist!
I am not saying that goods ‘ought* to be done. Certain natural or social
conditions may militate against the emergence and communication o f goods;
this neither makes the conditions themselves o f ethical relevance nor affects
the character o f ethical activities or motives when they do appear.
Tw o further arguments are more detailed. One argument claims that
mutual co-operation, inspiration, etc., is not exclusive to goods while certain
“5
things that I treat as evils— the desire for money or recognition, for instance
— are often necessary to produce scientific or artistic creation in a given
individual, and may thus be found ‘co-operating* with goods in a most
intimate fashion. Champion billiard players, orchid growers, etc., I have
been told, display all the characteristics I claim for artists and scientists:
their developments o f technique assist one another, they themselves keep
in touch with each other, exchange hints, inspire each other. ‘Yet this does
not seem to be o f any ethical interest.* I should argue, on the contrary, that
it is o f ethical interest; the orchid grower and billiard player who exchange
information freely with others in their fields, who are inspired by advances
in them, are displaying ethical qualities that assimilate their activities to those
o f the scientist and the artist and the producer in general and radically
distinguish them from those fellow-exponents o f their craft who are con
cerned with fame, with profit, with ‘getting one over* the men whom they
see as hostile competitors.
The allied suggestion that scientific and artistic production o f a high order
frequently display an extraordinary intertwining o f motives— o f intellectual
interest with unusual egotism, ambition or the desire for self-assertion—
raises more serious issues. It is true that a person’s immersion in good
activities may be intensified by evil motives: a man’s scientific work may be
goaded on by his desire for wealth, honour and the love o f women, as Freud
puts it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such an alliance between good and
evil motives can only be o f the ‘extrinsic* kind outlined above. The length
o f time for which such motives can co-operate without overt friction will
depend upon purely fortuitous circumstances. At the same time, the assist
ance which evils can render goods in specific circumstances seems to me
akin to the assistance which non-mental occurrences— earthquakes, epidem
ics or poverty— can render goods and not at all akin to the assistance goods
render each other. In general, I should be inclined to suggest that evils,
where they assist goods, do so only by inhibiting other evils. A man’s love
o f money will prevent him from seeking luxury at a particular moment or
from showing his envy o f his colleagues if he has reason to believe that his
reputation and work as a disinterested scientist will get him greater money
in the end. But the love o f money cannot give him the conception o f dis
interestedness or the capacity to display it on those occasions that he does
display it.
The second and last o f the detailed arguments concerns the distinction
between goods as involving immersion in an activity in which the distinction
between means and ends is unimportant, and bads as involving the elevation
o f ends. It has been objected that the pursuit o f ends need not be the pursuit
o f possessions, that a man’s end may be the promotion o f a good activity,
the securing of conditions in which the activity can go forward. This kind
o f position is often put, with considerable sincerity, by Vice-Chancellors o f
116
E T H IC S A N D TH E ‘ T R U L Y H U M A N ’ S O C IE T Y
Universities and heads of scientific and educational institutions. Yet the

very difficulties in which such people repeatedly find themselves seem to me
to expose their claim. The ‘protection* of education or culture, the securing
of guarantees and conditions as an aim preceding the activity itself, invariably
threatens to end in the subordination of education or culture to the non-
educational and non-cultural forces whose protection and guarantees it
seeks. There can be a consistent and coherent educational, scientific or
artistic policy; there cannot be a consistent and coherent policy for securing
education, science and art their ‘rightful* (i.e., protected and guaranteed)
place in a society of competing interests and ways of life.
This is not to say that any particular person or institution or movement
can escape the problems of practice, of allocating insufficient resources,
struggling and at times compromising with inimical movements and con
centrating on one thing rather than another. It is to deny both that ethics
is in any sense a handbook or a set of principles for such practical accommo
dations and that any such handbook could be composed. It is to insist, on
the contrary, that accommodations are between existing movements, that
policies follow and do not precede activities and ways of life. Goods are not
constituted by what they aim at, but by what they are.
H7
PART FO UR
Ethics and the Mature Marx

12. The New Edifice: Historical
Materialism and the Rejection of
‘Philosophy’
marx , we have seen, began his political activity as a philosopher.

His tools were primarily logical; the core of his belief was a philo
sophical, indeed, metaphysical, conception of the necessary dialectical
development of man, through alienation and the inevitable conflicts
resulting from alienation, toward the truly universal and truly self-
determined. He did display, from the very beginning, a strong anti-
transcendental strain, an increasingly confident rejection of anything
divorced from empirical reality. Between 1841 and the end of 1844,
Marx’s views became steadily more social in content: the Communist
society replaced the Hegelian Absolute, the dialectical conflict in
history became a conflict of movements and institutions rather than of
categories and ideas, the ‘party of the concept’ was replaced by the
proletariat. But in the second Hegel critique published in February
1844, his insistence on seeking the positive social content of all human
beliefs is still no more than the insistence that all knowledge is empiri
cal, that the supra-terrestrial can always be reduced to the terrestrial.
Toward the end of the Paris Manuscripts (M I, 3, 115) Marx argues
that the laws of alienation which dominate political economy also apply
to religion, the family, the State, jurisprudence, morality, science and
art. But this is so because all these are, like industry, forms of human
production and alienation evinces itself within all human production.
There is nothing in his work yet to suggest that economic production
must dominate and determine, at all times, all other forms of produc
tion and of social life. There is nothing in his work to call into ques
tion the precise status or content of the logico-ethical categories—
121
E T H I C S A N D TH E M A T U R E M A R X
dependence, alienation, self-determination, ‘the truly human*— with

which he is working.
By the middle of 1845, however, these questions do move into the
forefront of his work. In that year, after completing the Paris Manu
scripts of 1844, Marx discovered or proclaimed his materialist inter
pretation of history1—his insistence that economic production domin
ates and determines all social institutions and beliefs. In the German
Ideology he writes:
Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of
all history, and how nonsensical is the conception of history held hitherto,
which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding
dramas of princes and States. Civil society embraces the whole material
intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of development of produc
tive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of this stage
and, in so far, transcends the State and nation, though, on the other hand
again, it must assert itself towards foreign peoples as nationality, and in
wardly must organise itself as State . . . Civil society as such only develops
with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of produc
tion and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the
rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated
by the same name.
(MI, 5, 25-6. Italics mine.)
In the letter to P. V. Annenkov of December 28,1846, written soon

after the completion of the German Ideology> Marx develops the same
point:
What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of men’s reciprocal
activity. Are men free to choose this or that form of society for themselves?
By no means. Assume a particular state of development in the productive
forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consump
tion. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce
and consumption and you will have a corresponding social order, a cor
responding organisation of the family and of the ranks and classes. Pre
suppose a particular civil society and you will get particular political condi
tions which are only the official expression of civil society . . . the social
1 See Engels' well-known statement in his preface to Marx’s Revelations
Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne: ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the
summer of 1844, our complete agreement on all theoretical questions became
clear . . . When we met again in the spring of 1845 in Brussels, Marx had already
developed out of these foundations the main lines of his materialist theory of
history.’
122
TH E N E W E D I F I C E
history of men is never anything but the history of their individual develop
ment, whether they are conscious of it or not. Their material relations are
the bases of all their relations. These material relations are only the necessary
forms in which their material and individual activity is realised.
(SC 7-8.)
It is on this basis that Marx can turn viciously1 on his own earlier
conception 'of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no
class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical
fantasy*. There is, he insists in the German Ideology, no essential Man
apart from real man and real men are shaped by economic forces:
This sum of productive forces, forms of capital and social forms of inter
course, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something
given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as ‘substance*
and ‘essence of man*.
(M I, 5, 28.)
'All history’, he reminds Proudhon,2 'is nothing but the continuous

transformation of human nature.’ Thus, finally, he can replace philo
sophy by the economico-historical science of society:
Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins; the
depiction of the practical activity, of the practical process of development,
of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to
take its place. With the depiction of reality, philosophy as an independent
branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At best, its place can only
be taken by a summing up of the most general results which can be abstracted
from observation of the historical development of men. In themselves,
viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have no value whatever.
They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of the materials of history,
to indicate the sequence of the separate stata. But by no means do they afford
a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of
history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the
observation and arrangement—the real depiction—of our historical material,
whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is
governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which
only the study of the actual life-processes and activity of the individuals of
each epoch will make evident.
(M I, 5, 16 -17 .)
Morality—at least in the sense of normative ‘principles’, which Marx

had already rejected in his earlier work—went just as definitely:
1 In The Communist Manifesto, SW I, 55; supra II, 8.
2 The Poverty o f Philosophy, p. 165.
I23
E T H I C S A N D T H E M A TU R E M A R X
Communists preach no morality at all. . . They do not put to people the

moral demand: Love one another, be not egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they
know very well that egoism, like sacrifice, is under certain conditions the
necessary form of the individual’s struggle for survival.
(Op. cit., p. 227.)
Communists know very well, too, that ‘conscience is related to the

knowledge and whole way of life of a man. A Republican has a differ
ent conscience from Royalist, a propertied man has a different con
science from one who is propertyless, a thoughtful man a different one
from a man without thought.’ 1 What applies to conscience, according
to Marx and Engels, applies to all human ideas and conceptions:
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and
conceptions, in a word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his
social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production is
changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express
the fact that within the old society the elements of the new one have been
created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
(The Communist Manifesto, SW I, 49.)
If conceptions of religion, morality, law and ideals of freedom and
justice have been common to all past stages of society, this is merely
because
one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of
society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past
ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except
with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
(Op. cit., p. 50.)
This, at any rate, is one side of what Marx began saying from 1845
onward and continued to say till the end of his life in 1883. It was on
these conceptions that Engels erected his ‘scientific socialism’ and
subsequent Marxists their materialist dogmas. How far they correctly
represent his mature thought and how far they constitute a repudiation
1 Marx, in his article ‘The Trial of Gottschalk and Others’, published in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung of December 22, 1848 (M I, 7, 501).
124
of his earlier philosophical and ethical beliefs we shall have the

opportunity of judging.
A preliminary difficulty for the criticism and elucidation of Marx’s

mature position concerns the ‘status’ of any assertion that may be made
about Marxism or any other subject. His mature thought is often
interpreted—by Marxists at least— as implying that there can be no
question of ‘objective’ truth or ‘objective’ knowledge and that any
criticism or elucidation of Marxism in terms of ‘fixed concepts’, such
as he displayed in his earlier work, is therefore completely pointless
and inadmissible.
There are two main sources for this interpretation. One is the
eleven Theses on Feuerbach, jotted down by Marx in his notebooks in
the spring of 1845 and first published by Engels (in a version not
wholly true to the original) in the appendix to the separate edition of
his Ludwig Feuerbach in 1888. The second is the specific pronounce
ments on truth by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and his A nd
Diihring. The position suggested by Marx and the line taken by Engels
-
are not the same.
‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (including that
of Feuerbach),’ Marx writes in the first thesis, ‘is that the thing, reality,
,
sensibility, is conceived only under the form of the object or of con
templation, but not as human sensory activity practice [Praxis], not
subjectively* (M I, 5, 533; cf. SW II, 363). The point is developed in
the second thesis:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking
is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must
prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking.
The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated
from practice is a purely scholastic question.
(M I, 5, 534; cf. SW II, 365.)
That this implies a pragmatic theory of truth— the position that true
beliefs are those which work or aid the solution of ‘tasks*— is taken to
be confirmed by the famous eleventh thesis:
Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point, however,
is to change it.
(M 1, 5,535; SW II, 367.)
Now, in so far as the Theses are an attack on the Cartesian cogito,
on the doctrine of the passive mind merely confronted by the ‘external’
i*5
E T H I C S A N D TH E M A TU R E M A R X
object, Marx’s position is perfectly sound. He is insisting that the

mental activity and the object interact in a single process and that
mental activities do not passively cognise an object, but actively strive
toward it. It is this recognition that the mental and the non-mental
belong to the same historical, spatio-temporal reality, that they interact
on a single plane, and not any doctrine of the primacy of the ‘substan
tial’, which is the valuable part of Marx’s materialism.
The quotations given, however, reveal far more questionable mater
ial. If idealism enabled Marx to reject the dualism of mind and matter
and to see the mind as active, knowing as a form of striving, it also led
him into the false view that terms which are part of a single process
become the same term. It is this false amalgamation of the knower and
the known, the denial of any final distinction between them, which
seems to bring him to the view that knowledge is possible only to
those who actually participate in the movement of things.1
That Marx’s position is false is brought out sufficiently by the
admissions implicit in the eleventh thesis. If knower and known are
the same process, if knowledge consists of ‘moving’ with the known,
then the idle speculation and interpretation which Marx decries would
simply be impossible. Neither could we make any sense of the demand
that the knower must change ‘the world’. If he and ‘the world’ are one,
if his knowing it consists of moving with it, then he cannot at the same
time act on it from the outside or produce changes within it. (The
same incoherence comes out in the Marxist slogan, formulated by
Engels, that ‘freedom is the insight into necessity’. If the development
is truly necessary, then the knower’s insight or lack of insight into it
is totally irrelevant. The process must continue in the way set down; if
the observer himself is treated as part of the process, then the observer,
too, must be carried along in its development. But whether he is treated
as part of the necessary development or not, he must be powerless to
affect it and his insight must therefore be irrelevant. Else the develop
ment is not necessary.)
A faint suggestion of cruder instrumentalism— of pragmatism in
its true sense— lies in Marx’s association of truth with reality andpower.
1 Cf. John Anderson: Critical Notice of H. B. Acton’s The Illusion of the
Epoch, A .J.P., vol. 37 (1959), p. 156 et seq., at p. 158: ‘The general position of
the Theses is that to have true knowledge is to be moving with the movement of
thing, which is a revolutionary movement; it is only the revolutionary, participat
ing in that movement, who really understands it—who has a “ dialectic” under
standing (i.e., precisely participatory, going beyond himself) as contrasted with
the idle speculation of the non-participant/
126
If Marx is saying that true beliefs are proved— or more accurately,

confirmed—in practice, in our dealing and grappling with the objects
of these beliefs, then this is perfectly sound: though it again implies
that knower and known can be distinguished as distinct processes.
If Marx is saying—as some pragmatists have said— that ‘ “ all X are
Y ” is true’ means nothing but ‘ “ all X are Y ” works in practice’, he
is faced with the obvious difficulty that the latter proposition still has
to be treated as true in the ordinary, and not in the pragmatic, sense.
Otherwise the proposition ‘(“ all X are Y ” works in practice) is true*
would have to mean ‘(“ all X are Y ” works in practice) works in
practice’ and so on to a vicious infinite regress. At some stage we should
have to be able to say ‘Does it work in practice or not?’ and this could
only be made a significant question by treating the truth of a proposi
tion as the issue ‘Is it so or not?’ and not as a pragmatic question of its
consequences.
The position suggested by Engels has not the merit of confusedly
drawing attention to important issues. It is simply the most naive
proclamation that all truth is relative, accompanied by material that
makes it clear that Engels himself has confused different issues and
hardly knows what his statement means. Since Hegel, he says in his
Ludwig Feuerbach:
One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated insubstantial anti
theses of the older metaphysics of true and false, good and evil, identical and
differentiated, necessary and accidental; one knows that these antitheses have
only a relative significance, that that which is recognised as true now, has
its concealed and later-developing false side, just as that which is recognised
as false, its true side, by virtue of which it can later on prevail as the truth . . .
(SW II, 351, amended according to the superior translation in the
Kerr edition.)
In Anti-Diihring> Engels proclaims the same relativism and takes it to
be proven by the spectacle of human disagreement and human error:
That twice two make four, that birds have beaks, and similar statements, are
proclaimed as eternal truths only by those who aim at deducing, from the
existence of eternal truths in general, the conclusion that there are also
eternal truths in the sphere of human history—eternal morality, eternal
justice, and so on—which claim a validity and scope equal to those of the
truths and deductions of mathematics. And then we can confidently rely on
this same friend of humanity taking the first opportunity to assure us that
all previous fabricators of eternal truths have been to a greater or lesser
degree asses and charlatans, that they have all fallen into error and made
mistakes; but that their error and their fallibility have been in accordance
12 7
with natural law, and prove the existence o f truth and accuracy in his case;
and that he, the prophet who has now arisen, has in his bag final and ultimate
truth, eternal morality and eternal justice. This has all happened so many
hundred and thousands o f times that we can only feel astonished that there
should still be people credulous enough to believe this, not of others, but of
themselves. ,. _
(AD 104-5.)
The central weakness of such relativism has been exposed by Plato
in the Theaetetus. The relativist, in claiming that all truth is relative,
does not put his own claims forward as relative but claims for them
‘absolute’, i.e., unambiguous, truth. There is in fact no other way of
conveying an issue: to say all truth is relative, however much the issue
may be confused by reference to what is ‘true for me’ is simply to say
that X both is and is not Y and thus to make discourse impossible.
That Engels has no real wish to do so is made sufficiently evident by
his shirking of the issue over mathematical truths and his admission,
in Anti-Diihringy that certain ‘trivial’ propositions— ‘twice two make
four’, ‘birds have beaks’, etc.— are unambiguously and not relatively
true. His position, indeed, depends entirely on the consideration of
more ‘complicated’ theories and assertions which, he claims, may be
true to a relative extent but not absolutely. He illustrates this by citing
Regnault’s discovery that Boyle’s law does not apply in certain cases—
a proof, according to Engels, that Boyle’s law is untrue and yet not
false. But the actual position, of course, is that Boyle’s law— the asser
tion that all gases have property X —is positively and not relatively
false, while a different assertion— that all A-gases have property X — is
positively and not relatively true.1 If neither assertion were unambig
uously true or false, there would be no way of choosing between them.
What Engels is really saying is that men are more prone to error
in general statements than in particular ones and in social and historical
fields than in natural sciences. This, far from implying the relativity
of all truth, requires the recognition of unambiguous truth, of a positive
and definite distinction between truth and error. Thus, when Engels
writes in Anti-Diihring (p. 101) that ‘the knowledge which has un
conditional claim to truth is realised in a series of relative errors . . .
through an endless eternity of human existence,’ it is clear that the
word ‘relative’ has no meaning here. It should simply be dropped. The
movement described by Engels is not a movement from relative to
1 For a fuller discussion of this particular example, and of Engels’ theory of
truth in general, from the realist standpoint I myself adopt, see John Anderson:
‘Marxist Philosophy*, A .J.P .P ., vol. XIII (1935), p. 24 et seq., esp. pp. 26-32.
128
THE N E W E D I F I C E
absolute truth, but a quantitative movement from the knowledge of

some facts to the knowledge of more facts. But what we know and
what we can know is irrelevant to the objective issue of what is, or is
not, the case. (Neither, of course, is there any ground for Engels’
vulgar optimistic doctrine that knowledge constantly progresses, that
there are no regressions, no recrudescences of error. The suggestion
that every theory contains ‘more truth’ than the theory which pre
ceded it is patently false.) The point, however, is that if all truth were
relative, we could not speak of a movement, of discovery, at all—we
could not distinguish true beliefs from error. What Engels has patently
done is to confuse ‘absolute’ truth in the sense of total knowledge,
knowledge of all that is to be known, with ‘absolute’ truth in the sense
of conveying an unambiguous issue, of being either true or false and
not both. His correct assertion that there can be no total knowledge in
no way implies that any single issue is not unambiguous or even that
it cannot be known correctly. If everything had to be known before
knowledge could begin or error discovered, knowledge could not
begin and error could not be discovered.
A third attack on the very basis of criticism, on the positive treat
ment of philosophical or ethical issues, rests on the ‘materialist’
reduction of ideologies to the material foundations of society, to the
material position of a class or (more ineptly) to the material ‘interests’
of a class. We have seen this view in the citation from the Communist
Manifesto a few pages back; it is to be found, in different forms and
with varying degrees of ambiguity, in most of Marx’s mature work.
What is proclaimed as truth, these statements are read to imply, is
what any particular man is necessitated into thinking by the social
situation of which he is part: since no man can escape this determina
tion, there can be no question o f‘objective* truth; since social situations
constantly change, there can be no question of permanent truth. Thus
Marx insists that the sensory world is itself a historical product, indeed,
a product of activity in the world of industry and trade:
Even the objects o f the simplest ‘sensory certainty* are given through social
development, industry and commercial relations. The cherry tree, like almost
all fruit trees, was transplanted to our zone, as is well known, through
commerce; it was only by virtue o f this action o f a determinate society at a
determinate time that it was given to ‘the sensory certainty* of Feuerbach.
(M I, 5, 32-3.)
The bearing of this on the truth of any proposition, such as the
belief that cherry trees blossom in spring, need hardly be taken
I29
seriously. While Marx’s attempt to socialise the whole of reality, to

suggest that all non-human things are products of human material
activity, is obviously false, he is quite right in suggesting that know
ledge has conditions and that these conditions are historical, that they
change. It may even be true that what people know is what they— or
some motives within them—wish to know: we know that which
satisfies some desires or eases some tension. This is very different from
insisting that a man’s belief in what is true, or even his errors, are
determined by his class position, or that the ruling ideas of any age
are the ideas of the ruling class. These propositions are obviously
empirically false. But in any case, all these assertions concern only
how a man comes to know; they have nothing to do with the truth of
what he believes. To the question whether cherry trees blossom in
spring, the origin of cherry trees and the manner in which I came to
know them, are entirely irrelevant. Marxists, as well as Marx himself,
do confuse questions about the origin of a thing with questions about
the actual nature of the thing; but their confusions have to be brought
out and firmly rejected. They themselves, as we have seen, cannot talk,
cannot make any assertions at all, without assuming that the truth of
an assertion is a positive and definite issue, and that a thing can be
distinguished from the conditions which produced it.
Philosophy ‘as an independent branch of activity’, we have seen

Marx suggest, ‘loses its medium of existence’ once positive historical
science begins. Does this, then, make logical or philosophical criticism
of Marx’s work ‘inappropriate*?
There is a great deal in Marx’s writing— early and late— to suggest
that he would reject completely any conception of philosophy as a
‘meta-science’ concerned purely with methodology, axioms or prin
ciples that logically precede the possibility of any science whatever.
There are, Marx would have insisted, no ‘principles’ preceding empiri
cal knowledge or independent of it; there can be no question of ‘apply
ing’ ‘principles’ to ‘facts’. There is, as he says in the German Ideology, no
‘fruitness’ apart from real fruits, no ‘humanity’ apart from real men.
Universal propositions can have significance, according to Marx, only
in so far as they isolate the common characters of existing events.1
This position of Marx’s, I should argue, is unexceptionable.
Marx’s Hegelianism, however, drove him further. Nothing could be
1 ‘All epochs of production have certain distinguishing features in common,
have common characters. Production in general is an abstraction, but an intelligible
130
understood in itself, as having positive and unambiguous characters;

everything was a ‘moment’ in the history of its development toward a
final end; it could be understood only in terms of its total situation and
the total process of which it was part.1 This position is not unexception
able— it seems to me, in fact, entirely untenable. It requires Marx, as
we have seen, to destroy or ‘overcome* all positive distinctions. It
forced him to treat ‘Nature’ as a social product that will finally be
taken into man. It now also forces him— since his new underlying
reality is to be society and no longer Man— to minimise2 any specific
human characteristics and to treat men as no more than a reflection or
product of social relations. It is this totalism which accounts for the
tendency in Marx to treat his historical materialism as a form of econ
omic reductionism and to treat the products of social forces as mere
‘reflections’ of them. But if all things are to be part of one process,
determined by ‘it’, they cannot have their own characters, their own
ways of acting.
This appears to be the upshot of Marx’s ‘materialist’ or economic
interpretation of history—a theory we shall now turn to examine more
closely.
1 ‘All stages of production have common characters, which thought establishes
as universal; but the so-called universal characters of all production are nothing
but these abstract moments, with which no actual historical stage of production
can be understood/ (Grundrisse, p. 10).
2 Passages in the German Ideology, the Poverty o f Philosophy, The Communist
Manifesto and the Theses on Feuerbach suggest that the mature Marx does not
merely minimise the importance of permanent human appetites, attitudes and
drives, but actually denies their existence. Yet in a draft passage written for the
German Ideology and dropped before publication, he specifically distinguishes
permanent human appetites, which are modified by changing historical conditions
but are not produced by them, from relative appetites ‘which owe their origin to
a specific form of society, production or exchange’ (M I, 5, 596). Again, arguing
against Bentham in the first volume of Capital, Marx reminds us that before
deciding what is useful for man, we would have to consider first ‘human nature
in general* and then that human nature ‘which history modifies in every epoch*
(K I, 640; C I, 668). Both passages are yet another reminder of the dangers of
deducing a Marxian ‘system’ from those of his pronouncements that have become
well-known because of their seeming simplicity and general scope,
abstraction in so far as it really brings out, fixes, the common and therefore saves
us repetition’, Marx wrote in his notebook in 1857 (Grundrisse, p. 7).
131
13. The Materialist Interpretation
o f History and Marx’s Critique o f
Moralities
the basis of the ‘materialist interpretation of history’, according to

Marx and also to Engels, is a simple proposition both were to reiterate
time and time again—the proposition that ‘the mode of production in
material life determines the general character of the social, political
and spiritual processes of life* (CPE 11). ‘Material life’ is what the
eighteenth-century philosophers and Marx himself used to call ‘civil
society’; Marx now refers to it more frequently as ‘the material founda
tion’ or ‘the world of industry and trade’. On this, he believes, every
thing else is in some (not always clear) sense dependent.
Marx, and Engels after him, distinguish within the material life of
men two separate, if related, factors: productive forces and relations of
production. The productive forces are the skills, knowledge and tools
(all of them social products) existing at any given period of society.
The relations of production are the ways in which different factors of
production are appropriated and secure their returns— in other words,
what Marx calls the class structure of society. While both Marx and
Engels are generally loose in their references to the economic or
productive foundation by which all social life is allegedly determined,
Marx does make it clear that, on his theory, ‘the relations of production
correspond to a definite stage of development of their [men’s] material
powers of production’ (CPE n ). The fact that it is these forces of
production that are taken as the basic determinants of social change is
confirmed by his insistence that social change takes place— always
violently—when the relations of production come into conflict with
the productive forces. For while the productive forces are constantly
132
TH E M A T E R I A L I S T I N T E R P R E T A T I O N OF H I S T O R Y
developing, the relations of production in any given period are com

paratively fixed and resist change. It is thus that the relations of produc
tion which began by ‘expressing* (serving the needs of) the develop
ment in the forces of production, end by becoming ‘fetters* upon this
development. It is then that a new class, called into being by the new
developments in the productive forces, emerges into the arena of
history and bursts the old class structure asunder. Inevitably and
repeatedly the constantly developing forces of production triumph
over the lagging productive relations. Only with the supercession of
all classes and the emergence of ‘rational and intelligible relations*
among men does the tension between productive forces and productive
relationships and the violent change from one social form to another
disappear from the historical stage.
Engels, most of Marx’s followers and most of his critics took and
have taken Marx’s position to imply an underlying technological
determinism. On the basis of some of Marx’s statements and many of
Engels’, including the latter’s discovery of primitive communism,1
the theory has been elaborated thus:2
The study of history shows that there have been four stages of
technological development, each of them producing a corresponding
stage of the relations of production. First, there was an era of stone
tools, to which corresponds a primitive communism in the means of
production and the distribution of products. With the advent of metal
tools, society split apart into masters and slaves— the first form of the
class society. Then came feudalism, which, as Marx suggests in the
Poverty o f Philosophyf was based on the hand-mill and finally industrial
capitalism, based on the steam-mill or power-driven machinery in
general (though there was an earlier form of mercantile capitalism
preceding the industrial revolution). The highly elaborate forces that
result from the increasing application of modern science to industry
will bring about the next stage, that of socialism merging into Com
munism, where the division of labour will be replaced by the organisa
tion of production (cf. Grundrissey pp. 88-9), where control and
planning will be by the community as a whole.
1 In a footnote to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto (SW I,
33), Engels explains that he and Marx were not aware of the existence of primitive
communism when they wrote the Manifesto in 1847, but that its existence had
become evident from recent researches by Haxthausen, Maurer and Morgan.
2 Cf. the summary by H. B. Acton: The Illusion o f the Epoch, p. 135.
3 ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill
society with the industrial capitalist.' (M I, 6, 179; PP 122.)
133
The technological interpretation of Marx’s materialist doctrine can

not treat it as a theory of direct and unmediated technological deter
minism. Marx insists that the history of society is the history of social
struggles, that the key to political and ideological forms lies in the
class structure of all past societies. The determinism exercised by the
productive forces must therefore be mediated by the productive
relationships that result from these forces'—else all classes would
share the same ideology. The theory thus becomes that productive
forces determine productive relations and that these, in turn, determine
the social superstructure: the legal and political forms of the society
and the philosophical, ethical, legal, aesthetic and economic theories
or ideologies to be found in that society.
Marx’s materialist interpretation of history has been discussed often

and at length, both as a fundamental ‘principle’ belonging to the
philosophy of history and as a summary of detailed historical studies
to be confirmed or disproved by actual historical events. Some critics
have denied the possibility of framing any general law of historical
development; others have striven to prove, as a matter of fact, the
independence and power of ideological forces in history. But the
argument has constantly been bedevilled by doubts: precisely what is
Marx’s position, exactly what is he claiming?
It does not follow from the fact that Marx has a position that he
himself would have been able to provide satisfactory answers to these
questions. In the German Ideology, it is true, he and Engels write
confidently:
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their correspond
ing forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of indepen
dence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their
material production and their material intercourse alter—along with these—
their real existence and their thinking and the products of their thinking.
(M I, 5, 16; GI 14-15O
But before examining the sweeping propositions contained in this
passage in themselves, let us see what they come down to— in Marx’s
own hands— in practice. Consider first Marx’s handling of a problem
in aesthetics— is it shown to have no ‘semblance of independence’, to
be completely reducible to men’s material production and intercourse?
In his notebook Marx writes:
Known—that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but its
foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations which lies at the
134
basis of Greek imagination and therefore of Greek mythology possible

with self-actors and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs? What
becomes of Vulcan faced with Roberts et Co., Jupiter faced with the light
ning-conductor, Hermes faced with the Crldit mobilier? All mythology
overcomes and dominates and moulds natural forces through the imagination
and in the imagination, disappears therefore with actual domination over
these [forces]. What happens to Fama next to Printing House Square? Greek
art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e., Nature and social forms already
worked over by folk imagination in an unconsciously artistic form. That is
its material. Not any mythology you care to choose, i.e., not any uncon
sciously artistic fashioning of Nature (hereby everything objective, therefore
society, included). Egyptian mythology could never be the foundation or
maternal lap of Greek art. . . . But in any case, a mythology. Hence in no
circumstances a social development which excludes any mythological
relationship to Nature . . .
From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and shot? Or the
Iliad, altogether, with the printing press and the steam press even . . .
But the difficulty does not lie in understanding that Greek art and Greek
epic poetry are tied to specific forms of social development. The difficulty
is that they still give us artistic satisfaction and in certain respects remain as
norms and unattainable models.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But is he not
pleased by the naivete of the child and must he not again strive to reproduce
its truth on a higher level? Does not the nature of the child reveal to each
epoch its own character in its elemental truth? Why should the historical
childhood of mankind, where it blossoms most beautifully, not exercise
eternal charm as a stage that can never reappear? One finds bad-mannered
children and children old before their time. Most of the ancient peoples
belong in these categories. The Greeks were normal children. The charm
of their art for us is not inconsistent with the fact that their art grew from
an undeveloped stage of society. [The charm] is rather the result of this and
is rather indissolubly linked with the fact that the unripe social conditions
under which this art developed, and only under which it could develop, can
never come back.
(Grundrisse, pp. 30-1.)
Consider this passage carefully. First, we note that Greek mythology

and art are not here presented as passive reflections or passive effects
of Greek social organisation. The existence of Greek social organisa
tion and the absence of later social organisations and knowledge are
necessary for Greek art and mythology, but not sufficient. To become
mythology, Greek nature and social forms must be ‘worked over by
folk imagination in an unconsciously artistic form . To become art, one
135
gathers by implication, they must be worked over in a consciously

artistic form. (How this would enable us to distinguish a myth from a
short story without inspecting the author is not clear, but that is not
our present point.) Artistic form, then, is also necessary for something
to become mythology or art, and this artistic form, clearly, is not
something that reflects the social organisation, but something additional
to it.
Secondly, consider Marx’s attempt to account for the charm that
Greek mythology still exercises on us. This is not an attempt to account
for the artistic form of Greek art or mythology; the form is pre
supposed as an intrinsic characteristic independent of our attraction to
what has the form. But Marx is not willing to say that its charm lies
in the form. He wants an economic account. But again, the account
breaks down. The parallel with childhood is forced; the ‘elemental
truth’ which Greece reveals to us remains obscure. But in any case, the
appeal of childhood and of such elemental truth is presented as an
eternal verity, a truth of human psychology in no way linked with the
social organisation under which we— the appreciators— live. Once
again, Marx has shown at best— and this time, quite unconvincingly—
that the economic organisation of Ancient Greece (its infantile char
acter) is a necessary condition for its fascination over us; it is not a
sufficient condition because it requires also our interest in the infantile
— an interest which remains unrelated to economic factors altogether.
At the same time, Marx seems also to concede that not all children
exercise fascination for us— it is only (in the first reference) beautiful
children or (in the second, more explicit reference) normal children.
In any case, it is clearly not the children that reflect our economic
structure, satisfy our economic needs or serve the interests of our
class. In such an analysis, it is hardly surprising that Marx should
speak of Greek art and mythology being 'tied to specific forms of
social development instead of saying they are determined by them.
Nor is this bringing in of factors which are not on the face of it
economic at all confined to Marx’s rough and possibly ill-considered
notes. We find it repeatedly in his long, concrete and considered
account of capitalist development in the first volume of Capital. ‘The
forcible process of expropriating the mass of the people in the sixteenth
century gained new and terrible momentum from the Reformation
and the colossal theft of church property which followed it,’ he writes
(K I, 759; C I, 792). ‘ Church property constituted the religious bul
wark of the traditional relationships in landed property. With its fall
136
TH E M A T E R I A L I S T I N T E R P R E T A T I O N OF H IS T O R Y
these could no longer be maintained’ (K I, 761; C I, 793-4). Again,

discussing the methods of primitive accumulation in general: ‘These
methods rest partly on the most brutal might, e.g., the colonial system.
But all of them use the might o f the State, the concentrated and organ
ised might of society, in order to accelerate the process of transforming
the feudal into the capitalist mode of production and to shorten the
transitions. Might is the midwife o f every old society pregnant with a new
one. It is itselfan economic power.9 (K 1, 791; C 1, 823-4—Marx’s italics.)
In Marx’s brief discussion of aesthetics, his economic account
eschews—as we have noted— such central issues as the characteristics
of ‘artistic form’ and the nature of beauty. The same is true of his far
more frequent comments on law. In general terms, Marx insists in the
German Ideology, in the Poverty o f Philosophy and in Capital itself on
the secondary character of law, its dependence on economic factors and
its service in the interests of the ruling class. At no stage, apart from a
few vague remarks about law being based on property, does Marx try
to analyse the fundamental categories and principles of English law,
or of its various branches, and show that they are determined by the
economic structure of English society. He noticeably avoids any
consideration of the large and important part of the criminal law
concerned with offences against the person; nowhere does he discuss
the tremendous changes in the substantive content and procedural rules
of the civil law, changes that were taking place and arousing wide
spread attention before his very eyes. Instead, he shows, with consider
able and generally convincing supporting detail, the capitalist bias of
contemporary European Factory Acts, the shameless protecting of
their own interests by mill-owners sitting as justices of the peace, and
the way in which legal procedure was used to discriminate against
workers, e.g., by prosecuting workers for breach of contract, while
similar causes of action against masters were confined to the civil
courts.1 It is significant that all this material shows economic interests
1 See especially his chapters, in the first volume of Capital, headed ‘The
Working Day* (K I, 239-317; C I, 255-330) and ‘Machinery and Large-scale
Industry* (K I, 387-532, esp. pp. 505-29; C I, 405-556, esp. 526-52). Marx
implicidy concedes the devotion and independence of view of many of the factory
inspectors appointed under the Acts, and their attempts to expose the intolerable
nature of factory conditions and some of the worst legal abuses in the Reports,
from which Marx draws much of his material. Marx, and Engels in his addenda
to subsequent editiofis, note that some of the abuses (including the discrimina
tion against workers over breach of contract) have been, or are being, remedied.
Of course, this would not in itself show that all the features of the capitalist
137
at work in the actions of individuals or in Parliamentary legislation;

Marx never attempts to show the same economic interests enshrined
in the very structure of the common law.1
Nowhere does Marx show in detail that the structure or content of
any ideology is wholly determined by the economic conditions or
social structure of the group or society that gave it birth. But neither
does he show precisely what it is that would, on his view, determine the
content of the ideology. This difficulty emerges even in the scant
references that the mature Marx makes to morality. What does a
morality ‘reflect’? The general character of productive relations in the
society? This seems to be the suggestion Marx is making when he
insists on the conflict of rights and duties as ‘reflecting’ the conflicts
and incoherence of ‘civil society’. But how, then, is one morality to be
distinguished from its remaining contemporaries? Here Marx falls
back on a different determinant: the social situation seen from the
standpoint o f a specific class. Thus he reduces Kant’s doctrine of the
good will not directly to the productive relations in eighteenth-century
Germany, but to the political impotence of the German bourgeoisie
coupled with its aping o f the French model. How is the standpoint of
one class to be distinguished from that of another? Here Marx falls
back on a doctrine of class ‘interests’ (seen, no doubt, as themselves
economically determined). The proletarian, Marx and Engels write in
the Communist Manifesto (SW I, 42), sees law, morality and religion
as ‘so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush
just as many bourgeois interests.’ This, in very crude terms, is the line
popularised by Engels in Anti-Diihring:
We maintain . . . that all former moral theories are the product, in the last
analysis, of the economic stage which society had reached at that particular
epoch. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality was
always a class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests
1 Modem Soviet legal theorists, further embarrassed by their inability to
discover fundamental differences in content between Soviet and ‘bourgeois* law
similarly concentrate on showing how the judicial process can be distorted by
economic interests, rather than how it is shaped by them. Thus, Vyshinsky’s
discussion of the concrete working of ‘bourgeois’ law (The Law o f the Soviet
State, pp. 501-3) is taken up almost entirely with an account of the Dreyfus,
Beilis and Sacco-Vanzetti trials.
factory system which Marx exposes are merely temporary—but the interaction
of many factors in factory legislation, which Marx has to admit implicitly, raises
difficulties for his whole theory of economic determination with which he never
tries to cope.
138
of the ruling class, or, as soon as the oppressed class has become powerful
enough, it has represented the revolt against this domination and the future
interests of the oppressed.
(A D 109.)
Thus Engels distinguishes in modern times the Christian-feudal
morality of the feudal aristocracy, the modern bourgeois morality and
the proletarian morality. Kautsky, following the Engels line in his
Ethics and the Materialist Conception o f History, argues that in the
ancient world the ethical question first emerged clearly as a result of
the class tensions that followed the Persian wars. These wars placed
the Greeks at the centre of widespread commercial activity and pro
duced three leading types of morality: the Epicurean, representing
those connected with private production; the Platonic and Neo-
Platonic, representing the section of the aristocracy not engaged in
personal control of production; the Stoic, representing several of the
remaining classes and acting as a mediating ethical theory.1
All this has its origin in a subtler and rather more intelligent treat
ment of historical moral codes by Marx and Engels in the German
Ideology. The interpretation given there does not lay itself open to a
voluntaristic ‘conspiracy’ theory of morality, by which moralities
come to be seen as consciously-fashioned tools in the struggle for
domination. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels consistently take
morality as aiming to express the common interests of a society. In the
rational society of Communism such interests will be truly harmonious
and universalisable; a perfectly coherent morality, in which private
and social interest will be completely fused, will therefore arise. In the
class society, the common interest is an illusion, an ideal which
alienates man’s social functions from man and sets them up to oppose
him. The moralities of class society are therefore necessarily fraudulent
and incoherent. They represent not the common interest of the whole
society, but only of a class; its particular economic interests disguised
as general social interests. The result is on the one hand a constant
changing of moralities as the social initiative passes from one class to
another, on the other a tension between the specific interests of the
class and its claim to represent society as a whole:
1 Most contemporary Soviet ethical philosophers, such as Sharia and Shishkin,
take the same line that each morality represents the economic interests and
attitudes of a class, though unlike Kautsky, they make no serious attempt to link
the fundamental ethical structure of a theory with its alleged class background.
They are satisfied instead with an occasional example of obvious ‘class' prejudice
in a moral philosopher, e.g., Aristotle's contempt for slaves.
139
Each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is
compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests
as the common interest of all the members of the society, put in an ideal form;
it will give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only
rational, universally valid ones..
(GI 40-1; M I, 5, 37.)
This procedure, according to Marx and Engels is not, in the initial
stages of the new class struggles, entirely Machiavellian.
The class making a revolution appears from the start, merely because it is
opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole
society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling
class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected
with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the
pressure of conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the
particular interest of a particular class.
(GI 41; M I, 5, 37.)
The situation described here, Marx and Engels seem to assume, pro
vides evidence for their view that history displays a moral advance
toward true universality. After describing how the victory of the
French bourgeoisie over the aristocracy enabled many proletarians to
raise themselves into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, they conclude:
Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis
than that of the class ruling previously . . .
(GI 41; M I, 5, 37.)
These are the most explicit and detailed comments on morality to
be found in the work of Marx the Communist, and the most sensible to
be found in the work of Engels. They are not enough. They tell us
nothing about the vexed question of interests; they eschew any
consideration of the truth or falsity of moral claims; they give no
account of the issues that have dominated the history or moral theory
and ethical controversy. They give us no basis for distinguishing
between the political programme and the ethical convictions of a class,
nor do they make any attempt to see whether there are constant
themes in the history of ethics and, if so, how they could be accounted
for. Moralists, after all, have condemned other things beside theft.
We are now in a better position, perhaps, to return to a general

consideration of the content and force of the materialist interpretation
of history. It comes out, even in Marx’s work, as a theory that is
formulated loosely, ambiguously, without proper care; it is never
140
T H E M A T E R I A L I S T I N T E R P R E T A T I O N OF H I S T O R Y
demonstrated in detail in even a single case; it is frequently ignored and

virtually subverted in the discussion of concrete social developments.
Its most concrete point seemed to be that economic conditions deter
mine ideology and never vice versa, yet even this had to be modified
the moment it was seriously questioned. In his letter to Conrad
Schmidt of October 27, 1890, Engels made a host of concessions:
Where there is division of labour on a social scale there is also mutual inde
pendence among the different sections of work. In the last instance, produc
tion is the decisive factor. But when the trade in products becomes indepen
dent of production itself, it follows a movement of its own which, while it is
governed as a whole by production, still in particular cases and within this
general dependence follows particular laws contained in the nature of this
new factor; this movement has phases of its own and in its turn reacts on the
movement of production . . .
It is similar with law. As soon as the new division of labour which creates
professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent
sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production
and trade, still has its own capacity for reacting upon these spheres as well.
In a modem State, law must not only correspond to the general economic
position and be its expression, but must also be an expression which is
consistent in itself, and which does not, owing to inner contradictions, look
glaringly inconsistent. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of
economic conditions is more and more infringed upon. All the more so, the
more rarely it appears that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulter
ated expression of the domination of a class—this in itself would already
offend the ‘conception of justice* . . . Thus to a great extent the course of
the ‘development of law* only consists: first in the attempt to do away with
the contradictions arising from the direct translation of economic relations
into legal principles, and to establish a harmonious system of law, and then
in the repeated breaches made in this system by the influence and pressure of
further economic development, which involves it in further contradictions
(I am only speaking here of civil law for the moment).
The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a
topsy-turvy one: it happens without the person who is acting being conscious
of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori principles, whereas they
are really only economic reflexes; so everything is upside down. And it
seems to me obvious that this inversion, which, so long as it remains un
recognised, forms what we call ideological conception, reacts in its turn upon
the economic basis and may, within certain limits, modify it. The basis of
the law of inheritance—assuming the stages reached in the development of
the family are equal—is an economic one. But it would be difficult to prove,
for instance, that the absolute liberty of the testator in England and the
141
severe restrictions imposed upon him in France are only due in every detail to
economic causes. Both react back, however, on the economic sphere to a
very considerable extent, because they influence the division of property.
(SC 478, 481-2.)
Here, again, we have all the usual ambiguities. Law now reflects
economic relations and not class interests; though precisely how an
economic reflex or an economic relation becomes a normative legal
principle is not clear. Nor is it readily apparent why the translation of
economic reflexes into legal principles should lead to contradictions,
or how a materialist interpretation of history would account either for
the interest in harmony and consistency or for our conception of
justice. But what is clear is that Engels has conceded that ideologies
are not purely passive, and even that they may affect the economic base
‘to a very considerable extent*. There is no force after this in Engels’
attempt to save the situation by insisting that ‘in the last instance,
production is the decisive factor.’ If production is affected by ideology,
then the production that proves decisive is not the production that
formed the economic base. Once we grant even ‘relative’ independence
and multiple interaction in social events, once we recognise that law
may react back on economic forces and economic relationships, we
have to admit that history is not a single-factor story, that social action
does not move in only one direction, and that there is no way of setting
necessary limits to the possible social effects of social movements,
activities and beliefs.
What accounts for much of the confusion surrounding the material

ist interpretation of history is Marx’s inadequate view of causality—
his consistent tendency to think of causality in general as the produc
tion of an effect by a single cause which is by itself both necessary and
sufficient for the effect. This view, I have suggested earlier, is unsound:
it is only by acting on a field that a cause will produce anything, and
the cause which is necessary and sufficient to produce effect E in field
A may not be necessary or sufficient to produce effect E in field B.
The steam mill may produce capitalism in certain social situations; it
will not do so in others. Precisely because Marx does not distinguish
between the cause and the field on which it acts, we find him and
Engels so frequently amalgamating the two and treating as the social
determinant what amounts simply to the entire social situation. Again,
because the false picture of causal action as a direct passage from cause
to effect so readily suggests logical implication, Marxists consistently
142
THE M A T E R I A L I S T I N T E R P R E T A T I O N OF H I S T O R Y
think they have saved economic determinism by arguing that patently

non-economic causal factors acquire honorary economic status be
cause they were themselves at an earlier stage economically determined.
With all these— fatal—weaknesses, the materialist interpretation of
history still carries with it a suggestion of saying something very impor
tant. Why? It is not only that emphasis on economic factors, social
pervasiveness and social situations is infinitely preferable to the naive
individualism and emphasis on the directing role of moral ideals which
Marx’s theory largely displaced and discredited. It is rather that Marx
is saying something positive, which was only obscured by his causal
formulation of the materialist interpretation of history and can be
salvaged from it. His real point is the point he had made as a young
man against Hegel: Hegel reverses a true and important relationship
by treating the State as the subject and society as its predicate. For
Marx, society remained the subject. From 1845 onward he came to
recognise the central and continuous role of production in social life.
He recognised that what distinguished the social from the non-social
was its being a productive organisation and that men were not the
subjects to which this productive process belonged, but were them
selves part of it. A coherent development of this insight would not lie
in treating needs, interests, rights and moral and legal rules as causal
products of a system of production, as effects following it in time. The
rights, etc., as many critics of Marx have pointed out, would be part
of the system of production. The point is rather, as Anderson puts it,1
‘that it is to a given factor in production that “ rights” belong, that it is
their “ subject” , that through which alone their character and history
can be grasped, just as the productive process in general is the “ subject”
of the whole system or distribution of “ rights” .’ It is in the internal
function and external conflict of social provinces that laws and sanc
tions are required; it is forms of activity, and not ‘individuals’, that
have needs and formulate ‘rights’.
The important insight underlying the materialist interpretation of
history has been obscured by the causal formulation Marx tended to
give his doctrine; it has been weakened even more seriously by Marx’s
inability to free himself from individualism, from seeing moralities as
serving human ends and human interests. He thus opened himself up
to the individualistic caricature of his work by Engels and made it
possible for a subsequent generation of Communists to erect— in his
name— a preceptual morality and a coercive system of law.
1 ‘Crit. Notice of Acton’s Illusion o f the Epoch*, A .J.P ., vol. 37 (1959), p. 163.
M3
14. Historical Materialism and the
Overcoming o f Alienation
the distinction between freedom and alienation, we have seen, was the
ethical leitmotif of Marx’s philosophical and political development.
What Hegel and Feuerbach had seen in the history of human thinkings
Marx saw in the history of human production and social life. It was
alienation that Marx discovered in the facts, as well as the theory, of
political economy; it was the tension and instability resulting from
alienation which would inevitably end in its collapse and the inaugura
tion of a new, unalienated, economic and social life. Yet in the econ
omic magnum opus of his mature period—Das Kapital—he does not
rely on the term ‘alienation’ at all. Was it, then, one of the casualties
of his tendency toward economic reductionism? Had it been dropped
as a ‘philosophic’ or ‘ethical’ concept having no place in his new
objective and scientific historical materialism?
The answer is no. The positive content which Marx gave to the
term ‘alienation’ remains central to the position he is expounding in
Capital. The mental process of objectifying one’s own product and
allowing it to dominate one Marx now calls the fetishism of commodi
ties (K I, 76-89; C I, 4); it remains the same process. Man’s loss of
control over his labour power Marx calls his dehumanisation; it, too, is
the same process—a process which for Marx remains of central im
portance to the understanding of capitalism. Man’s loss of control
over the product of his work Marx now calls exploitation; a term which
does not mean that Marx thinks the capitalist is getting too much—
more than is ‘reasonable*, but which underlines his insistence that what
belongs to one man, or to men in general, is being appropriated by
others, or by some men in particular. Exploitation is made possible by
the creation of surplus value; but its basic ground for Marx remains
144
H ISTO RICAL M ATERIALISM
the alienation of man from his labour power, the fact that man's
activity becomes a commodity. In the German Ideology and in Marx's
economic notes and drafts made between 1850 and 1859 the connexion
of all this with the term ‘alienation’ is made specific (cf., e.g., G I,
64-7; M I, 5, 56-9; Grundrisse, 73-82, 88-90, 151-62, 504-8). But
we do not need to have the connexion made specific, to have the actual
term flourished in the text, to see precisely the same theme in Wage
Labour and Capital, the Critique o f Political Economy and Capital
itself. ‘Marx's condemnation of capitalism', writes Karl Popper,1 a
critic not at all interested in alienation, ‘is fundamentally a moral
condemnation. The system is condemned, for the cruel injustice inherent
in it which is combined with full ‘formal’ justice and righteousness.
The system is condemned, because by forcing the exploiter to enslave
the exploited it robs both of their freedom. Marx did not combat
wealth, nor did he praise poverty. He hated capitalism, not for its
accumulation of wealth, but for its oligarchical character; he hated it
because in this system wealth means political power in the sense of
power over men. Labour power is made a commodity; that means that
men must sell themselves on the market. Marx hated the system
because it resembled slavery.'
Marx, of course, is not confronting capitalism with a moral principle
established independently of his enquiries and condemning it for not
being ‘what it ought to be’. Whatever the logical weaknesses Marx's
account of the distinction between dependence and freedom may have,
the distinction rests, as we have seen, on an empirical basis. If Marx and
his readers are drawn toward freedom and repelled by dependence and
alienation, this is not because he has striven to show that they ‘ought to
be'. It is rather because some goods, at least, operate in Marx and in
many of his readers, so that the morality of freedom, the sympathies
and antipathies of goods themselves, are something he and they can
also feel. Marx, of course, in his mature work as much as in his earlier
work, wants to go somewhat further than this. He wants to show that
history is inevitably working toward freedom, toward the Communist
society where men’s production will no longer enslave them, but will
become part of them, where tools will cease to be men's masters and
become their servants. But however unfounded this view may be, it,
too, is not—in Marx’s sense—a moral view. It neither presupposes nor
establishes a new moral obligation in place of those which Marx
exposed.
1 The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. II, p. 199.
145
In his mature work, then, Marx describes the same process and
predicts the same goal as he described and predicted in the Paris
Manuscripts. Much of the seeming gulf between the ‘philosophical’
terminology of these Manuscripts and the empirical descriptive
terminology aimed at in Capital has been bridged for us with the
publication of the Grundrisse. These notes and drafts reveal clearly
the extent to which Marx remained a philosopher, thinking in philo
sophical categories and then seeking for their empirical content. This
is what he did with ‘alienation’ and— less successfully—with ‘freedom’.
The results of his quest did not, it seemed to him, destroy these con
cepts: on the contrary, they gave these concepts richer content and
confirmed their value.
There is, of course, one obvious distinction between Marx’s con
ception of alienation in the Paris Manuscripts and his later conception.
In the Manuscripts, he still sees man as alienated from a generic, social
being which is at once the universal nature common to all men and the
essential nature underlying man’s empirical development. In the
Theses on Feuerlach, the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto
he rejects this conception specifically. There is no eternal or essential
human nature from which man has become alienated, no ‘Man in
general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the
misty realm of philosophical fantasy’ ( Communist Manifesto, SW I,
55, supra, II, 8, III, 12). ‘Human nature [Wesen],9 he now writes (in
the sixth thesis on Feuerbach), ‘is no abstraction inherent in each
separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relation
ships.’ (M I, 5, 535.) But the metaphysical conception of an essential
human nature, however much Marx may need it for his conception of
Communism, is certainly not necessary for the portrayal of alienation
under capitalism, even in the form in which Marx depicts it in the
Paris Manuscripts. He has no difficulty in exhibiting the same aliena
tion, and the same features of it, in his later work. ‘The exercise of
labour power is the worker’s own life-activity,’ he writes in Wage
Labour and Capital1 (SW I, 77; M I, 6, 475), ‘the manifestation of his
own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to
1 The series of articles published by him in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in

April, 1849. They were based on lectures he had given to the workers’ Club
(Arbeiterverein) in Brussels in 1847 and formed only part of a larger manuscript
the publication of which was interrupted by the February Revolution. (See
Marx’s note in Capital, K I, 607; C I, 633.) The complete manuscript has been
lost.
146
HISTORICAL M ATERIALISM
secure the necessary means o f subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for

him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live.
He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice
of his life/ (Marx’s italics.) This is the alienation of the worker from
his own activity which Marx noted in the Paris Manuscripts• It
implies, Marx had argued in the Manuscripts, the worker’s alienation
from his product. This, too, is reaffirmed in Wage Labour and Capital:
What [the worker] produces for himself is not the silk he weaves, not the
gold he draws from the mine, not the palace he builds. What he produces for
himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace resolve themselves for him into a
definite quantity of the means of subsistence, perhaps into a cotton jacket,
some copper coins and a lodging in a cellar.
(Loc. cit.)
The worker’s alienation from his activity and from his product: these
conceptions are not merely reaffirmed in Capital, they form one of the
major themes running through the entire work.
There was a third aspect of alienation noted in the Paris Manu
scripts—man’s alienation from other men and therefore from society
and social powers. The same alienation is stressed in the first and third
volumes of Capital, e.g.:
Since the instruments of labour [under capitalism] confront the labourer as
independent, economy in their use also appears as a special operation which
has nothing to do with him and which is therefore separated from the methods
which raise his personal productivity.
(K I, 340; C I, 357.)
Finally, as we saw earlier, in actuality the worker treats the social character
of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common purpose,
as a power alien to him; the instruments necessary to bring this combination
into being are alien property to him, to the waste of which he would be quite
indifferent if he were not forced to treat them economically.
(K III, 105; C III, 102.)
This alienation between man and the social character of his activity
can be seen in every sphere of capitalist society: it is presupposed by
the existence of law, religion, etc. But only under capitalism does this
alienation appear in all its nakedness. In feudalism, as we have seen
Marx stressing in his earlier work, man is dependent but not yet
divided; in capitalism his dependence is intensified in practice and his
division is accomplished in theory (K I, 82-7; C I, 88-96). The slave
sold his person, the serf sold part of his labour power, the worker
147
under capitalism sells all of his labour power, but he sells it piecemeal.
His alienation is therefore more thorough-going, more complete, than
that of the slave and of the serf who preceded him in the arena of
history. (Cf. The German Ideology, M I, 5, 56-9, GI, 64-8; Grundrisse,
73-82; Capital, K I, 76-89, C I, 81-95.)
The final aspect of alienation brought out in the Paris Manuscripts
is man’s alienation from nature. Instead of controlling it, making it
part of his being, he is dominated by it, becomes part of its being. In
the Grundrisse and Capital the reference is more frequently to produc
tion, but the concept remains the same. Instead of making production
his activity, controlling its laws, man becomes a mere tool of produc
tion and develops according to its laws. In this sense, the capitalist is
as dependent as the worker. Both are shaped and determined, in their
character, their activity and their beliefs, by the inexorable laws of the
economic process. Thus the very epitome o f the laws o f historical develop
ment in the class society that forms the pre-history o f mankind— the
materialist interpretation o f history— is for M arx the ultimate and
fundamental expression o f human alienation: it recognises as law mans
subjugation by powers that should be and once were his own. The coming
of Communism, the supercession of alienation, means that man
ceases to be the product and slave of production, and becomes its
master.
There is no basis, then, for seeing Marx’s rejection of a ‘meta
physical’ human nature as radically affecting his use of alienation in the
economic and social contexts in which he had always thought its
value to lie. It is true— as the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the
Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. puts it— that ‘by “ estrangement”
or “ alienation” , Marx means the forced labour of the labourer for the
capitalist, the appropriation by the capitalist of the product of a
worker’s labour and the separation of the labourer from the means of
production which, being in the capitalist’s possession, confront the
labourer as an alien, enslaving power’. (EPM, Introduction, p. 8.) But
this is not all he means. Dependence is not confined to capitalism: it
began with the division of labour and private property, capitalism is
only its most virulent and pervasive form. Economic dependence
necessarily produces human dependence in all other fields— in religion,
morality, law. The fact that Marx no longer uses the general term
‘alienation’ in Capital to sum up all these ramifications of economic
dependence, does not prevent him from taking every opportunity in
the same work to emphasise or display the pervasive dependence and
148
HISTORICAL M ATERIALISM
dehumanisation on which capitalism rests and which it constantly

extends and intensifies.
The distinction between freedom and alienation, I have argued, can
not be understood without recognising that Marx has grasped, how
ever instinctively, the positive distinction between the operation of
goods and of evils, between the morality of freedom associated with
the productive spirit and the linked motives of domination and sub
mission that emerged in the consumer’s morality, in the subordination
of activity to ‘ends’. It is because the history of artistic and scientific
production displays the producer’s morality more clearly, more un
equivocally, than industrial production— and only because of this—
that there is a certain superficial plausibility in connecting Marx’s
vision of man in Communist society with the creative work of an
artist living in a society of artists. Nothing in Marx’s mature work
repudiates or alters this conception of the distinction between free
and alienated living. Not only that, but Marx himself brings out, in
the Grundrisse, the positive ground of his distinction and its intimate
connexion with the character of artistic and scientific activity:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou labour! was Jehovah’s curse, which he
gave to Adam. And it is thus as curse that A[dam] Smith regards labour.
‘Rest* appears as the adequate condition, as identical with ‘freedom* and
‘happiness*. A. Smith seems far from seeing that the individual, ‘in his
normal condition of health, strength, activity, capacity and skill,’ has also
the need for a normal portion of work, for an end to rest. It is true that the
amount of labour is itself determined externally, by the purpose sought and
the obstacles to the attainment of that purpose which must be overcome
through labour. But A. Smith has just as little conception of the fact that
this overcoming of obstacles is itself the activity of freedom—of the further
fact that the appearance of merely external natural necessity is stripped oft'
from external purposes and that these purposes are revealed as purposes
which the individual sets himself—of the fact, therefore, that the overcoming
of obstacles is self-realisation, objectification of the subject, therefore concrete
freedom, whose action is precisely work. He is right, however, in seeing
that in its historical forms as slavery, feudal services and wage labour,
labour always appears as something repulsive, as externalforced labour, and
that not working appears in relation to this as ‘freedom and happiness*. This
is doubly true: it is true of this contrasted labour, of the labour which has
not yet created the subjective and objective conditions . . . to make it travail
attractif self-realisation of the individual, which does not mean that it
becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier thinks with all the naivete of
a grisette. Truly free labour, e.g., composition, is damned serious at the
149
same time, it is the most intensive exertion. The work of material production
can acquire this character only by (i) having its social character affirmed
(2) having a scientific character and being universal labour, the exertion o f a
man not as a tamed natural force, but as a subject which appears in the
process o f production not only in its natural form and development as part
o f nature, but as an activity regulating all natural forces.
(Grundrisse, 504-5.)
These notes were not meant for publication. But this is how Marx
reacts, this is how he saw dependence and freedom.
In the years between 1844 and the publication of the first volume of
Capital in 1867 Marx read and appropriated into his thinking an
enormous mass of economic material. As an economist he was not
shallow: he was not merely a Ricardian glibly seizing upon the labour
theory of value as a convenient tool for bringing out the alienation,
dehumanisation, exploitation inherent in capitalism. He was also, in
economics, a very learned and a very perceptive man. He became
engrossed in all the technical and professional details of his subject:
monetary theory, accumulation, constant and variable capital, prices,
absolute and relative surplus value, trade cycles, labour conditions and
factory organisation. What is amazing in view of this is not how much
new material came in as the Paris Manuscripts grew into the three
volumes of Capital, but how much of the old material and of the old
thought remained. Nowhere is Marx’s conception of the appropriation
of things external to man exemplified more clearly than in his own
intellectual work. He took materials from everywhere, but he sub
sumed them to his own purposes, moulded them into his system, strove
to weld everything into a single coherent structure whose fundamental
plan retained its original purpose and thrust.
Marx, we have seen, did come to reject any conception of an essential
and eternal human nature preceding and underlying the process of
production which has come to dominate man. The importance of this
rejection as a radical break in his development should not be over
rated. Already in the Paris Manuscripts, for all his alleged Young
Hegelianism, Marx had insisted that it is only in ‘working on the world
of objects’, in production, that man proves himself to be a generic or
social being. (M I, 3, 88, supra, II, 7). But there he still thought of the
generic being as somehow part of the ‘essence’ of man—proved rather
than created by production. Now, in his mature work, he combines
the belief in a universal, social, generic being of man with his historical
150
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
materialism by seeing this being as the result of production, which

socialises man, brings him into union with his fellow-men, and lays
the technological foundations which enable man to become the master
and not the slave of Nature. This is the dialectic of capitalism: the
‘contradiction’ between its socialisation of man and his labour, its
creation of ever-increasing organisation and interdependence, and its
separation of men into classes, its alienation of one man from another,
even within the same class.
By sympathy, Marx always remained a philosopher. Throughout
twenty years of intensive labour in the economic field, he despised
economics. His correspondence with Engels in the later years of his
life is studded with gross and contemptuous references to the subject.
He resented the fact that it prevented him from turning to other fields
that interested him: law, morality, aesthetics. But he knew economics
to be fundamental to his position: the back-breaking labour could not
be avoided. His extraordinary achievement had been to take the onto
logical concept of alienation and invest it— quite early in his thought—
with concrete social and economic content. It was because alienation
and freedom remained central to his thought that the argument had
to be followed to the bitter end.
The final flowering of alienation was capitalism. The collapse of
capitalism had therefore to be shown inevitable, not by moral criticism
but from the logic of its own development. This occupied much,
perhaps most, of Marx’s attention. The doctrine of surplus value, the
analysis of competition, the attempt to prove the inevitable pauperisa
tion of the working masses and the ‘simplification’ of social classes are
vital to Marx for this purpose. They showed, he thought, that the
alienated society could not survive and could not be destroyed without
radically eliminating all of its presuppositions. These presuppositions,
according to Marx, are the division of labour, private property and
production for monetary return— all of them essential for the appear
ance of alienation. Marx invests his analysis of the history of produc
tion with a tremendous mass of detailed material, but the basic outline
of the preconditions and development of alienation is quite simple.
The division of labour begins in the family and gradually extends
throughout the society:
The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions
of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the splitting up of accumulated
capital among different owners, and thus, also, the division between capital
and labour, and the different forms of property itself. The more the division
151
E T H I C S A N D THE M A T U R E M A R X
o f labour develops and accumulation grows, the sharper are the forms that
this process o f differentiation assumes.
(M I, 5, 56, G I, 64; cf. K I, 368fF., C I, 385E )
What makes this division and separation possible is that with the
extended division of labour, production is no longer for use, but for
money, for exchange value.
The social division o f labour makes the labour [of the goods-possessor]
just as one-sided as it makes his needs many-sided. For this reason his
product can serve him only as an exchange value. It can acquire universal,
socially accepted forms o f equivalence through money, and the money is in
someone else’s pocket.
(K I, 1 1 1 ; C I, 119 .)
Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything
whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes
saleable and purchasable. Circulation is the great social retort into which
everything is thrown and out o f which everything is recovered as crystallised
money. Not even the bones o f the saints are able to withstand this alchemy;
and still less able to withstand it are more delicate res sacrosanctae extra
commercium hominum. Just as all the qualitative differences between com
modities are effaced in money, so money on its side, a radical leveller,
effaces all distinctions. But money is itself a commodity, an external object,
capable o f becoming the private property o f any individual. Thus social
power becomes a private power in the hands o f a private person.
(K I, 137-8 ; C I, 148-9.)
The division of labour, private property and money: these three (the
latter two made inevitable by the first) in turn make inevitable the
alienation, the dependence and separation that pervades the whole of
capitalist society. They create the division of town and country, of
worker and master, o f ‘individual* and ‘society’, of man and his labour.
They alienate man from other men, from his work, from his product,
from his society.
How, then, is this alienation to be overcome? By the inevitable logic
of the development of the productive process, which will end by
destroying private property and with it the division of labour and the
production for monetary gain. This is the point of Marx’s detailed
analysis of the capitalist economy: it shows, Marx believed, that
capitalism will be destroyed, and it shows this from ‘simple’, quite
unphilosophical, economic facts.
What Marx thought to be the basic outlines of the Communist
society of freedom are clear. The distinction between classes, resting
152
on their relationship to property, would disappear with the super

cession of property. So would the division of labour, the distinction
between urban and rural interests, between mental and physical labour.
Production and social intercourse will be stripped, for the first time, of
their independent character and subjugated ‘to the power of individuals
united' (G I, 70; M I, 5, 60).1 The material process of production will
become ‘a process carried on by a free association of producers, under
their conscious purposive control'; the relations between human beings
in their practical everyday life will ‘have assumed the aspect of perfectly
intelligible and reasonable relations between man and man, and
between man and Nature' (K I, 85; C I, 92).
Engels had attempted to set out what this means in concrete terms
in an early draft for the Communist Manifesto—his Fundamental
Principles o f Communism, a revolutionary catechism written in October,
1847 :
Question 20— What will be the consequences of the final abolition of private
property?
Answer—Society, by taking out of the hands of the private capitalist
the utilisation of the various productive forces and means of intercourse,
as well as the exchange and distribution of goods, and controlling them
according to a plan based on the available means and needs of the whole
whole society, will above all abolish all those harmful effects which at
present are still connected with the operation of big industry. Crises will
disappear; increased production, which is over-production for the present
social order and a powerful cause of misery, will then not even prove
sufficient and will have to be increased far more. Instead of bringing misery
in its wake, over-production will reach beyond the immediate needs of
society to the satisfaction of everybody’s needs; it will create new needs and
at the same time create the means for their satisfaction. It will be the cause
and determining condition of new advances; it will bring about these ad
vances without throwing the social order into confusion, as has always been
the case in the past. Big industry, free of the pressure of private ownership,
will develop at an increased rate compared with which its present form will
1 ‘This is not possible without the community. Only in community with
others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only
in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible . . . The illusory com
munity, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an
independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was
the combination of one class against another, not only a completely illusory
community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals
obtain their freedom in and through their association* (G I, 74-5: M I, 5, 63-4).
153
E T H I C S A N D T H E M A TU R E M A R X
seem as small as commodity manufacture seems compared with the big

industry of our days. This development of industry will provide our society
with a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of all. Similarly,
agriculture, also prevented by the pressure of private ownership and the
division into lots from utilising the improvements and scientific develop
ments already at hand, will gain new life and provide society with a mass of
products fully ample for all. Thus society will produce enough goods to
arrange distribution in such a way that the needs of all its members will be
satisfied. The division of society into separate classes opposed to one another
will become superfluous. Not only will it be superfluous, it will even be
incompatible with the new social order. The existence of classes arose out of
the division of labour, and the division of labour in the form it has had
hitherto disappears completely. For mechanical and chemical aids are not
sufficient to bring industrial and agricultural production to the heights
depicted above by themselves; the capacities of the men who utilise these
aids must be developed correspondingly. Just as the peasants and artisans
of the last century altered their whole way of life and became quite different
people when they were caught up in large industry, so the common control
of production by the whole society and the resultant new development of
production will both need and create totally new men. The communal control
of production cannot be carried out by men like those of today, each of
whom is subordinate to a single branch of production, is chained to it and
exploited by it, each of whom has developed only one of his capacities at
the expense of all the rest, each of whom knows only one branch, or only one
branch of a branch, of the whole of production. Even industry today has
increasingly less use for such people. Industry controlled in common in a
planned way by the whole of society presupposes men whose capacities
are developed in all directions, who are able to review the entire system of
production. The division of labour, which makes one man into a peasant,
another a cobbler, a third into a factory-hand and a fourth into a stock
exchange speculator, is already undermined by machinery; it will disappear
completely. Education will enable young people to go rapidly through the
whole system of production, it will enable them to go in rotation from one
branch of production to another, as the needs of society or their own
inclinations may direct. It will therefore deprive them of that one-sided
character, which the present division of labour stamps on every individual.
In this way society organised in Communist fashion will enable its members
to utilise their many-sided talents in many fields. This, however, necessarily
results in the disappearance of separate classes. So Communist society on the
one hand is incompatible with the continuation of classes; on the other hand
the creation of this society itself provides the means for dissolving class
differences.
It follows from this, that the contrast between town and country will
154
also disappear. Wholly material causes already make the pursuit of agricul
ture and industry by the same men, instead of by two separate classes, a
necessary condition of the Communist order. The dissemination of the
peasant population on the land, compared with the crowding together of
the industrial population in the large towns, is a condition which corresponds
only to an as yet undeveloped stage of agriculture and industry, a barrier to
all further development which can already be felt strongly in the present time.
The universal association of all members of society for the common
planned exploitation of the forces of production, the increase of production
at a rate that will enable it to satisfy the needs of all, the end of a state of
affairs in which the needs of one are satisfied at the expense of others, the
total destruction of classes and their contradictions, the development of the
capacities of all members of society in all directions through the abolition
of the division of labour as known hitherto, through industrial education,
through the rotation of jobs, through the participation of all in the satisfac
tions created by all, through the fusion of town and country—these are the
main results of the abolition of private property.
(M I, 6, 516-19.)
Marx was an infinitely abler, subtler and theoretically more percep
tive man than Engels. Where Engels puts thing concretely, simply and
often naively, Marx tends to put them philosophically, subtly and
sometimes abstrusely. He would have liked to believe what Engels
believed— it is just possible that he did. Certainly, Marx, too, refers to
the disappearance of the distinction between mental and physical
labour (Critique o f the Gotha Programme, SW II, 23), to the shortening
of the working day (K III, 873-4; C III, 954-5), to the combination of
productive labour and education ‘as a method not only increasing
social production but as the only method of producing human beings
developed in all their aspects’ (K I, 509; C I, 530). But he is certainly
less emphatic about the social unity of Communism resting on the fact
that technology will be able to satisfy all of men’s needs. He speaks,
in the Critique o f the Gotha Programme (loc. cit.) of the ultimate period
when ‘the productive forces have also increased with the all-round
development of the individual and all the springs of co-operative
wealth flow more abundantly’ (my italics); ‘the realm of freedom’, he
insists, ‘begins in actuality only when labour which is determined by
need and external utility ceases’ (K III, 873; C III, 954); but he does
not see this as flowing from the satisfaction of all needs. Marx was
simply not the utilitarian that Engels was; he was not concerned with
how much a man had, but with the way in which he acquired what he
had, with the conditions under which he worked. The essential thing
155
E T H I C S A N D T HE M A T U R E M A R X
for Marx that makes production truly social is the abolition of money
as a circulating exchange value (K III, 932; C III), the fact that the
individual is no longer an abstract buyer and seller of commodities, but
a participant in the social business of production and of consumption.
In truly communal production
its communal nature is taken as the foundation o f production. The labour
o f the individual is taken from the start as social labour. Therefore whatever
the specific material form o f the product which he creates or helps to create
may be, that which he has bought with his labour is not a special specific
product, but a specific share o f the communal production. For this reason
he has no special product that he has to exchange. His product is not an
exchange value. The product does not have to be translated into a specific
character form in order to acquire a universal character for the individual.
Instead o f a division of labour, necessarily ending in the exchange o f exchange
value, we would have an organisation o f labour, which results in the par
ticipation o f the individual in communal consumption.
(Grundrisse9 88-9.)
What does this passage mean? It means, I think, that Marx was both
far less and far more naive than Engels about production under Com
munism. He foresaw tremendous improvements in working conditions,
a considerable decrease in the amount of labour needed from each man
as a result of technological advance and the abolition of any need for
labour-discipline of the capitalist type (K III, 103; C III, 100). In its
stead, there would be social determination, by the community, of the
working day and of the distribution of labour (K III, 213, 907; C III,
221, 992) and, naturally, increased but more centralised book-keeping.
That resources would still need to be husbanded, and allocated among
alternative uses, Marx understands quite well;1 that people would have
to do extra work on behalf of those in the community who cannot work
he himself mentions (K III, 932; C III, 1021-2). He is simply not con
cerned to portray Communism as the society of plenty; he is concerned
to portray it as a society of human dignity: a society in which labour
1 ‘If we think of society as not being capitalist, but Communist, then money-
capital disappears entirely and with it, therefore, the disguises that it carries into
transactions. The matter simply becomes that society must calculate beforehand
how much labour, how many instruments of production and provisions can be
expended, without upset, on branches of activity which, like the building of
railways, for instance, will produce neither instruments of production nor food
nor any useful effects for a length of time, a year or more, but which will draw
away labour, tools and provisions from the total production for the year/ (K II,
314; C II, 361-2.)
156
acquires dignity and becomes free because it is carried out by full and
conscious participants in a community given over to co-operation and
common aims. The model of a co-operative, productive community
of artists or scientists (which Engels never understood) is again appo
site: its members may hunger, undertake enormous exertions, spend
hours on tasks not interesting in themselves— but they know what
they are doing and why they want to do it. In that lies their freedom
and their dignity. It is for these reasons, because Marx himself has the
productive morality, that he is more concerned with time than he is
with plenty:
Assuming communal production, the determination o f time remains impor
tant. The less time society needs to produce wheat, cattle, etc., the more
time it has for other production, whether material or intellectual. As in the
case o f the single individual, the universality o f its development, o f its
satisfaction and its activity, depends on saving time. Economy of time is
what all economics finally comes down to. Society must thus divide its
time usefully in order to arrive at a measure of production suitable to its
total needs; just as the individual must divide his time properly to gain
knowledge in suitable proportion or to satisfy the different demands on his
activity. (Grundrisse, 89.)
Marx’s vision of Communism, then, is not the vision of a society

of plenty, in which conflicting interests have disappeared because
everyone has everything he wants, or, at least, needs. But is he relying
on an economic reductionism, on the view that all alienation and
conflict stem from private property, and will therefore disappear when
private property is abolished? There is much in Marx’s work to
suggest this view. Yet fundamentally, I believe, he felt a certain un
easiness about it. His vision of the coming of Communism, as we have
seen, retained much that was metaphysical about it. The inevitability
of the complete supercession of property depends on nothing more
concrete than the claim that the proletariat, being divorced from all
property, must make the abolition of property its ‘principle’—it is
here that Marx has made the least advance on the views he held in
1843 and 1844. Capital gives the impression that he is desperately look
ing for specific, concrete connexions that will show the actual truly
free, truly communal form of the society that succeeds capitalism in
evitable. This is why he is anxious to stress the co-operation and
socialisation developing within capitalism. He sees the seeds of Com
munism in the limited company, ‘the dissolution of the capitalist mode
157
E T H I C S A N D THE MA T U R E M A R X
of production within the capitalist mode of production itself’ (K III,

479; C III, 519); he sees them also in the co-operative factories of
workers themselves (K III, 481; C III, 521). He is anxious to show that
even under capitalism the truly human quality of the worker can
appear, especially when he is freed from the crippling effects of the
detailed division of labour.1 But Marx is not willing to stake too much
on these examples; the character of Communism as the society in which
property is completely overcome and production controlled by the
free association of producers is assumed throughout Capital and never
demonstrated in detail.
Within a few years, the glibness of Marx’s vision was being ques
tioned, especially by men of anarchist tendencies who insisted that
Marx had grossly underrated the despotism imposed by technology
itself, by the very nature of factory production. Engels, with his hard-
headed ‘realism’ and no understanding whatever of the subtleties of
Marx’s conception of freedom, was in no position to resist their
arguments. To question the nature of authority in a factory, he argued
in a polemic with some Italian anarchists, is plainly utopian:
At least with regard to the hours o f work one may write upon the portals
o f these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [leave, ye that
enter in, all autonomy behind!] I f man, by dint o f his knowledge and
inventive genius, has subdued the forces o f Nature, the latter avenge them
selves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a
veritable despotism, independent o f all social organisation. Wanting to
abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish
industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning
wheel.
(Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. S. Feuer, p. 483.)
Marx, I think, would have replied quite differently. The authority

in a factory would have seemed quite different to him from external
dependence or capitalist labour discipline once the social nature and
1 Marx quotes approvingly an account given by a French workman after
returning from San Francisco: T never could have believed that I was capable of
working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was
firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter press printing . . . Once in
the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as
they do their shirt, by my faith, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out
remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typo
grapher, slater, plumber, etc. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit
for any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusc and more of a man* (K I, 513; C I,
534).
158
control o f production had been presupposed. Why? Marx could not quite
say this in terms of his historical materialism, but obviously his
answer is: because the individual’s attitudes to authority will be quite
different. The force of the authority will not flow from an external
structure imposed upon him, but from the nature of the activities in
which he is engaging freely and consciously. Those who have authority
will be fellow-producers, seeking the same productivity as he seeks:
their ‘authority* will rest on competence and experience he himself
recognises and admires.
In concrete human terms, this situation is again not entirely utopian.
Such voluntary acceptance of guidance and of the rules necessary for
the continuation of an activity can be found in institutions and teams
seized with the productive spirit. How such guidance and such rules
appear to any individual in the institution will, in fact, depend upon
his ‘attitude*, i.e., on the extent to which he himself is seized by the
productive spirit. This is not to say that conflicts of views or competing
interests will not break out in an organisation given over to production;
but in so far as the productive spirit is strong within the organisation
such conflicts will be subordinated to the needs and rules of the
productive activity itself.
What is utopian in Marx’s vision is his constant reliance on the
productive spirit, on the operation of goods in individuals, without
paying any attention to their character, to the conditions in which
they arise in any given individual and spread through a society, and
to the character of the forces opposing them. It is here that the ‘human
essence’ is still assumed in Marx’s mature work. Co-operation and
production are taken as the ‘normal’ way of working of the individual
freed from the pressures of external determination; a view for which
Marx provides no evidence and could provide no evidence. Above all,
he fails to consider the view—which his own concrete examples of
free activity suggest— that productive organisation can only result
from an already existing productive spirit: not merely from the inter
dependence created by capitalism, but from what Sorel calls ‘the heroic
values’ of enterprise, immersion in productive activity and indifference
to reward.
Here is the central weakness of Marx’s vision. Unlike Engels, Marx
was not a utilitarian; he was not trying to build a society of the future
on the enlightened self-interest of the individual, on the promise of
peace and plenty. The freedom and dignity he proclaimed as the goal
of history were not entirely a utopian vision: such freedom and such
159
ETHICS AND THE MATURE M ARX
dignity have been displayed by men and women in their life and work.
But only those who have such dignity and such freedom can bring it
about. Marx would have liked to believe that the industrial proletariat
was evolving such freedom, such enterprise, even under capitalism.
But he was not prepared to stake much on the conception. History
seemed a more powerful ally. The proletariat remained for him funda
mentally a vehicle of history: not a class displaying enterprise, produc
tion and co-operation, but a class denied enterprise, production and
co-operation, not a class that has freed itself from the shackles of
property, but a class denied property, a class whose whole character
consisted of nothing more than its exclusion from property, than its
suffering. In not seeing the proletariat as the bearers of enterprise, as
the class of free men, Marx may have been right; but if he was right
his vision was doomed. In fact, the proletariat proved more thoroughly
the child of capitalism than Marx had ever dreamt possible: the move
ment he founded helped to destroy the vision he worked for.
160
P A R T FIV E
Communism and Ethics

15. Ethics and the Communist Party
the fundamental weakness of Marx’s thought, then, lies in his failure

to work out a theory of classes and organisations, and of freedom and
servility, in positive terms, in terms of the character of the processes
and movements involved. What things are is prior to their possible
adjustments and their aims; it is in the struggle of specific movements
and organisations that adjustments arise and aims are formulated. It
is only because Marx glosses over the positive character of social
movements and ways of living that he is able to believe in a classless
society, in a society in which the conflict of movements and way of
living has disappeared. The transition to socialism thus becomes some
thing he simply cannot afford to examine seriously: the precise charac
ter of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ‘values’ and ways of
living represented by the people in whose hands it would lie, have to
be left out of account. Here he is driven back on a crude economic
reductionism: the abolition of private property destroys the foundation
on which competing interests rest.
Socialism, on Marx’s view, would be born out of capitalism. But
it would be the society of true freedom and enterprise, in which the
capitalist morality had been entirely destroyed. He was right in the
first proposition and wrong in the second. Socialism was bom of
capitalism. But it was not the result of the catastrophic collapse of
capitalism. On the contrary, it sprang from the very ideology fostered
by capitalism: the concern with economic ends over ways of living, the
belief in the universal exchangeability of all things, in the possibility
of rational control of all things seen as mere means to a commercial
end. The socialist’s vision of society, as Rosa Luxemburg once said
of Lenin, is the capitalist’s vision of a factory, run by an overseer. The
conception of economic planning, Schumpeter has pointed out, is a
capitalist conception: the capitalism manager is the prototype of the
163
COMMUNISM* A N D E T H I C S
socialist administrator. Both depend in their ideology on the commer

cial morality of utilitarianism: on the conception that all things can
be treated and assessed as means to ends and that ends can be reduced
to a common measure.
Marx had a strong desire to believe that the proletariat, in its misery,
yearned for initiative, enterprise and freedom, that it rejected servility,
careerism and the concern with security as Marx himself had rejected
them. It would not be bought off with ameliorated conditions, pros
pects of greater rewards, or of ‘opportunities’ for the individual to
‘better’ himself. But Marx was not prepared to make such a claim part
of his theory, to see socialism as the extension and culmination of the
freedom and enterprise already displayed by the worker. Essentially,
he stuck to his negative view of the proletariat as the most suffering
class; a class whose future was determined not by its character, but by
its conditions. This prevented him from paying serious attention to
freedom and enterprise as historic traditions, operating in any society,
strengthened and not necessarily weakened in the struggle against
adversity. It prevented him from seeing the importance of other forms
of production and of other manifestations of the productive spirit in
social life: of artistic and scientific production as continuing traditions
capable of supporting and strengthening the productive spirit in
industry. Instead, Marx chose to rely on ‘history’, to hold out to the
proletariat the vision of a classless society made safe for goods, where
enterprise and freedom would be guaranteed by the economic founda
tions of society itself, where freedom would not lie in struggle, but
follow from mere existence. The servile character of such a conception,
its appeal to the demands for safety and for security, for certain returns,
has been noted already. Its servile character was even further strength
ened by the fact that it was Engels, with his blindness for alienation,
with his crude evolutionism, his utilitarian concern with economic
satisfaction, who became the ‘ideologue’— the propagandist and
populariser—of Marxism.
There can be no question that the labour movement, and even the
socialist movement, was at no stage wholly given over to enterprise.
The search for security, for welfare and economic sufficiency, was
always a powerful motive within it. But there can also be no question
that propaganda of a Marxist colour, with its insistence on ends and
aims, its elevation of consumer’s demands, did much to destroy what
enterprise there was. In their controversies with anarchists and syndi
calists Marxists may have been able to expose much that was utopian in
164
E T H I C S A N D THE C OMMU N I S T P A R T Y
both movements. But against the anarcho-syndicalist elevation of the

free and enterprising character of the existing working-class, Marxists
were upholding a servile and unfree morality.
Partly as a result of Marx's failure to deal positively with ethical
questions, to highlight ways of life and of organisation, ethical distinc
tions did not play a central part in the splits and controversies that
racked Marxism. The revisionists in the 1890's, it is true, made much
ado about their Kantian ethics, and Bernstein proclaimed his seemingly
sound slogan: ‘The movement is everything, the goal is nothing.’ But
Bernstein, for all this, preached security and sufficiency all his life. The
real issue confronting Marxists was not ethics, but the consequences of
their neglect of ethics. Marx had been wrong in forecasting the im
minent collapse of capitalism and the growing pauperisation of the
worker; no longer driven by needs, the workers were displaying their
character, their preference for rewards and security over freedom and
struggle. If one wanted to follow the worker, the Marxist vision of a
radically new society born of struggle had to be dropped. Socialism
became a matter of negotiation and demand for improved conditions
and greater security within existing conditions. This was the path of
reformism. Notably, the Marxist neglect of ethics prevented them from
attacking reformism for its elevation of rewards and security; the
orthodox Marxists had to argue instead— quite implausibly—that the
reformists were bound to fail, that increased rewards and greater
security could not last under capitalism.
Orthodox Marxists, clinging to the vision, had to find a substitute
for the proletariat. Lenin, drawing on Russian Populism, found it in
the revolutionary intelligentsia and the centralised hierarchical party,
acting as the ‘vanguard' of the working-class, driving it beyond the
bread-and-butter politics at which the working-class by itself would
always remain. Enterprise was not to be won by the worker but for
him.
The bringing of freedom and enterprise to somebody is not a free
but a despotic conception. Yet Marx, too, had seen freedom as some
thing that would be brought to the worker by ‘history’. His work laid
no foundations for exposing the course the Communist Party was soon
to follow. Indeed, his failure to see freedom as a force within history,
his treatment of it as merely a final end, made it possible to erect
despotism in his name. The point is Marx's refusal to consider the
qualities of movements and institutions themselves, his idealist insist
ence that to do so is to treat them ‘abstractly’. It is their role in history,
165
C OMMUNI S M A N D E T H I C S
not their character, that matters to Marx. Social movements and

relationships are not good or bad, but progressive or reactionary,
doing ‘the work of history’ or frustrating it. There is no point in
judging in isolation, especially when the path of history is not one of
slow steady improvement, but one of inevitable conflicts, necessary
miseries, and later resolutions.
‘Reason,’ Hegel had said in one of the most famous passages in his
Encyclopedia, ‘is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to
lie in the inter-mediative action, which, while it permits the objects to
follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away,
and does not itself directly interfere in this process, is nevertheless only
working out the execution of its aims. With this explanation, Divine
Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the
capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men direct their particular
passions and interests as they please; but the result is the accomplish
ment of—not their plans, but His, and these differ directly from the
ends primarily sought by those whom He employs.’ (Wallace transla
tion, Section 209.) In the Communist Manifesto especially, Marx also
emphasised this disparity between the character of men’s actions and
intentions and the results that inevitably followed from them. The
exploitation of slaves made inevitable the agricultural development of
feudalism; the greed of the capitalist merchant built industrialism; the
increasing misery of the proletarian was the indispensable precondition
of the rational society of the future. In the face of the ethical qualities of
the end, the ethical qualities of the preceding stages, if they could be
spoken of at all, were irrelevant. If history proceeds inevitably toward
the truly rational, then, indeed, one can say with Hegel—Die Weltge-
schichte ist das Weltgericht.
For the Communist Party, as ‘the party of history’, the principle was
of inestimable value in imposing iron discipline and unquestioning
obedience in a period of militant struggle accompanied by the oppor
tunism of constantly shifting tactics. Reinforced by Marxist essential-
ism, by the conception that each stage of history requires the solution
of a dominant ‘task’, the victory of the proletariat under the leadership
of the Communist Party became the only relevant moral criterion in the
period of struggle under capitalism. (Stealing from capitalist employers
used to be denounced in party catechisms on the simple ground that it
would discredit the party in the eyes of the public.) Lenin, claiming
that there is no shred of ethics in Marxism from beginning to end,
repeatedly emphasised the moral primacy of proletarian victory.
166
E T HI CS A N D T HE COMMUNI S T P A R T Y
Trotsky, in his Their Morals and Ours, took the same line. A gun in
itself is neither good nor evil; it becomes good in the hands of a
proletarian fighting for the classless society and evil in the hands of a
capitalist fighting for oppression and exploitation. At the same time,
within the party and within the Soviet Union the principle could
always be used to justify those who actually gained and kept power.1
History was on their side. It is this which plants the first seeds of doubt
in the mind of the anti-Stalinist Rubashov sitting in his prison cell in
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon; within Marxism he can find no
answer.
1 Quite typical is this attempt by Mehring’s translator, Edward Fitzgerald, to
defend Marx (in an addendum) against Mehring’s moral strictures over the
Bakunin episode: ‘Any discussion of “ the moral qualities” of the methods used
in the fractional struggles between Marx and Bakunin and their followers can be
of only very subordinate interest to day. Marx and Engels were not “ innocent
lambs” , but Bakunin and his friends were also not and they waged the fractional
struggle by no means in strict accordance with the categorical imperative. In
any case, all this is of very subsidiary importance. In the struggle between
Bakunin and his followers on the one hand and Marx and Engels on the other,
fundamental principles and history were on the side of Marx and Marxism and
therefore, we may assume, “ moral” justification also/ (Mehring: Karl Marx,
p. 556.)
167
1 6. Law and Morality in
Soviet Society
the Soviet Union is not a society of artists co-operating freely and

consciously in tasks that require no coercive discipline but that express
the community’s mastery over the process of production. In their
forty-four years of existence, Soviet law, Soviet morality and Soviet
legal theory have trailed meekly in the wake of economic and political
requirements dictated from the top— requirements that frequently
suffered abrupt change and which even more frequently flowed from
practical aims quite inconsistent with Marx’s theory. But throughout,
there has been the wish to portray Soviet society as constantly nearing
the free, co-operative community envisaged by Marx: the community
in which law and the very conception of moral rights and duties will
have withered away.
For the Soviet legal theorist, the problem did not become acute until
the 1936 Stalin Constitution ushered in a period in which law was for
the first time openly proclaimed as an intimate and not highly tempor
ary part of the socialist society. In the period of ‘War Communism’
from 1917 to 1921, Communist leaders had taken the opposite view.
Convinced of the imminence of world-wide socialism, they strove to
rid their country of every vestige of capitalism. They abolished private
ownership of land and of the means of production; prohibited private
trade in consumers’ goods, did away with inheritance, paid wages
partially in kind, conducted moneyless transaction between State
business houses, and predicted the speedy coming of true Communism,
under which money, class and State authority would disappear. Law
was therefore regarded as strictly transitional and as still representing
class interests— as a set of rules designed for the suppression of the
‘class enemies’ which would become unnecessary once the liquidation
168
L A W A ND M O R A L I T Y IN S O V I E T S O C I E T Y
of these enemies had been accomplished. Thus, even the criminal law
was seen as a pure class measure dictated by the economic interests of
the proletariat. The Leading Principles o f Criminal Law, enacted by
the People’s Commissariat of Justice in 1919, expresses this attitude
bluntly:
In the interests o f economising forces and harmonising and centralising

diverse acts, the proletariat ought to work out rules o f repressing its class
enemies, ought to create a method o f struggle with its enemies and learn to
dominate them. And first o f all this ought to relate to criminal law, which
has as its task the struggle against the breakers o f the new conditions o f
common life in the transitional period o f the dictatorship o f the proletariat.
Only with the final smashing o f the opposing overthrown bourgeois and
intermediate classes and with the realisation o f the Communist social order
will the proletariat annihilate both the State as an organisation of coercion,
and law as a function o f the State.1
The New Economic Policy of 1921-28, it is true, saw a drastic

reversal of this trend. With the reappearance of money, private trade,
kulaks, and private business managers operating under State licences, a
detailed system of law and legal procedure quickly emerged.2 But it set
no basic problem for Soviet legal theory. The New Economic Policy
was an open, though partial and strictly controlled, restoration of the
capitalist market— the laws required, therefore, were not socialist
laws, but temporary laws on the capitalist model, which would dis
appear when the concessions to capitalism were once more eliminated.
The new Codes were frankly based on those of the non-socialist
world— on the Codes of Germany, Switzerland, Imperial Russia and
France. Legal capacity, persons, corporations, legal transactions,
Statute of Limitations, property, mortgages, landlord and tenant, con
tracts and torts, unjust enrichment and inheritance, as Berman remarks,3
were dealt with in traditional terms. In so far as one can speak of any
specifically socialist conception of law in this period, it rests not on
the legal concepts or principles exemplified in the Codes, but on their
subordination, in the last resort, to the alleged economic interests of
1 Quoted by Harold J. Berman: Justice in Russia, pp. 23-4, from Sobranie

uâkonenii i rasporiatfienii R S F S R {Collection o f Laws and Orders o f the R S F S R ),
1919, no. 66, Art. 590.
2 ‘In 1922 and 1923, there appeared a Judiciary Act, a Civil Code, a Code of
Civil Procedure, a Criminal Code, a Code of Criminal Procedure, a Land Code
and a New Labour Code*— Berman, op. cit., p. 25.
8 Ibid., p/26.
169
COMMUNI S M A N D E T H I C S
the proletariat. The famous Article i of the Civil Code states this over
riding principle of the NEP conception of law: ‘Civil rights shall be
protected by law except in instances when they are exercised in contra
diction with their social-economic purpose/1 There is no suggestion
that these social-economic purposes themselves lay the foundation for a
positive system of distinctively socialist law.
This became absolutely clear in 1928, when the NEP compromise
was abandoned and replaced by the two Five-Year Plans, designed to
turn Soviet Russia, independently of world revolution, into a socialist
society as quickly as possible.
Now, for the first time, positive content was given to the Marxist idea o f
the disappearance o f State and Law under socialism. It was thought that
Law, an instrument o f the class-dominated State, would be replaced by
Plan, the manifestation o f the will o f a class-less society. Through the Plan
all the characteristics o f the original Marxist dream would be realised.
Planning would eliminate exploitation; money would be transformed into
a mere unit o f account; private property and private right generally would be
swallowed up in collectivism; the family would disappear as a legal entity,
with husbands and wives bound only by ties o f affection and children owing
their allegiance and their upbringing to the whole society; crime would be
exceptional and would be treated as mental illness; the coercive machinery
o f the State would become superfluous. The Plan would give unity and
harmony to all relations. The Plan itself would differ from Law, since it
would be an instrument neither o f compulsion nor o f formality but simply
an expression o f rational foresight on the part o f the planners, with the whole
people participating and assenting spontaneously. Society would be regu
lated, administered— much as traffic at an intersection is regulated by traffic
lights and by rules o f the road; but in a society without class conflict there
would be few collisions and to deal with them it would be unnecessary to
have a system o f ‘justice*. Social-economic expediency would be the ultimate
criterion; disputes would be resolved on the spot.2
In this period, under the leadership of E. B. Pashukanis, N. Krylenko

and P. J. Stuchka, Soviet legal philosophy was unquestionably at its
best. Pashukanis and Stuchka were theorists, genuinely concerned to
1 Lenin put this forcefully in his letter to Kursky preceding the enactment of
the 1922 Civil Code: ‘We do not: recognise any “ private” thing; with us, in the
field of economics, there is only public, and no private law. The only capitalism
we allow is that of the State . . . for this reason, we have to widen the sphere of
State-interference with “ private” agreements. Not the corpus juris Romani, but
our revolutionary consciousness of Justice, ought to be applied to “ Civil law
relations” / Quoted by R. Schlesinger: Soviet Legal Theory, p. 150.
2 Berman, op. cit., pp. 30-1.
170
L A W A N D M O R A L I T Y IN S O V I E T S O C I E T Y
work out a coherent Marxist account of law. This, they knew, no one
had yet done properly. They wanted to show, as they thought Marx
showed, and as Soviet leaders had so far agreed (though Lenin had a
genius for ambiguity), that socialist law was a contradiction in terms.
Law, they held with Marx, was a reflection of economic antagonisms;
with the eradication of these antagonisms it would necessarily dis
appear. A Marxist theory of law, says Pashukanis, cannot claim to
seek the general concept of a proletarian law. ‘The dying out of the
categories of bourgeois law w ill. . . signify the dying out of law in
general: that is to say, the gradual disappearance of the juridic element
in human relations.’ 1 Pashukanis saw, however, that this view needed
far more support in the field of law than Marx, Engels and Lenin had
ever given it. He saw, above all, that it was necessary to show— as we
have seen Marx never showed— that bourgeois law is not merely in
fluenced and distorted by economic interests, but that its basic structure,
concepts and principles are the reflections of economic categories of
bourgeois society that make no sense without it. Pashukanis, in fact,
goes further and insists that law itself is essentially bourgeois, that it
rests on conceptions necessarily linked with commodity exchange, and
that law can therefore only attain its consummation in bourgeois
society. All law, Pashukanis argues, is private law. There can be no
true public law establishing the relationship between the State and
private individuals because the State is by its very nature above and
outside the law. Law is built on the contractual relationships required
in the process of exchanging commodities on a free market— its
corner-stone is the abstract individual of capitalist economic life, ‘the
right- and duty-bearing unit.’2 This contractual conception dominates
every sphere of law— tort, family and marriage law, labour law,
constitutional law (based on a ‘social contract’) and even criminal law,
in which Pashukanis sees the ius talionis giving way, after an inter
mediate stage of money composition, to the commercial idea that a
crime must be paid for ex post facto. With the overcoming of the
bourgeois abstraction of the individual, the abolition of commercial
relations and the establishment of the social interest and the social man,
the whole structure of law necessarily loses meaning and collapses.
1 Quoted in Hans Kelsen: The Communist Theory o f Law, p. 106. Pashukanis

concedes, of course, that in the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat ‘the
proletariat must necessarily utilise in its interest these forms which have been
inherited from bourgeois society and thereby exhaust them completely/
1 Berman, op. cit., p. 19.
171
Then, in 1936, a major theoretical upheaval began. Socialist society,

it was formally announced, had finally been achieved. The first stage
of the classless society, it contained three strata— the workers, the
peasants, the intelligentsia. These, however, were friendly and mutually
supporting sections of the population, not the hostile economic
groupings of the societies of class antagonism. Yet the conclusions
that would have followed from this announcement on earlier Marxist
theory were categorically denied. The State was not to wither away,
law was not to begin disappearing. On the contrary, the allegedly
successful completion of the foundations of stable socialist society
was to permit the unflowering of a truly socialist State and a truly
socialist law as an intimate part of Soviet society.
Formally, the theoretical backing for this radical change in theory
lay in the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. Soviet theoreticians
have at no stage denied, and do not deny even now, that State and law
will ultimately wither away.1 But from 1936 onward, the building of
socialism in one country was taken to make the earlier confidence in
the speedy withering away of the State inapplicable. Surrounded by a
hostile capitalist world, the theory ran, Soviet society needed the
protection of a strong State, and such a State inevitably needed law.
The theory itself was far from consistent, of course. Even if one
granted— and many Marxists did not— the possibility of a Marxist
theory of socialism in one country, the compulsive powers of a State
based purely on the threat of a surrounding capitalist world should be
confined to matters connected with that threat and to its occasional
intrusions, through spies or saboteurs, into Soviet society. It does not
lay the foundations for a coercive socialist law of marriage, family and
civil relations, non-political crime and so on. Yet it was precisely in
these fields that a mounting change was making itself most strongly
felt. The cause was not primarily theoretical but practical. By 1934
and 1935, a major crisis in the social relations of Soviet life was becom
ing more and more evident. Soviet leaders were becoming increasingly
conscious of the failure of the more radical Marxist theory to command
the support of the common people or to cope with such widespread
problems as juvenile delinquency and the instability of Soviet family
life. They responded with a wholesale abandonment of radicalism.
1 Vyshinsky, laying the foundations of the new Soviet view in his Law o f the
Soviet State (1938) states specifically that law and the State will disappear, but
only ‘after the victory of Communism in the whole world’ (p. 52). Shishkin,
op. cit., p. 38, takes the same view in 1955.
172
‘Free love’ was denounced,1 abortion controlled, patriotism verging

on Russian chauvinism strongly encouraged. There were major con
cessions to religion. ‘Soviet legality’ was suddenly proclaimed a funda
mental basis of Soviet social life. What Soviet leaders had realised—
but could never say—was that the new economic basis of Soviet life
in no way dissolved the traditional non-economic conflicts of social
and family life. Not Plan, but Law, was needed to deal with these.
The first task was to sweep away the theories of Pashukanis and
Stuchka, with their emphasis that law, in treating men as abstracted
individuals, was necessarily capitalist in nature. Both men were de
nounced as wreckers and traitors, seeking to sabotage Soviet socialist
development. The reaction was begun by P. Yudin’s article Socialism
and Law ? which rather unably re-emphasised the normative functions
of law as a class weapon, even in the socialist State.3 It was consum
mated with a far more vicious but equally unable attack by the then
Procurator of the U.S.S.R., A. Y. Vyshinsky, in his The Law o f the
Soviet State.
Ironically, Vyshinsky begins with a typical lack of theoretical far
sightedness to launch an attack which is quite sound but the implica
tion of which is to destroy the whole foundations of Marxist theory in
so far as they depend on economic reductionism. Law, he insists, can
not be reduced to economics. ‘Stuchka’s fundamental perversion in
this question is that he reduced Soviet civil law to the sphere of produc
tion and barter. What then is to be done with the part of law which
regulates marriage and family relationships? Or must these likewise be
regulated from the view-point of “ socialist planning” ? Clearly civil
1 Great emphasis has been placed ever since on denouncing ‘free love* as a
form of social and personal irresponsibility. (See, e.g., Sharia, op. cit., p. 99,
Shishkin, op. cit., pp. 260-2, Shishkin, /{ istorii eticheskikh uchenii {From the
History o f Ethical Doctrines), pp. 235-8, 320-8.) The critics have little difficulty
in showing that love does not become free by constantly feeding on new objects;
but their emphasis on ‘discipline* in love certainly suggests an implicit awareness
and fear that sexual protest supports and encourages other forms of protest.
There is indeed much evidence that freedom in love is a necessary, though not a
sufficient condition, of all other freedoms.
2 A full English translation of the article (which originally appeared in
Bolshevik, No. 17 of September 1, 1937) may be found in the collection by
Hazard et al., Soviet Legal Philosophy, pp. 281-301.
3 Pashukanis, of course, had largely obscured Marx’s notion of law as a
normative weapon in the class struggle, and treated it instead in a positive, rather
passive, fashion as reflecting the structure of the commodities-producing society
as a whole.
173
law embraces a sphere of relationship broader than those of barter only

(as Pashukanis asserts) or even those of production and barter only
(Stuchka)/1 ‘Reducing law to economics, as Stuchka did, asserting
that law coincides with the relations of production, these gentlemen
slid into the bog of economic materialism/ ‘Stuchka and his followers
liquidated law as a specific social category, drowned law in economics,
deprived it of its active, creative role/2
Vyshinsky wants to save law as a specific social category. But while
his hard-headed realism— spurred on, no doubt, by political calcula
tion— enables him to see the obvious difficulties of economic reduction-
ism, he cannot throw enough of it overboard to give an account of
this category himself. Economics and politics, he has to concede,
determine law. But the effect, he argues, is not the same as the cause.
Law has a specific nature of its own, in socialist society at least.
What, then, is the specific nature of law? Here Marxism drives
Vyshinsky into nothing but contradictions. ‘Law,’ he says boldly, ‘is
the totality (a) of the rules of conduct, expressing the will of the
dominant class and established in legal order, and (b) of customs and
rules of community life sanctioned by State authority—their applica
tion being guaranteed by the compulsive force of the State in order to
guard, secure and develop social relationships and social orders ad
vantageous and agreeable to the dominant class/3 In other words, law
again is the expression of class interest, and though Vyshinsky avoids
characterising class interests as economic, it is clear that what is
specifically legal has still not appeared.
What is specifically legal never does appear in Vyshinsky’s work.
He does, with the naivete of Communist utopianism, assert that in
Soviet society the will of the toilers has become the will of the whole
people. The single general guiding principle for all Soviet law in all
its branches is socialism.4
For all his heroic criticism of reductionism, then, Vyshinsky has
1 The Law o f the Soviet State, p. 54.

2 Quoted by Berman, op. cit., p. 46. What especially worried Vyshinsky, as
Berman’s quotations show, is the undermining of the absolute authoritativeness
of law by reducing it to economics or politics. ‘Reducing law to politics/
Vyshinsky writes indignantly about the Soviet ‘wreckers* of the past, ‘these
gentlemen depersonalised law as the totality of legal rules, undermining their
stability and their authoritativeness, introducing the false concept that in a
socialist State the application of a statute is determined not by the force and
authority of Soviet law, but by political considerations.*
3 Vyshinsky, op. cit., p. 50. 4 Loc. cit., p. 77.
174
nothing positive to offer. Uneasily conscious of the fact that actual

Soviet law—especially in what Vyshinsky takes to be the obviously
legal spheres of family and social relationships—is surprisingly like
bourgeois law in content, he yet wants to deny that there are universal
legal categories or forms underlying all legal systems. Bourgeois law,
to Vyshinsky, is indeed simply an expression of economic interests,
only socialist law is truly legal law. Why? Not because it has certain
specifically legal qualities lacking in bourgeois law, but because it has
come to express the will of the entire people. In which case, as Marx
and earlier Marxists saw, there should simply be no need for law.1
The conflict between the theories of Pashukanis and those of

Vyshinsky begins as a conflict of emphasis. Pashukanis leans heavily
on the anti-authoritarian strain in Marx’s work. He takes as his starting-
point Marx’s insistence that law expresses man’s alienation from other
men and society—in law, these confront him as hostile forces. Condi
tions of freedom, therefore, will make law impossible. Vyshinsky
claims to agree with this. In conditions of true freedom, the social and
the individual interest will be finally merged; law will disappear. But
Pashukanis himself had conceded that in the transitional stage the
proletariat, having captured control of society, must still use law and
force in suppressing its class enemies. This, we have seen, is the
conception of socialist law with which Vyshinsky begins. He, too,
leans heavily on certain ideas in Marx’s work: the conception of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, from whi^h the path to Communism
must commence,2 and Marx’s treatment of law and political power
1 I have drawn heavily in the preceding pages on Section III of Alice Ehr-
Soon Tay and Eugene Kamenka: ‘Karl Marx’s Analysis of Law’, loc. cit., pp. 30-8.
2 Marx and Engels proclaim this clearly at the end of Section II of the Com
munist Manifesto (M I, 6, 545-6), where the proletarian seizure of state power is
treated as the inauguration of a dictatorship which will make despotic inroads
into the old order until it sweeps away by force the old conditions of production
and with them the conditions of class antagonism. Then shall arise ‘an association
in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all’. In other words, the proletariat must constitute itself as a ruling class and
exercise despotic political power in its class interest before it can destroy all
classes, including itself, and its own supremacy. In Marx’s three articles on ‘The
Class Struggles in France’ (1850) this conception is still strong, though soon to
be combined with the ‘permanent revolution* that we find in ‘The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte* (1852). Marx’s references to the dictatorship of
the proletariat certainly do not suggest that he saw the transitional period as a
lengthy one which would produce a full-blown social form of its own. A certain
*75
generally as ‘merely the organised power of one class for oppressing

another’ ( The Communist Manifesto, M 1, 6, 546). The initial distinction
between Pashukanis and Vyshinsky thus seems to be merely that one
emphasises the imminence of true freedom under Communism while
the other emphasises the necessity of coercive law in the transitional
period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which class distinctions
and their consequences have not yet entirely disappeared from social
life.
Such differences in emphasis need not, on the face of it, be incom
patible. Marx does emphasise in several works that there is a certain lag
between developments in the economic structure of society and result
ant changes in the political and ideological superstructure. His view
seems to be that the abolition of property does not immediately
eliminate the psychological attitudes born of property: these disappear
slowly in the ensuing generations which have lost even the memories
of class society. Where Vyshinsky would have appeared to Pashukanis
and earlier Communists to be going well beyond what can be justified
from Marx is in his emphasis that Soviet law as a normative weapon
still has ‘a creative role’ to play and in his insistence that there are
social spheres to be regulated from points of view other than that of
socialist planning. Here, then, once more was the superstructure
playing an active and not merely passive role.
We have seen already that Marx himself was far from taking seriously
his own doctrine o f‘reflection’ and always treating factors in the super
structure as purely passive. Might, he recognised, could become an
economic force; and his whole conception of the proletariat trans
forming production through the exercise o f despotic political power
rests on this non-reductionist assumption. Marx himself attempted to
tension between the centralising motive in his thought (which came to the fore
again in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme* in 1875) and his concern with
the free society appears in his The Civil War in France (1871). The impression
which the anarcho-federalist ideas of the Paris Commune, inspired by Proudhon,
made on him is quite evident. ‘The new Commune . . . breaks the modern State
power . . . The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body
all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging
the free movement of, society. By this one act it would have initiated the re
generation of France.* (CW F 42.) After Marx*s death Engels showed a decided
tendency to minimise the earlier emphasis on violent revolution and to see
Communism coming through parliamentary action. (Cf. his introduction to the
new German edition of ‘The Class Struggles in France* in 1895.) For Engels*
earlier view of the dictatorship of the proletariat see his letter to Bebel of March
18-28, 1875 (SC 336-7).
176
avoid any open conflict in his theory by treating the proletariat’s

political action as itself economically determined. Vyshinsky and his
followers have wanted to go further than this, to invest socialist law
with all the majesty of conscious rationality, to see freedom enshrined
within the very dependence proclaimed by (their) law. This required
more than a grudging admission of a certain amount of interaction
between the superstructure and the base. It required a new and totally
un-Marxist conception of ideologies and legal and political institutions
as vital, creative and conscious forces moulding society; it required
the administrator’s delusion that policies determine society. Stalin,
indeed, came close to it:
The superstructure is born of the base, but this does not at all mean that it
only reflects the base, that it is passive, neutral, that it is indifferent to the
fate of its base, to the future of classes, to the character of the [social] struc
ture. On the contrary, having come into the world, it becomes a mighty
active force, actively helping its base to develop and grow stronger, taking
all measures to help the new order to ruin and liquidate, the old economic
base and the old classes.1
Marx’s economic reductionism, as we have seen, closed off the

positive study of ethics just as Marx himself was beginning to lay
foundations on which it might be developed. To the revolutionary
socialist this was not so obvious while his primary struggle was against
social slavery in the form of political bondage or utter economic
dependence. Marx’s reductionism, with all its incoherencies, had
enabled Marx to emphasise the disparity between ‘formal’ and actual
justice in the societies of class domination, to show the emptiness of
‘rights to do’ that were not accompanied by the actual capacity to do.
In some societies, such as Victorian England, which occupied a
favourable position in the world economy of their day, in which the
standard of living was rising rapidly and where the pressure of com
petition was not particularly severe, the Marxist analysis made no
great ethical or political impact. It was natural for leaders of all sections
of the community to confuse the benefits of a period of increasing
prosperity with the benefits that might accrue from morality. In
nineteenth-century Russia there was no such rapid rise in prosperity,
and no corresponding faith in the efficacy of conventional moral
principles, orderly political negotiation and legal ‘rights’. ‘Legal rights
1 Marksiyn i voprosy ya{yko{naniia (Marxism and Questions o f Linguistics),
1950, pp. 4-5.
177
have no value for a man unless he possesses the material means to

benefit by them,’ wrote the Russian revolutionary N. G. Chernyshev-
skii at the time that Marx was writing Das Kapital.1 ‘Man is not an
abstract legal person, but a living creature . . . A man who is dependent
for his material means of existence cannot be an independent human
being in fact, even though his independence is proclaimed by the letter
of the law.’ Subsequent Marxists in Russia had little difficulty in taking
up this thread in both Chernyshevskii and Marx and making it,—
together with the materialist rejection of supra-empirical norms— their
main criticism of the ‘class’ moralities of the past. The insistence that
there is no common or social interest above other interests in the class
society, the rejection of unhistorical ‘norms’ and of the abstract ‘in
dividual’ and the exposure of contradictions between formal ‘rights’
and actual social situations is the one steady and reasonably respectable
theme running through Marxist and Soviet ethical writing.
In the pre-Revolutionary period and in the early days of the Revolu
tion there was also considerable emphasis on Communist morality as
the morality of freedom— but it came more from intellectuals capti
vated by the vision of a new society than from the professional and
disciplined revolutionaries whom Lenin saw as the true bearers of
Communism. Thus both P. B. Struve and N. A. Berdyaev, during their
brief Marxian period in the last decade of the nineteenth century,
emphasised the Kantian dictum that the individual person must always
be treated as an end and never as a means, while rejecting Kant’s
ethical formalism and his concern with ‘abstract obligation’. Com
munism, to them, as to Marx in his more individualist moments, was
the universal kingdom of ends. By 1903, when both Struve and
Berdyaev had turned from Marxism, four other young Russian
Marxists were proclaiming Communism as the true dawn of the
individual. They were A. V. Lunacharsky (1875-1933), later to become
People’s Commissar for Culture under Lenin; Stanislav Volsky
(pseudonym of A. V. Sokolov, 1880-1936?); A. A. Bogdanov (pseudo
nym of A. A. Malinovsky, 1873-1928); and V. A. Bazarov (pseudonym
of V. A. Rudnev, 1874-1936?). Lunacharsky and Volsky, as G. L.
Kline points out,2 drew heavily on the work and ideals of Nietzsche,
1 Sochineniia ( Works), vol. IV, p. 740. Marx said later that Chemyshevskii’s
writings ‘brought true honour* to Russia (ME Soch., XIII, i, 354).
2 ‘Changing attitudes Toward the Individual*, in C. E. Black (ed): The Trans
formation o f Russian Society, pp. 606-25, at pp. 618-23 . 1 have relied on a number
of Dr. Kline*s interesting citations from works not easy to obtain in the West.
178
explicitly rejecting any conception of moral obligation and upholding

the individual as a free creator of values and ideals. Moral indoctrina
tion, Lunacharsky writes,1 can generate nothing but slaves. The new
social order will emancipate man completely, establish the individual’s
right to be guided in his life solely by his own desires. Admittedly,
social and individual interests may clash; but the species has no exist
ence apart from its individual members. ‘What is a living powerful
species if not an aggregate of living, powerful individuals?’ In ‘the
splendid future’, under the new social order, the interests of the
individuals and those of society will be in complete harmony. Volsky
takes the same line, hardly less passionately but somewhat more
coherently. Obligatory norms will disappear with the defeat of capital
ism. The bourgeoisie had freed the individual in the hour of revolution
only to enslave him in the hour of triumph; the proletariat will com
mand the individual in the hour of revolution only to free him in the
hour of triumph. ‘The class sees in itself something to be eliminated,
the individual something to be asserted.’2
Bogdanov and Bazarov are also concerned to free the individual from
coercive norms, but they do not see the socialist collective as an
aggregate of powerful, self-driven individuals. The individual, rather,
will become fused into the collective— as ‘in ecstatic moments . . .
when it seems to us that our tiny being disappears, is fused with the
infinite.’3 Individualism, both Bogdanov and Bazarov insist, was a
liberating movement in its conflict with authoritarianism, but becomes
reactionary in its struggle against the socialist future (Kline, pp. 621,
622). In the new society, emphasis will fall upon sobornost (organic
togetherness), upon ‘objective, immediately social creativity, in which
the very notion of ‘the individual’ and his interests will be extin
guished.’4
The upholding of individualism, we have suggested above, is not a
satisfactory answer to Marxism: there is some truth in Bazarov’s sug
gestion that a free society will not be ‘walled off into the miserable
little cells of self-sufficient individualities.’ The intimacy of lovers, he
1 Osnovy positivnoi estetiki (.Foundations o f a Positive Aesthetic) in Ocherki
realisticheskogo mirovo^reniia (Outlines o f a Realist Wzltanschaining), St. Peters
burg, 1905, cited by Kline, loc. cit., p. 619.
2 Filosofiia horby: opyt postroeniia etiki marksi^ma (The Philosophy o f Struggle:
An Attempt at Building a Marxist Ethic), Moscow, 1909; Kline, p. 620.
3 Tseli i normy ihi^ni (The Goals and Norms o f Life), written in 1905, and
republished in Novyi mir (1920), p. 64; cf. Kline, p. 621.
4 Cited by Kline, pp. 622-3.
179
writes, gives only ‘a faint hint of that fusion of all human souls which
will be the inevitable result of the Communist order/1 Similarly, when
Bogdanov insists2 that Goethe did not produce Faust or Darwin the
theory of evolution, but that both men put the finishing touches to a
collective effort, there is more truth in this than Kline, say, is willing
to stress. Bogdanov has perceived, as Bazarov also perceived, some
thing of the mutually supporting character of artistic creation, love
and enquiry, the way in which they can ‘transcend’ the individual and
appropriate freely materials furnished by others. Recognising this how
ever, does not require us to minimise the role that any particular
person— Goethe or Darwin— might play in shaping the finished pro
duct of theory, whereas Bogdanov and Bazarov do patently wish to
minimise this role. The new society, Bazarov writes, will favour not
‘artists of disorderly individual searching, but artists in schools which
move by plan toward their goal.’ 3 Here we have more than the correct
recognition that free activities are mutually co-operative activities.
Here we have the reimposition of servility, the elevation of goals and
plans over the spontaneous workings of the free and creative life.
When Bogdanov and Bazarov turn to attack not Kant’s abstract will
but his elevation of man as an end, and themselves substitute other
ends, the servile character of their doctrine is finally confirmed. ‘The
free man not only regards his neighbour as a means; he demands that
his neighbour should see in him only a means . . . for the neighbour’s
own ends.’ 4 ‘The recognition of the ‘individual person’ as an absolute
principle has always been, and will always be, alien to the proletariat.’ 5
By 1920, the point of all this had become painfully evident. Leon
Trotsky, in his Terrorism i kommuniim (p. 61), repudiates scornfully
the ‘Kantian-clerical, vegetarian-Quaker chatter about the “ sanctity of
human life” .’ The doctrine that individuals are ends in themselves is a
metaphysical, bourgeois doctrine; the proletarian and the revolutionary
know that where necessary (for the Revolution) the individual is and
should be treated only as a means. The prominent party theorist
1 Na dva fronta (Toward Two Fronts), St. Petersburg, 1910, p. 140; Kline,
P*623*
2 Padenie velikogo fetishi^ma (The Fall o f the Great Fetishism), Moscow,
1910, p. 46; Kline, p. 623.
3 Op. cit., p. 164; Kline, p. 623.
4 Bazarov: ‘Avtoritarnaia metafifika i avtonomnaia lichnost* (‘Authoritarian
Metaphysics and the Autonomous Personality*), in Ocherki realisticheskogo
mirovo^reniia, p. 271; Kline, p. 623.
6 Bazarov: Na dva fronta, p. 141; ibid.
180
LAW AND MO R AL IT Y IN SOVI ET SOCIETY
A. B. Zalkind put the position bluntly five years later: ‘For the prole
tariat, human life does not have a metaphysical, self-sufficient value.
The proletariat recognises only the interests of the . . . revolution/1
The struggle between individualists and collectivists was resolved

emphatically by the regime that followed the October Revolution.
Lunacharsky’s period of grace was short-lived; the poet Blok died and
the poet Yesenin committed suicide; the primacy of the proletarian
revolution, of the party, of collective discipline and individual sub
ordination and obedience were established with increasing firmness.
Ethical speculation was discouraged; intellectuals were treated with
suspicion as ‘individualists’ and possible dissenters. The principle of
collective criminal responsibility was used to crush the peasantry and
the principle of guilt by class-origin or kinship was used to crush the
intelligentsia. Everything, it is true, was done in the name of freedom,
seen as a goal soon to be achieved; but the immediate content of moral
conceptions was the primacy of the victory of Communism and of the
rules of the Party. Then came the period of the Stalinist dictatorship
and of the ‘great purges’ and ethical theory reached its nadir.
The change in ethical theory, as in law, came with the new Stalin
Constitution in 1936. The new concern was with social stability, with
reinforcing the family, the love of country and the security o f‘ordinary
life’. Moral radicalism, which had failed to capture the masses, was
largely abandoned. The exigencies of war produced heavy emphasis
on conventional moral slogans and normative exhortation; they also
led to increased stress on ‘socialist humanism’, the respect for man which
‘progressives’ had displayed in all ages and shared in all countries even
today in their struggle against the ‘fascist beasts’. Forthright attacks
on the importance of the individual disappeared from Soviet writing.
Communism means the ‘true flowering of the individual’, but such
flowering ‘is only possible on the basis of the leading role of social
interest.” 2
The vital and creative role of Soviet law had been stressed by
Vyshinsky— for patently political reasons— in 1938. To ascribe a vital
1 Revoliutsiia i molode{h, ( Youth and the Revolution), p. 54; Kline, p. 624.

2 A. I. Zis, O kommunisticheskoi morali (Concerning Communist Morality),
1948, p. 30. Cf. Shishkin, Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali, pp. 144! and 257^
where he stresses the priority of the social interest and collectivism over individual
interests, but balances this by devoting an entire section (p. 23of) to socialist
‘respect and care for man*.
181
COMMUNI S M A N D E T HI CS
and creative role to Soviet morality would have been to depart even
more dangerously from the Marxian slogan that ‘social being deter
mines social consciousness’ and that morality only reflects the material
life of man. Then, with Stalin’s Marxism and Questions o f Linguistics
(1950), the supreme authority himself opened the way for treating the
superstructure, including morality, as a vital and active force on the
path to Communism. Official encouragement was given to the creation
and propagation of the theory and norms of Communist morality. In
1951, a conference of Soviet and Czech philosophers agreed that the
teaching of Marxist ethics was inadequate and confused, that it was not
set out in logical terms and that it neglected moral theory before
Hobbes: a specialist course, such as M. I. Lifanov had outlined in
Voprosy Filosofii (no. 2, 1951), was badly needed. In the same year,
Sharia published his Concerning Some Questions o f Morality, in which
the active, creative role of consciousness was stressed even more
strongly than Stalin had stressed it:
Marxism-Leninism leaches that not only the building o f the new Communist
economy, but also the formation o f the new Communist consciousness o f
man is not self-propelled, not a process dictated by fate, but follows from
the many-sided, completely devoted educational work o f the Bolshevik
Party and the Soviet administration.
(Introduction, p. 3.)
Sharia, in his emphasis on conscious decision and limited free will, had
perhaps gone somewhat further than Soviet authorities were willing
to countenance; he has written nothing on ethics since. But the empha
sis on moral theory and propaganda continued. Shishkin, now the
doyen of Soviet moral philosophers, published his Foundations o f
Communist Morality in 1955 and the first reasonably serious work on
the history of ethical theory for many years, From the History o f
Ethical Doctrines, in 1959. At the same time, a conference of moral
philosophers and party, industrial, educational and Komsomol leaders
met in Leningrad under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
and of the Ministry of Higher and Specialised Secondary Education to
discuss the role of ethics in Soviet life. It ended by formulating a draft
syllabus for ethical teaching in higher educational institutions and
publishing the papers presented before it.1 All of them stressed the
profoundly ethical nature of Communism and the need for the most
intensive moral education to overcome the vestiges of capitalism and
1 Voprosy marksistko-leninskoi etiki (<Questions o f Marxist-Leninist Ethics),
Moscow, i960.
182
of anti-moral and amoral conceptions in human consciousness. N. S.

Khrushchev, in his report to the XXIst Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, had underlined the importance of moral
education:
We must develop among Soviet people Communist morality, at the founda
tion o f which lie loyalty to Communism and uncompromising enmity to its
foes, the consciousness o f social duty, active participation in labour, the
voluntary observation o f the fundamental rules of human communal life,
comradely mutual help, honesty and truthfulness, and intolerance o f the
disturbers o f the social order.1
To these excellent sentiments the Soviet philosophers and educational
leaders assembled found little to add.
Soviet moral philosophers, then, have come down heavily on the

conception we saw Marx and Engels develop in the German Ideology:
the conception that morality is concerned with social interest.2 The
morality of the new world is thus full of the abstract moral concepts
of the old: duty to society, care for fellow-men, upholding of the social
order, etc. To establish a difference, Soviet philosophers rely on the
economic interpretation of history. The abolition of private property
means that the social interest has truly been established, while in the
capitalist society of private property and class distinctions it remains
an illusion or a hypocritical cloak for the interests of the ruling class.
Even in the period of the proletarian dictatorship, when morality still
represents a class interest, morality loses completely its hypocritical
character: the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of mankind,
needs no hypocrisy to cloak its interests, which are the interests of the
vast majority of mankind. But its morality, before the Revolution and
after, is a mighty force, organising and fusing the masses, helping to
destroy the old order and lay the foundations for the new.3 Ever-
increasingly, Soviet leaders emphasise the power of ideology, of
moral exhortation and moral education.
The abandonment of ethical radicalism, of contempt for conven
tional moral slogans and of the insistence that all moralities passively
1 Materialy vneocherednogo X X I s’ e^da K P S S (Materials o f the Extraordinary
XXIst Congress o f the C.P.S.U.), p. 46.
2 ‘The relationship of individual and society, the relationship between
personal and social interests— this is the chief content of morality* (Sharia, op.
cit., p. 23, his italics).
8Is toriia VKPQ>). Kratkii kurs. (History o f the C.P.S.U. (Bolsheviks). A
Short Course), p. 125; Shishkin: Osnovy . . . pp. 13-14.
183
reflect the economic conditions that give them birth, has finally led to
the extension of the ‘Popular Front’ ideology to the field of moral
philosophy. Soviet philosophers in recent years not only insist—
following Engels in Chapter IX of Anti-Diihring—that there has been
continuous progress in morality, but now emphasise that there are
certain basic moral conceptions applicable in all ages and that the ‘pro
gressive’ thinkers of all times have gone beyond the conditions of their
time to the morality of the future. Lenin, in The State and Revolution
(HM 759), speaks of the ‘elementary rules of social life’ which have
been taught in school books for generations and which Communists
will make into a social habit; Krushchev, as we have just seen, echoed
the phrase in his address to the XXIst Congress, where he called for the
‘voluntary observance of the fundamental rules of human communal
life’. To a Soviet philosopher, these are eminent and ‘safe’ authorities,
even if Engels (and Marx) were quite unequivocal in insisting that any
moral principles that had appeared ‘eternal’ did so only because they
expressed those forms of dependence common to all past societies. At
the same time, a new generation of specialists in the Soviet Union
tends naturally to become increasingly aware of the specific problems
and characters of a specialist’s field and to demand for it a certain
intellectual independence. Even so, only one Soviet philosopher— as
far as I know—has drawn the full logical implications of the Lenin-
Khruschev position. V. P. Tugarinov, of Leningrad University, has
been arguing since 1958 that in the various sciences we will find a part
determined by the categories of historical materialism, but also a part
based on the special categories of the science concerned— categories
which are applicable at all stages of historical development. Thus in
ethics, he argues in his 0 tsennostiakh {hi{ni i kultury (Concerning The
Values o f Life and Culture), there are ‘moments’ expressing what is
common to all humanity and ‘moments’ expressing class interest.
Tugarinov, of course, does not simply divide ethics into eternal
truths and disguised class interest; he portrays the relationship as an
intricate one, insists that abstract judgments expressing universal
ethical notions become subservient to class interest in the manner of
their application to concrete situations, and generally holds that
‘moments’ of a universal kind are stronger in aesthetics than ethics.
(Op. cit., pp. 2 3-4 .)
Even Tugarinov, however, promising as his position might appear,
is prevented from making any genuine contribution to ethical theory
by his uncritical acceptance of moral rules as normative rules and of
184
ethical judgments as tied to—unexamined— ‘interests’. Precisely

because no Soviet philosopher has either questioned or even seriously
examined this identification of ethics with interests, Soviet philosophy
has consistently substituted evasion and conformism for any genuine
tackling of the problems of ethical theory. Working with a doctrine of
interests, they have been in an impossible position. Like the legal
writers, Soviet moral philosophers have faced the basic difficulty that
the need for moral or legal obligation can only be explained if individual
and social interest do not truly coincide, while the difference between
Communist morality and other moralities can only be explained by
saying that under Communism individual and social interest do
coincide. Sharia, indeed, tries to argue that individual and social
interest in Communist society harmonise without being identical: If
they were identical, he concedes, there would be no moral ‘alternatives*
and therefore no field for morality (p. 70). Morality hence has to be
based on the combination of two criteria:
True moral evaluation cannot take place on the basis o f the purely objective
criterion o f the usefulness o f an action for the development o f society,
neither can it take place on the basis o f the purely subjective criterion o f
personal pleasure— only the bringing together o f both these criteria gives us
the underlying morality o f action. Priority always belongs to the objective
content o f behaviour. This Marxist thesis refutes both the a priorism of
moral norms and creeping empiricism, i.e., the actual denial o f moral prin
ciples altogether. In this M arxist thesis the dialectical-materialist principle
o f the unity o f subject and object finds its concretisation in the field o f morality.
(P. 62, Sharia’s italics.)
The reference to dialectical materialism, of course, is sheer mystifica

tion. Sharia’s promulgation of two criteria does nothing to solve the
problem— if this is a genuine problem— of harmonising individual and
social interest: it merely restates that problem. Neither does any other
Soviet ethical writer solve or seriously tackle this problem; the others
gloss it over more skilfully—and more dishonestly.
What does appear from Sharia’s position, from our earlier quotations
from Shishkin, from the papers at the Leningrad conference and from
every recent Soviet pronouncement on ethics is the pervasive treatment
of morality as a normative system, concerned with establishing prin
ciples and guiding behaviour. And this, as Marx often saw, cannot be
anything more than the attempt to achieve the harmony of discord
and harmony, to bind evil with chains that are themselves evil and that
create nothing but further evil and further instability. The morality
185
COMMUNI S M A N D E T HI CS
of freedom erects no principles and proclaims no obligations; it finds

itself in the struggle with evils and not in their suppression.
O f recent ethical writers in the Soviet Union, Sharia certainly makes
the most serious attempts to see the discipline which he places at the
foundation of moral conduct as conscious, self-imposed discipline. But
in his work, too, the discipline is not the free and coherent working
of an activity; it is the set of requirements imposed by an external need:
In socialist society every right of the citizen which is real, and not formal, is
linked with a corresponding duty. The right to work is linked with every
one’s duty to work . . .
The supporters o f ‘free love* strove to support their anti-moral ‘theory’
by saying that since in bourgeois society a woman’s freedom in expressing
her feelings is paralysed by her lack o f economic rights, therefore in socialist
society she must be free o f every limitation. In saying this, the nihilists in
the field o f morality failed to see that socialism is not the weakening o f the
social bonds between people, but on the contrary, the strengthening o f these
bonds, and in so far as love is not only an emotional-psychological event, but
necessarily includes in itself social relationships, it cannot be anarchic, but
must subordinate itself to the developing socialist relationships. In other
words, Marxism-Leninism, repudiating the compulsive discipline (it matters
not whether the compulsion be legal or economic) o f the society o f exploiters,
upheld by the stick in feudal society and by hunger in capitalist society, sets
against this compulsive discipline conscious discipline, i.e., the conscious
striving toward the upbuilding o f Communist society.
(Pp. 99-100.)
The pedestrian character of Soviet ethics, its tedious preaching of ends

and duties, emerges even more clearly in Shishkin’s Osnovy, where he
sets out the ‘principles and norms of Communist morality’. His section
heads give an adequate idea of the contents:
1. The victory o f socialism in the U .S.S.R. and the new conditions under
which Communist morality is formed.
2. Collectivism as a principle o f Communist morality:

(a) The superiority o f collectivism over bourgeois individualism
(b) The social interest— the main interest o f Soviet man
(c) The concept o f duty, honour and conscience in Communist ethics
(d) Labour— a duty and matter o f honour
3. Patriotism and internationalism:

(a) Attitude to the homeland as a moral problem
(b) Devotion to the homeland and to the international brotherhood o f
toilers— the main demand o f Communist morality
186
4. Socialist humanism:
(a) Socialist humanism—the highest type of humanism
(b) Respect for the worth of man and care of man
(c) Hatred for enemies and vigilance—an inescapable feature of socialist
humanism
5. The moral foundations of friendship, marriage and family:
(a) Society and personal life
(b) Friendship
(c) Marriage and family
6. The moral qualities and character traits of the fighter for Communism
In all this, of course, there is not even a hint of the fundamental

problems and difficulties of normative morality: no discussion of the
logical and empirical basis of ‘obligation’, no consideration fo the
problems of moral ‘justification’, no hint of the necessary vagueness of
normative principles. The true basis of moral ‘obligation’ in Commun
ist society emerges clearly enough when Shiskin heads the seventh and
final section of his book: ‘The Communist Party—the Mind, Honour
and Conscience of Our Time.’
187
Conclusions
Ethics and the
Foundations o f Marxism
belief in the rational, free and completely co-operative society

m a r x ’s
of the human spirit, we have seen, was the foundation and driving
force of his intellectual and political development. The structure that
followed was high and broad. As it grew it disturbed the foundations,
but the basic thrust and design remained. The goal was the same. Man
would pass from the realm of conflict and dependence into the realm of
co-operation and freedom.
The concern with minimising conflict and maximising co-operation
in the abstract is no stranger to moral and political theory, and never
has been. It has not normally stemmed from the concern with freedom,
however. Liberty, as Croce has said, lives ‘a perilous and fighting life’;
the concern with minimising conflict of any kind, with making the
world safe for harmony, is more typical of the desires for security and
sufficiency, of the motives concerned to establish domination and seek
the shelter of submission. It is such movements, such concerns to
escape from the conflicts and dangers of history, that moral and political
philosophers have all too often been willing to serve. One of Marx’s
important contributions to ethics is his bringing out of the despotic
conceptions, and the resultant incoherence, underlying their work.
There is no harmony of discord with harmony, no way of binding man
into freedom. There can be no coherent principles of moral or political
obligation. The source of moral obligation, the legal and political
sovereign, cannot be exalted above the conflicts and divisions of his
tory. As long as movements and interests conflict, any attempt to bind
this conflict cannot be anything more than an attempted domination of
some of these movements and interests over the rest. If the community
of interest proclaimed by the sovereign were real, there would be no
191
CONCLUSIONS
point in such proclamation and no basis or need for the exercise of

‘sovereignty’.
Marx is often accused of having minimised the interdependence of
competing movements and interests in society—an interdependence
from which, it is claimed, overriding moral and political principles can
be elicited. A pluralist view of society— for which Marx helped to lay
the foundations—would not have to treat interests as fixed and separ
ate, though Marx’s doctrine of class struggle itself came close to such
treatment. The interrelation of movements and interests in a society
will reveal affinities as well as conflicts; certain interests may be able
to reach adjustments with other interests which will enable both
parties to go forward vigorously and amicably. Even where interests
seem totally opposed to each other, there will usually be certain boun
daries beyond which the conflict cannot be pressed without destroying
both the participants. This sense of the affinities between different
movements, or of the boundaries to fruitful conflict, is called ‘states
manship’. But there is nothing in all this to show that there is a public
interest ‘higher’ than special interests, or an interest common to all
movements which they must satisfy first. The adjustment of interests
is not something that precedes and determines the characters and aims
of specific interests. On the contrary, it can only follow from them
The legal and political structure of a society, its sanctioned rights
and duties, represent partly the actual adjustment reached between
interests and partly the mechanism arrived at for further adjustments.
(No sharp line can be drawn between adjustment and mechanism,
since the mechanism itself is reached by adjustment and may be changed
by future adjustment.) As Marx saw there is no impartial adjustor
standing outside all interests and all history. The adjustments and
even the most basic mechanism of adjustment in a society will be
formulated in the clash— in the conflicts and the alliances— of specific
movements. Just as there is no finite number of movements in a society,
just as there are no fixed, separate and unchanging interests, so there is
no total adjustment, no overall plan, to which all movements and
interests can be subordinated or through which they can be expressed.
The belief in the possibility of an overall social plan requires the
erroneous treatment of interests as atomic, as capable of being counted
and moulded into a pattern. The belief in the possibility of ‘rational
principles* for adjustment requires the commercial notion that all
interests can be reduced to a common currency. It requires the political
theorist to elevate co-operation without considering what it is that
192
E T H I C S A N D THE F O U N D A T I O N S OF M A R X I S M
co-operates. It requires him to ignore the positive characters of the

movements he wants to control and the qualitative distinctions in the
interests he wishes to reconcile. This is why his principles can never be
concrete. This is why conflict and incoherency break out the moment
we seek to ‘apply’ these principles to any specific social situation.
There may, of course, be certain social situations— such as war, or
alien domination—when a wide range of movements within the society
faces a common impediment or fears a common danger. It is in such
situations that talk of the ‘national interest’ or ‘the common good’
gains its maximum degree of plausibility. But even here we find con
sistently that the concrete policies concealed in these phrases cannot
command total support and have to resort to ambiguity, hypocrisy
and physical suppression in order to maintain a semblance of social
solidarity. In fact, the greater the claims that a common social interest
exists, the more urgent the need to manufacture the evidence for social
unity, the more vicious the repression of the inescapable protestors
and dissidents. That such a common interest is not a true common
interest is sufficiently indicated by this need for suppression and the
stifling of criticism, by the fetishism invoked to protect the State, the
army or the movement of national liberation. That what co-operation
does take place is extrinsic and temporary is sufficiently indicated by
the invariable disunity, by the struggle for power, that follows victory
in war or the attainment of national ‘independence’.
Neither is there anything in the interdependence of movements or
social provinces to show that all the participants must have a common
policy or a common end. It is true that one party in conflict could cause
its own destruction as well as its opponent’s by pressing its demands
beyond a certain point. There is nothing in this to produce co-opera
tion while the two competing parties do co-exist, and their co-existence
is not a policy to be aimed at but a fact, often pleasing to neither. The
point at which mutual destruction will result cannot be laid down by
general and immutable principles: it will vary as concrete social situa
tions and alignments vary. In any case, the frequent suggestion that
moral and political principles are necessary to save society from chaos
and self-destruction is quite false. Movements operate in concrete social
situations and formulate policies within these situations; they do not as
a general rule press their demands to the point of destroying themselves.
The moral and political principles that arise in a society are not the
barrier between blindly self-seeking movements and destruction. It is
because movements already recognise their mutual dependence that
193
CONCLUSIONS
they formulate social codes and political principles: codes and prin
ciples that nevertheless vary and conflict as movements vary and
conflict, which seek working arrangements and limits to conflict but
in no way presuppose that there is an ultimate working arrangement
or a final limit.
The main point is that any specific interest in adjustment as such is
not higher, but lower than specific interests. There are no ‘rational’
principles on which it can rest or base its supremacy. It does not
precede specific interests, but follows them. It is in general not creative
but parasitic. It is not above society, but part of it: it, too, is historical,
socially determined and partial. Its notion that it controls society
instead of being controlled by it is an illusion.
The illusion that policies, or moral and legal principles, are control
ling factors in society is one to which the moral and political theorist is
especially prone. The chief merit of Marx’s economic or materialist
interpretation of history, with all its confusions and difficulties, lies in
its exposure of this illusion. Causally, policies will be factors in any
given social situation and may affect the changes that take place in that
situation. But all the evidence shows that they are not controlling
factors in history: they do not precede and determine all historical
development. Above all, they are not the policies of ‘reason’ or ‘mor
ality’ or ‘society’; they are the policies of specific, existing movements,
the characters and social situation of which precede and determine
their aims. Normative ethical and political theory, as Marx realised, has
depended largely on obscuring this point: on treating ends, policies
and principles as ends, policies and principles in themselves. Once we
show that this is not so, that they are ends, policies and principles o f
specific and historical subjects, conflicting among themselves, the
normative pretensions of much moral and political theory are fatally
undermined. The vagueness and incoherence that break out in theories
of moral and political obligation stand revealed as inescapable results
of the illusion on which normative theories rest and not as the mere
consequences of an individual theorist’s incompetence. To this con
clusion Marx has shown us the way.
Marx’s exposure of normative conceptions was not marred by the

crass inconsistencies of Engels. Whatever Marx’s followers may have
done, Marx did not proclaim historical evolution, or Marxist science,
or the coming revolution, as normative criteria establishing new
obligations and new principles for conduct. He was too able and
194
E T H I C S A N D THE F O U N D A T I O N S OF M A R X I S M
coherent a thinker for that. Nevertheless, his exposure of normative

ethics was not as thorough-going as it might have been; not as clear
sighted as it needs to be for the establishment of an ethical science.
Marx prided himself, already in his youth, that he did not confront
‘the world’ with doctrinaire principles of what ‘ought to be’; he did no
more than show it the end to which it was inevitably developing. The
end Marx foresaw, we have argued, was not a mere utopia, based on
nothing but metaphysical illusions. It had a genuine empirical content,
an empirical content which ethical theory cannot ignore and on the
basis of which a positive ethical science becomes possible. Marx’s
positive contribution to the working out of such an ethical science is
not great. It rests on unsystematic flashes of insight, on an emotional
character in which the morality of freedom and the ability to see
qualitative distinctions and ways of living were strong. It does not rest
on any reasoned working out of the distinctions that Marx was able
to appreciate intuitively or of the cultural tradition in which he himself
was an uncompromising participant. Marx perceived, in himself and
in others, the characteristic ways in which goods work. He saw that
evils were divisive and goods co-operative, that apparent harmony
between evils always involved an element of resistance, always re
quired coercion on one side and submission on the other. He saw the
connexion between freedom and the productive morality; he himself
used scientific and artistic creation as the paradigm of free labour. He
saw the incoherence and dependence enshrined in any morality that
elevated ends and subordinated activities: he realised the different roles
played by ‘rules’ in the morality of freedom and the morality of security
and protection. The distinctions in the operation of movements,
motives and ways of living with which ethical science begins are all
displayed in his work. In his comments on religion and punishment, in
his analysis of the social effects of capitalism, we find a depth of psycho
logical and historical insight impossible to the man who is not able to
grasp the positive distinctions between freedom and slavery, between
enterprise and servility, between the untrammelled morality of
production and the fetishistic morality of security.
Why could Marx take this no further? Why could he not associate
the distinctions he saw so clearly with distinctions in quality? Why
could he not see the struggle for freedom as a concrete historical
struggle between free movements and unfree movements, co-existing
and competing at any one time? To recognise that goods and evils,
free and unfree activities, co-exist is to recognise that neither are
195
CONCLUSIONS
metaphysically higher, that a struggle which has gone on throughout his

tory points to no ultimate end or resolution. Marx was committed to such
an end, to such an ultimate resolution. It required him to treat freedom
as the true and self-sufficient state of man, servility and dependence as
temporary phenomena that did not stem from any positive human
character or any permanent feature of social activity. In his early period
he did so frankly by elevating the essential human spirit above the
empirical and determined man. In his later period he concentrated on
the instability and incoherence of evils, glossing over the concrete
foundations and positive character of goods.
What made this evasion possible was Marx’s idealist upbringing
and his confused doctrine of freedom as self-determination. Self-
determination as a philosophical concept enabled him to treat goods
purely negatively, as that which occurs when external dependence
and domination have been removed. Man’s character, the nature of his
activities and the social organisation in which he lives thus become
entirely irrelevant, provided all external determination has been
removed. What it is that now determines itself is left— and has to be
left—entirely unclear. For self-determination, as we have seen,
requires the ultimate removal of all distinctions, the paring away of
all qualities, the assumption of an underlying but unspecific human
substance into which everything is absorbed.
The belief that evil and the conflict of evils could be eradicated also
required a reductionist doctrine— a single course from which all evils
and all conflict sprang. That source, for the mature Marx, was private
property.1 In this, and in his allied definition of classes in terms of their
relation to property, he proved himself thoroughly the intellectual
child of the capitalism he criticised so unsparingly.
The most obvious failure of Marxism has lain in the incorrectness
of Marx’s predictions. In each case, this incorrectness has stemmed
from his over-estimation of the importance of private property. He
failed to see the gains which the working-class might make under
capitalism because he saw the worker’s divorce from property as a
divorce from all enterprise, control or political power. He failed to
1 Marx did see private property as following inescapably from the division of
labour. But he cannot coherently distinguish the division of labour from the
organisation of labour which will emerge under Communism except in terms of
the ownership of tools which the former allegedly implies. Hence I take
private property as fundamental in Marx’s analysis.
196
E T HI CS A N D THE F O U N D A T I O N S OF M A R XI S M
recognise the emergence of centralised power in the State because he

could not seriously conceive a political, non-property-owning institu
tion gaining or keeping any significant power in a society he saw as
dominated by property. He grossly underestimated the social impor
tance of nationalism because he saw the conflict of the propertied and
the propertyless as the only fundamental and significant conflict. His
followers have been totally unable to give a plausible account of
fascism, as they were incapable of appreciating its importance when it
first emerged, for similar reasons.
The pattern which Marx saw in historical change was a pattern
suggested almost entirely by the transition from the Aticien Rigime to
capitalist ‘democracy’— above all, by the French Revolution. It simply
did not, and would not, fit Asia. Admittedly, Marx did not see Asia as a
disturbing factor in capitalist development because he visualised Asia
being throughly penetrated by European capitalism, its institutions
overthrown, its governments toppled, its social life radically com
mercialised. He saw this, indeed, as the precondition for freedom after
2,000 years of Oriental stagnation and despotism. But on what did the
despotism rest? On private property, on which Marx saw all despotism
resting? Climate and territorial conditions, Marx wrote in the New
York [Daily] Tribune in 1853, made artificial irrigation by canals and
waterworks the basis of Oriental agriculture. The construction and
control of these vast waterways ‘necessitated in the Orient, where
civilisation was too low and the territorial extent, too vast to call into
life voluntary association, the interference of the centralising power of
the government.’ ‘The key to the Oriental heaven,’ Marx and Engels
agreed in an interchange of correspondence in June 1853 (Marx, M
III, 1, 477; Engels, ibid., 480), is ‘the fact that there was no private
ownership of land.’ A penetrating observation, as Wittfogel has
shown,1 but an observation which entirely destroys the basis for
Marx’s belief that a society without private property must be a society
of freedom. If the power of the Oriental State rested on its powers of
direction and management, then another despotism can be built on the
same power. Many people, Wittfogel among them, have seen Soviet
society as precisely such a despotism.
The realities of Soviet life and the character of the Communist

Party as a historical institution are not best brought out by examining
the moral theory proclaimed by Marxism alone. But there can be little
1 In his Oriental Despotism. See esp. chapters I-III and IX.
197
CONCLUSIONS
doubt that Marx’s reductionism, his proclamation of an ultimate goal

supported by history and his failure to emphasise positive distinctions
in ways of living have done much to facilitate the Philistinism and the
servility that characterise contemporary Marxism. The neglect of
positive distinctions, the elevation of historical ‘tasks’ and ‘ends’,
enabled the Communist Party to seize centralised power and exercise
unprincipled tyranny in the name of a new metaphysical sovereign:
history itself. It removed any barriers to opportunism, it facilitated
the elevation of ends above forms of organisation and ways of life: it
thus reduced all concrete institutions and activities to a subordinate
status and a dependent existence. The concentration on the ‘one thing
needful’ rested on the same utilitarianism and produced the same
dependence and stagnation of enterprise as the capitalist emphasis on
material reward. Together with the doctrine that all things are reflec
tions of a fundamental conflict—a doctrine that proved almost fatal to
science, speculation and art in Soviet society—it was a godsend to
those concerned to stifle independence and creativity, to establish
uniformity and total control.
There has recently been something of an advance in Soviet scientific
and speculative thought. It is, indeed, one of the features of tyrannies
that they are parasitic upon scientific, industrial and artistic movements
basically incompatible with the fetishisms of political and intellectual
domination. The tyranny requires science and production: in fostering
these, it constantly runs the danger of fostering the scientific and the
productive spirit as well. It is no accident that serious speculation and
intellectual competence in the Soviet Union found their greatest
theoretical barrier in crude economic reductionism, in the doctrine of
‘reflections’. Intellectual pressure from men having a certain compet
ence in specific intellectual fields certainly did much to lead to the
collapse of thorough-going reductionism. But it is one of the ironies
of contemporary Marxism that it has been outweighed by the crude
voluntarism which the abandonment of the doctrine has also made
possible. The stabilisation of Soviet tyranny has led to a widening of
the area of inessential liberties: it has also led to increasing reliance on
fetishism, on moral exhortation and moral sanction. It is fast leading
to the normative illusion that policy can control society and solve the
conflicts of international relations. In all this, there is no significant trace
of the freedom and spontaneous co-operation envisaged by Marx.
Capitalism, as Marx saw, split man into two: in liberating him as a
political citizen it also liberated the avarice and commercialism that
198
ET HI CS A N D THE F O U N D A T I O N S OF M A R XI S M
could reduce man to dependence. But it did liberate him as a political

citizen: it increased the possibilities for movements and institutions to
function independently in the social struggle, it made possible organisa
tion and, above all, publicity. The struggle with evils is one in which
goqds are strengthened as frequently as they are destroyed; in a society
in which there was no such struggle there would be no goods. In fact,
the struggle continues in all societies, in the societies of Communism
and of past Oriental despotisms as it continues under capitalism. But in
so far as Marx is right in distinguishing between the alienation of man
under capitalism and the enslavement of the whole man in Oriental
despotism and feudalism, the Communist society of to day and of the
foreseeable future stands with the latter.
199
Bibliography of Works Cited
A. T EX T S BY M ARX AND EN GELS
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, ed. Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow; Frankfurt

a.M., i927f., Section I, vols. i- i, i-ii, and 2-7, Section III, vols. 1-4 .
Marx-Engels: Sochineniia, Institute o f Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, 1939F-
Marx-Engels: Selected. Works, 2 vols.; Foreign Languages Publishing House,
Moscow, 1951.
Marx-Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer;
Anchor Books, New York, 1959.
Marx-Engels: Correspondence [843-1895, ed. Dona Torr; International
Publishers, New York, 1936.
Marx-Engels: The Holy Family, Or Critique o f Critical Critique, trans.
R. Dixon; Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956.
Marx-Engels: The German Ideology, Parts I & III, ed. R. Pascal; Lawrence
& Wishart, London, 1939.
Marx-Engels: On Britain; Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow,
*953*
Marx: The Poverty o f Philosophy, Foreign Languages Publishing House,
Moscow, undated. [A superior translation, in my view, to that in the Kerr
edition, Chicago, 1920.]
Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie; Dietz Verlag, Berlin,
*953-
Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. I. N. Stone;
Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1918.
Marx: Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, vols. I—III; Dietz
Verlag, Berlin, 1957.
Marx: Capital: A Critique o f Political Economy, vols. I—III, trans. Samuel
Moore and Edward Aveling; Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1912.
Marx: The Civil War in France: Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1941.
Engels: Herr Eugen Diihring s Revolution in Science (Anti-Diihring), trans.
E. Burns; International Publishers, New York, undated.
Engels: The Origin o f the Family, Private Property and the State', Lawrence
& Wishart, London, 1940.
200
B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O R K S C I TE D
B. W O R K S R E L A T E D T O M A R X A N D M A R X IS M
Acton, H. B.: The Illusion o f the Epoch; Cohen Sc West, London, 1955.
Adams, H. P.: Karl Marx in His Earlier Writings; Allen Sc Unwin, London,
1940.
Barth, Hans: Wahrheit und Ideologies Manesse Verlag, Zurich, 1945.
Berman, Harold J.: Justice in Russia; Harvard U.P., 1950.
Black, C. E. (ed.): The Transformation o f Russian Society; Harvard U.P.,
i960.
Bums, Emile: (ed.): A Handbook o f Marxism; International Publishers,
New York, 1935.
Carr, E. H.: Karl M arx: A Study in Fanaticism; J. M. Dent Sc Sons, London,
I934*
Eastman, Max: Marx, Marxism and the Science o f Revolution; Allen Sc
Unwin, London, 1926.
Hazard, John et aL: Soviet Legal Philosophy; Harvard U.P., 1951.
Hilferding, Rudolf: Das Finamjapital; I. Brand, Wien, 1910.
Hook, Sidney: Towards the Understanding o f Karl Marx; Victor Gollancz,
London, 1933.
Kautsky, Karl: Ethics and the Materialist Conception o f History; Charles H.
Kerr Sc Co., Chicago, 1918.
Kelsen, Hans: The Communist Theory o f Law; Stevens Sc Sons, London,
I955‘
Lenin, V. I.: Sochineniia (4th Edition); Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1948.
Lichtheim, George: Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study; Routledge
Sc Kegan Paul, London, 1961.
Lukacs, Georg: Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein; Malik-Verlag Berlin,
I923‘
Marcuse, Herbert: Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise o f Social
Theory; Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, London, 1955.
Mehring, Franz: Karl Marx: The Story o f His life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald;
Allen Sc Unwin, London, 1948.
Nicolaievsky, Boris and Manchen-Helfen, Otto: Karl Marx, Man and
Fighter, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, Methuen Sc Co.,
London, undated.
Popitz, Heinrich: Der entfremdete Mensch. Zeitkritik und Geschichtsphiloso-
phic desjungen Marx; Basle, 1953.
Popper, Karl: The Open Society and Its Enemies, vols. I and II; Routledge
Sc Kegan Paul, London, 1957.
Rosenberg, Arthur: A History o f Bolshevism from Marx to the First Five
Years Plan, trans. Ian F. D. Morrow; Oxford U.P., 1934.
Rubel, Maximilien: Pages Choisies pour une Ethique Socialiste; Librairie
Marcel Riviere et Cie, Paris, 1948.
201
B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O R K S C I T E D
Schlesinger, R.: Soviet Legal Theory; Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, London,

I95T*
Schumpeter, Joseph A.: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy; Allen &
Unwin, London, 1959.
Sharia, P. A.: O Nekotorykh voprosakh kommunisticheskoi morali', Gospolitiz-
dat, Moscow, 1951.
Shishkin, A. [F.]: Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali; Gospolitizdat, Moscow,
J 955;
Shishkin, A. F.: I { istorii eticheskikh uchenii; Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1959.
Sorel, Georges: L a Decomposition du Marxisme; Paris, 1908.
Stalin, I: Marksipn i voprosy ia{yko£naniia; Izdatelstvo ‘Pravda’, Moscow,
x95a
Trotsky, L. D .: Terrorism i kommunism; Petrograd, 1920.
Trotsky, Leon D .: The Living Thoughts o f K a rl M arx; Cassell Sc Co.,
London, 1942.
Tugarinov, V. P.: 0 tsennostiakh {hi^ni i kultury; Leningrad University Press,
i960.
Vyshinsky, A. Y .: The Law o f the Soviet State, trans. Hugh W . Babb;
Macmillan, New York, 1954.
Wittfogel, Karl A .: Oriental Despotism; Yale University Press, 1956.
Zis, A . I. O kommunisticheskoi morali; Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1948.
Istoriia V K P (f). Kratkii kurs; Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1952.

M aterialy vneocherednogo X X I s’e{da K P S S ; Gospolitizdat, Moscow,
1959-
Voprosy marksistko-leninskoi etiku Materialy nauchnogo sovechchaniia;
Gospolitizdat, Moscow, i960.
Anderson, John: ‘Marxist Philosophy*, Australasian Journal o f Psychology

and Philosophy, vol. XIII (1935).
Anderson, John: ‘Marxist Ethics*, A J . P . P vol. XV (1937).
Anderson, John: ‘ Critical Notice o f H. B. Acton’s The Illusion o f the Epoch,
A .J .P ., vol. 37 (1959).
Kamenka, Eugene: ‘The Primitive Ethic o f Karl Marx’, A .J .P ., vol. 35
0957).
Kamenka, Eugene: ‘The Baptism of Karl Marx’, Hibbert Journal, vol. LVI
(1958).
Kamenka, Eugene and Tay, Alice Erh-Soon: ‘Karl Marx’s Analysis o f Law*,
Indian Journal o f Philosophy, vol. I (1959)*
Kamenka, Eugene and Tay, Alice Erh-Soon: ‘Karl Marx on The Law o f
Marriage and Divorce— A Text and a Commentary’, Quadrant, no. 15
(Winter, i960).
Kline, George L .: ‘ Changing Attitudes Toward the Individual’, in C. E.
Black (ed.): The Transformation o f Russian Society, cited above.
202
B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O RK S C I T E D
C. OTHER WORKS
Chemyshevskii, N. G.: Sochineniia; Gos. Izdat. Khudozhestvennoi Litera-
tury, Moscow, I948f.
Feuerbach, Ludwig: The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans;
London, 1854.
Hare, R. M.: The Language of Morals; Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1952.
Hegel, G. F. W.: The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. J. B. Baillie; Swan
Sonnenschein, London, 1910.
Hegel, G. F. W.: The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox; Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1953.
Passmore, J. A.: Ralph Cudworth; Cambridge U.P., 1951.
Spinoza, B.: The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes; Tudor Publishing Co.,
New York, 1941.
Stevenson, C. L.: Ethics and Language\ Yale U.P., 1944.
Anderson, John: ‘Determinism and Ethics’, A .J.P .P ., vol. VI (1927).
Anderson, John: ‘Realism versus Relativism in Ethics’, A .J.P .P ., vol. XI
(i933)-
Anderson, John: ‘The Problem of Causality*, A .J.P .P ., vol. XVI (1938).
Anderson, John: ‘Art and Morality’, A .J.P .P ., vol. XIX (1941).
Anderson, John: ‘The Meaning of Good’, A .J.P .P ., vol. XX (1942).
Anderson, John: ‘Ethics and Advocacy’, A .J.P .P ., vol. XXII (1944).
Simpson, C. A.: ‘Old Testament Historiography’, Hibbert Journal, vol.
LVI (1958).
Urmson, J. O.: ‘On Grading*, in Logic and Language (Second Series), ed.
by A. G. N. Flew, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1953.
203
Index
Marx’s early writings, preceding the Economico-Philosophical Manu

scripts of 1844, are indexed under ‘Marx’ and letters under the name of
the recipient. Otherwise, all works by Marx and Engels are indexed
under their titles, generally rendered in English. Works by other authors
appear only under the author’s name. Details of editions are given in
the ‘Bibliography of Works Cited’ on pages 200 ff.; references in the
bibliography are not included in this index.
Absolute Idea, 23-4, 41 Austro-Marxists, 8

abstraction, Marx and Hegel’s view of,
2 in., 100; of political State, 43, 63-6;
in political economy, 7 1-3, 79-80; Bakradze, S. K., 4
in punishment, 35 Bakunin, M., 30, 167m
Barth, Hans, 19m, 52m
Acton, H.B., 2n., 36m, 126m, 133m
Adams, H. P., 22m Bauer, Bruno, 17, 53, 60
adjustment, social and political., 106, Bazarov, V. A., 178-80
108-9, 117, 192-3 Bebel, August, 176m
alienation, 12, 55-62, 83; in E P M , 70- Bentham, Jeremy, 13 m.
86, 148; in mature Marx, 144-52; Berdyaev, N. A., 178
outside economics, 85-6, 121, 175; Berman, Harold J., 169-71, 174m
Bernstein, Eduard, 8, 165
empirical content of, 110 -14 , *48-9;
overcoming of, xii-xiv, 67-9, 80-6, Blok, Alexander, 181
110 -14 , 149-60 Bogdanov, A. A., 178-80
Anacharsis, 94 Boisguillebert, Pierre Le Pesant de, 70
anarchism, anarchists, xv, 7, 158, 164-5 Boyle’s Law, 128
ancient society, 67, 133 Buret, Eugene, 70
Burke, Edmund, 37
Anderson, John, 97m, 10 1-14 , 112,
126m, i28n., 143
Annenkov, P. V., 122 Capitaly xiii, 4, 9, 83m, 13 m., 136-8,
Anster, John, 78 I 44- 5°, I 52~ 3>M 5-8
Anti-Duhringy 2, 125, 127-30, 138-9, capitalism, contradictions of, 1, 7-10,
184 73, 147-52, 196-7; collapse of, xiii,
Aquinas, Thomas, 100 6-9, 151-2, 157, 163; socialisation
Aristotle, 23m, 28m, 139m within, 9, 157-8; ideology of, xiii,
artists, society of, xii, 11 0 - 1 1, 113, 157; 163-4
ethical character of, 101, 103, 1 1 1 , capitalist, alienation of, 77, 148
113, 116 Carr, E. H., ion.
204
INDEX
causality, 97-8, 142-3, 174 Economico-Philosophical (Paris) Manu

censorship, xii, 18, 26-7, 31, 103-4 scripts, xii, 46, 70-86, 100, 11 1- 12 ,
Chernyshevskii, N. G., 178 121, 146-8, 150
Chinese Communism, nn. economics (political economy), inco
Christianity, 3, 29, 30, 53, 61-2, 107 herence of, 70-81; and ethics, 79-80;
church property, 136-7 Marx’s contempt for, 151
civil society, 37,40-7, 51-69,94,108-9, education, 85, 102-3, 116 -17 , 155
121-3, 132 egoism, 54, 56-8, 61, 65-6, 94, 103,
Civil War in France, The, 176m 107-8, h i , 124
class morality, 138-40, 183-4 Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bona
class struggle, 6, 55, 66-9, 139-40, parte, The, 175m
I 73n-, J 92 emancipation, political, 57-9, 63-9;
classless society. See Communism religious, 53, 60-2; true, 53-4, 56.
Class Struggles in France, The, 175m See also alienation, overcoming of
Communism, ‘crude’, 83-5; primitive, ends, concern with, xiii, xv, 26, 108,
133; ultimate society of, xii-xiii, 46, m - 1 7 , 149-50, 164, 180, 186, 194,
83-6, 113, 139, 145, 152-60; Engels 198; and means, 26, 37, 101; univer
o n ,153-5 sal kingdom of, 24, 178-81
Communist Manifesto, xivn., 83, 123-4, Engels, Friedrich, xvi, 3, 5m, 124, 125,
129, 13m ., 133m, 138, 146, 166, 137m, 143; and alienation, xiv, 70-1,
17511., 176 164; on Communism, 153-5, 158;
Communist Party, xv, 11, 165-7, and ethics, 2, 71, 138-40, 184; on
182-3, i87 materialist interpretation of history,
conscience, 92, 94, 124 I22n., 132-4, 141-2; on Oriental
consumer’s morality, xiii, 113 -14 society, 197; on revolution, 176m;
Contribution to the Critique of Political on truth, 125-30; utilitarianism of,
Economy, 5m, 132, 145 xiv, 155, 164
crime, criminals, 35-6, 171-2, 181 Epicurus, 21-2, 23m, 42, 68, 139
Critique of the Gotha Programme, xiii, equality, 64-5, 84-5
155, 176m Erfurt Programme, 8
Croce, Benedetto, 114, 191 estates (feudal classes), 39-40, 57-9
Cudworth, Ralph, 90m ethics, in young Marx, xvi, 72, 94-6,
100-14; in mature Marx, xvi, 145,
Darkness at Noon, 167 165-6,194—6; and Marxism, xv, 1-13 ,
Darwin, Charles, 180 165; and Communist Party, 166-7,
David, King, 99m 181-7, 198; positive, xiii, 99-117,
Democritus, 21-2 195-6; normative, 89-96,115,185-7,
determinism, Marx’s, 28, 96-9; tech 191—5; and obligation, 91-2, 96-7,
nological, 133-4 145, 179, 191-2. See also morality,
Deutsche-Briisseler Zeitung, 29 moralism
dialectic, Marx’s social, 39m, 51-72, Euthyphro, 90
121, 132-3, 151 evils, xiii, 23, 37, 70-1, 95, 99-107,
dignity, Marx’s emphasis on, 28-30, i u - 1 7 , 195
52-3, 156-8 exploitation, 144. See also alienation
division of labour, 72, 83m, 133, 141,
148, 151-60, 196m
dualism, in normative ethics, 92, 94-5; Factory conditions, Marx on, 137-8
in Marx, 95-6 facts and values, 2
Fenelon, Archbishop, 37
economic planning, 15 3-7; and capital fetishism, 8on., 144-5, I93- $ ee a^s0
ist ideology, xiii-xiv, 192-3; in alienation
U.S.S.R., 11, 168-70 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 17, 41, 54, 56,
economic reductionism, xiii, 131, 157, 6on., 74, 76, 94, 103, 125, 129, 144
173- 4, 177, 198 finance-capitalism, 8
205
INDEX
Fitzgerald, Edward, 16711. 146, 150-1. See also man
Fourier, Franôis-Marie-Charles, 84,
149 ideologies, Marxist account of, 6, 55,
Frederick William IV, xii I2 4, I2 9“ 3°, I 34- 42, 177
freedom, as Marx’s criterion of good, ideology, capitalist, xiii, 163-4
22~3I» 34-47, 99, M5i and caprice, imperialism, 8
28, 33, 47, 95; characteristic of good India, 29
activities, viii, 102-4, I07_ 8, 110 -13 , individual and society, 37-47, 61-6,
145, 159-60, 180, 195; in history, 94; in Soviet writings, 179-87
xv-xvi; political, 64-8, and self- Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the
determination, 23-36, 39-42, 96-9, Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.,
196; and necessity, 2, 85, 126, 149; 148
and society, 64-9, 108-9, 153-60 Jews, Judaism, 28m, 53, 60-2, 66
free labour, 149-50 justice, ethical, 109-13, 145; political,
free love, 84-5, 102, 173, 186 109, 117, 192-3
free thought, 102
Freud, Sigmund, 101-2, 116 Kamenka, Eugene, 28m, 32ml., 175m
Fundamental Principles o f Communism, Kant, Immanuel, xv, 24, 34, 35, 38m,
153-5 68, 100, 138, 165, 178-81
Kautsky, Karl, on ethics, 3, 139; on
Gans, Eduard, 32, 35 class tensions, 8
German Ideology, xiii, 37, 42, 46, 59, Kelsen, Hans, 17m .
83m, 122-30, 13m ., 134, 137, 139- Khruschev, N. S., nn., 183, 184
40, 145-8, i 5i - 3> i83 Kline, G. L., 178-81
Godwin, William, 37 Kolnische Zeitung, 38, 39m
Goebbels, Joseph, 2n. Koestler, Arthur, 167
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 78, 180 Krylenko, N., 170
good, common, 40-1, 193
good, goodness, goods, xiii; quality or Lauderdale, James Maitland, Earl of, 70
relation, 89-94; Marx’s view, 20, 23, law, 109, 192; young Marx on, 18,
26-30, 37-8, 99; positive conception 32-8, 40, 46-7, 95, 12 1; mature
of, 100-17, 195, 199 Marx on, 34, 137-8, 148, 175-8;
Greece, art of, 3211., 134-6; ethics in, Engels on, 14 1-2; Soviet theory and
2<S> practice, n , 138m, 168-78
Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Law, John, 70
Oekonomie, xvi, 114m, 130m, 13 m., Lenin, V. I., xiii, xv, 3, 163, 165, 178;
133- 5, I 45~ 5°> ! 56> 157 and ethics, 3, 166, 184; on imperial
ism, 8-9; on law, i7on.
Hare, R. M., 92m, 93m Lichtheim, George, 8n.
Haxthausen, August von, 133m Lieber, Hans-Joachim, xviin.
Hegel, G. W. F., 19m, 22m, 2 3-4 ,28m, Lifanov, M. I., 182
35, 40- 5, 5<S> 74- 5, 80, 97, 98, 127, limited company, Marx on, 157-8
144, 166; and Marx, xvii, i7~25, List, Friedrich, 70
6on., 73m; Marx’s critiques, 18, 20, Ludwig Feuerbach etc., 125, 127-30
33-4, 39> 40- 5, 106, 143 Lukacs, Georg, 12
Hess, Moses, 36, 52 Lunacharsky, A. V., 178-9, 181
Hilferding, Rudolf, 2 Luther, Martin, 8on.
Hobson, J. A., 8 Luxemburg, Rosa, xiii, 11, 163
Holderlin, J. C. F., 18
Holy Family, The, 34-5, 77n* MacCulloch, John Ramsay, 70
Hook, Sidney, 2n. Malinovsky, A. A. See Bogdanov
Hugo, Gustav, 32 man, and human essence, 24, 34, 37-47,
human nature, Marx on, 83, 123, 13 m., 98-9, 150; as generic or social being,
20(5
I ND E X
54-9, 63-9, 76-7, 150-1; and animals Nietzsche, Friedrich, 178
28, 76-7. See also human nature norms, moral, 115 ; and Marx, 1, 3, 37,
marriage and divorce, in Marx, 32-4, 70-2, 96, 106; and Engels, 2-3; in
46-7, 84-5; in Soviet Union, 170-3, Soviet ethics, 3, 11, 178-87
175, 186
Marx, Heinrich (KarPs father), 17 Oriental society, 197, 199
Marx, Jenny (von Westphalen), 18 Osiander, H. F., 70
Marx, Karl, in Trier and Bonn, 17; in ‘ought’, 1-2 , 91, 115
Berlin, 17, 32; high school essays, Outlines o f a Critique o f Political
28-9; doctoral dissertation, 17-25, Economy, 71
37-8, 42, 51-2, 95; Anekdota contri
butions, 17, 26; Rheinische Zeitung Paris Manuscripts. See Economico-
contributions, 17-18, 26-9, 32-4, Philosophical Manuscripts
38-40, 43, 45; first Hegel critique, Pashukanis, E. B., 170-6
18, 20, 33-4, 39- 4<$, 51, 54-5; Passmore, J. A., 9on.
Deutsch-franôsische Jahrbiicher con Peuchet, Jacques, 36
tributions generally, 18 ,5 1,5 3 , 55m, philosophy, Hegel’s conception of, 24;
60; Correspondence of 1843, 30, 53m, and the young Marx, 19-25, 38,
54, 55m, 62-3, 95; second Hegel crit 51-5; and mature Marx, 12 1-3 1,13 4 ,
ique, 53-5, 62, 66-8, 121; On the Hi
Jewish Question, 55—8, 60—7, 108; Physiocrats, 84
Critical Glosses etc., 67-9 Plato, 35, 90, 99, 101, 128, 139
Marxism, and Marx, 3-13 ; as myth and pluralist view of society, 192-3
ideology, 5, 7; and philosophy, 12 1- Plutarch, 28
131, 15 1; and science, 10 -11, 72, 123 Popitz, H., 52n.
materialism, Marx’s, 125-6 Popper, Karl, 145
materialist interpretation of history, Populism, Russian, xv, 165
5-6, 11, 55m, 122-4, 132-43, 148, Poverty of Philosophy, 72m, 83m, 123,
176-7, 194 I 3 i n *, 133, 137
Maurer, Georg Ludwig von, 133m pragmatism, and Marx, 125-7
Mehring, Franz, 167m privilege, Marx on, 18, 39-40, 43, 57-
Mill, James, 70 58
Mill, John Stuart, 38m producer’s morality, xiii, 113 -14
monarchy, 39, 43 production, i3on., 13m ., 143, 157;
money, as means of alienation, 60-1, forces and relations of, 5-6, 122-3,
78-9, 152, 156, 170 132-4; social organisation of, 133,
morality, Marx’s critique of, 106,121-4, 153-60
148; Marxist account of, 2,134, 138— proletariat, alienation of, 72-7; charac
140; Soviet, 11, 178-87; utilitarian, ter of, xiii-xiv, 29, 68-9, 157-60,
xiii-xiv, 95, 108-9, x98 163-4; dictatorship of, xiii, 7, 169,
moralism, 104, 106-7, M5 175-7, 183; as motive-force of
Morgan, Lewis, 133m revolution, 7, 18, 51, 53-6, 68;
motives, as subject of ethics, 100-2, pauperisation of, xv, 7-8, 9, 165
104 property, private, xii, 63-8, 81-6, 15 1-
160, 163, 168, 196m; public, 84-6;
Nature, man’s alienation from, 75-7, church, 136-7
148; man’s union with, 46, 76-7, Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 72m, 84, 123
85-6, 131, 148-50 punishment, Marx on, 34-6; and ethics,
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 124m, 146m 103-7
New Economic Policy, 169-70 qualities, logical, 89-93
New York Daily Tribune, 29, 36
Nicolaievsky, B. and Manchen-Helfen, reformism. See revisionism
O., 52m Regnauld, H. V., 128
207
I N DE X
relations, logical, 89-94 Simpson, C. A., 990.
religion, critique of, 22n., 30, 34, 55, Skarbek, Frederic, 70
62-3, 66, 8on., 134, 148. See also Smith, Adam, 70, 73, 8on., 149
Christianity, Judaism Socialism, and young Marx, 18-19
representation, political, 43-7, 57—8 Socrates. See Plato
Republic, The, 101 Sokolov, A. V. See Volsky
revisionism, classical, xv, 8, 165; East Sorel, Georges, 5, ion., 113, 159
revolution, permanent, 66-8, 175m; Spinoza, Baruch, 27-8, 97, 98
proletarian, 53, 68-9, 176m Stalin, J. V., 3-4, 177, 182
Rheinische Zeitung, 18-19, 52~ 3* $ ee State, Hegel on, 40, 42m, 44; Marx’s
also Marx view of, 6, 39, 57-9, 62-9, 197;
Riazanov, David, xvi, xviin., 36m rational, 38-47, 51; Soviet view of,
Ricardo, David, 6, 70, 8on., 150 172
‘right’ and ‘wrong’, 91 Stevenson, C. L., 92m
rights, and duties, 37, 40, 42, 106-9, Struve, P. B., 178
186-7; political, 38, 64-6, 100, 143, Stuchka, P. J., 170-4
170, 192 Sue, Eugene, 34-5, 107
Rosenberg, Alfred, 2n. surplus value, 6-7, 144
Rosenberg, Arthur, 18 syndicalism, xv, 164-5
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 24, 34, 36m,
43, 44, 100
Rubel, Maximilien, 36m Tay, Alice Erh Soon, 32ml., 175m
Rudnev, V. A. See Bazarov Theses on Feuerbach, 125-7, 13m ., 146
Ruge, Arnold, 17, 30, 52, 67m town and country, division of, 152-5
rules, and evils, 113 ; social, 183-4; in Trotsky, Leon, 6n., 167, 180
production, 158-60; in law, 35-6, truth, Democritus on, 21; Marx and
168—9, J 74; and free activity, vii, Engels on, 125-30
112 - 13 , 15a Tugarinov, V. P., 184-5
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouv-

roy, Comte de, 84 universalisability, 24, 34, 44, 100
Say, Jean-Baptiste, 70 universality, logical, Marx on, 37-8, 44
Schelling, F. W. J., n o Urmson, J. O., 9311.
Schlesinger, R., 3m, i7on.
Schmidt, Conrad, 141 Volsky, Stanislav, 178-9
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 100 Vyshinsky, A. Y., 3411., 138m, 17211.,
Schumpeter, Joseph A., 10, 163 173-7, 181
Schiiz, Carl Wolfgang Christoph, 70
science, young Marx’s view of, 20-5,
12 1; mature Marx on, 123; ethical Wage Labour and Capital, 145-7
character, 101, 103, i n , 116 -17 , 157 Wittfogel, Karl A., 197
self-determination, xiii, 20-2, 96-9,
196; and good, 26-8
Yesenin, Sergei, 181
Shakespeare, William, 78-9 Yudin, P., 173
Sharia, P. A., 3, 34m, 139m, 173m,
182-6
Shishkin, A. F., 2, 2n., 34m, 139m, Zalkind, A. B., 181
172m, 173m, i8in., 182-7 Zis, A. I., i8in.
208

The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (PDFDrive)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (PDFDrive)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (PDFDrive)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS

ISBN: 978-1-138-85502-1 (Set)

Routledge & Kegan Paul

Printed in Great Britain by

© Eugene Kamenka, 1962, 1972

iVb / w r 0 / A00A /rcczy reproduced in

PREFACE TO THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION page vii

Part I: The Primitive Ethic o f Karl Marx

2 THE FREE INDIVIDUAL 26

3 THE NATURAL LAW OF FREEDOM 32

4 THE ‘ TRULY HUMAN* SOCIETY 37

Part II: Karl Marx’s Road to Communism

6 THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICS 60

7 THE CRITIQUE OF ECONOMICS 70

8 COMMUNISM AND THE COMPLETE, UN ALIENATED

Part III: Critical Resume: Ethics and the

1 0 THE REJECTION OF MORALISM, OF ‘ R IG H TS’ AND

1 1 ETHICS AND THE ‘ TRU LY HUMAN* SOCIETY IIO

Part IV : Ethics and the Mature Marx

1 3 THE M A TER IA LIST IN TERPRETATIO N OF HISTORY

Part V : Communism and Ethics

hold, without significant reservations, what I take to be the book’s

as a theoretical system, is a product of nineteenth-century

karl m arx , I shall argue in this book, came to Communism in the

administrator. Both depend in their ideology on the commercial

freedom as a force within history, his treatment of it as merely a final

unfaithfulness to the originals.1 Despite its incompleteness, it is still

The genius displayed in Marx’s writings— the suggestive power of

the interest of his very inconsistencies—has made writing this book as

Laqueur, Mr. George Lichtheim, and M. Maximilien Rubel of Paris.

the bibliography of works cited at the conclusion of the text indicates

SC—Marx-Engels: Correspondence 1843-1895, ed. Dona Torr.

volume ii of the Gesamtausgabe .

Where other English translations of material here translated from

t h e relationship between Marxism and ethics is often alluded to and

rarely explored. The disputes that surround it have produced little

and disciple, Friedrich Engels. The ‘co-founder* of Marxism asserts in

The attempt to combine description and advocacy, to claim scientific

Marxism has become a dogma. Like Christianity, it speaks in the

1 Ethics and the Materialist Interpretation o f History, p. 201.

clarifying the thought of the Master and building on its foundations.

of Marx and the corpus of Marxism. It is rather to warn that the

1 This is Marx’s formulation in the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique

of production cease to correspond with the forces of production and

depended upon the extraction of ‘surplus value* from hired labour by

Marx may no longer have expected them to occur. Kautsky, it is true,

Communist movement— not because it successfully explained the

consisted of a detailed examination and criticism of the central Marxist

1 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 3.

positivism of the earlier part of the twentieth century; it could mobilise,

1 The opponents of such a course, e.g. Rosa Luxemburg, were inevitably

Soviet party leaders and theoreticians have begun to emphasise the

is not generally matched by a similar willingness to deal with the

The Primitive Ethic o f Karl Marx

i n autumn, 1835, the 17-year-old Karl Marx, recently matriculated

from the Trier Gymnasium, entered the University at Bonn as a student

political articles for the radical newspaper newly formed in Cologne,

in the young German intellectuals of the Vormari. He sought to free

Yet, almost in the act of stating this conception, he finds it disintegrat

In his contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung, especially in his discus

necessity is to imply that in a conflict between public and private inter

Unquestionably, Marx was pushed toward the proletariat and to

man’, of nature as something which man ‘appropriates’, of conscious