July 27, 2025 • 33 mins
This captivating essay by Harold Laski, a renowned figure in the British socialist movement, offers an in-depth examination of Karl Marxs life and philosophy. Born in Manchester in 1893, Laski was an influential member of the Fabian Society and the Socialist League faction of the Labour Party. As a professor at the London School of Economics, he mentored numerous politicians, including leaders of post-war Asia and Africas independence movements, and Ralph Milliband, father of the current Labour Party leader, Ed Milliband. Laskis political views, which encompassed democratic socialism, revolutionary Marxism, and Zionism, were sophisticated and multifaceted. This compelling 1922 essay provides a critical and scholarly analysis of Marxs work and life. - Summary by Phil Benson (adapted from Wikipedia)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Part five of Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Five Marx,
his personality is no easy one to dissect. There is
no trace of the rebel in his inheritance, and his
early education would have fitted him for any career rather
(00:22):
than the one he chose. If he became the head
and center of the destructive forces of Europe, that was
the inevitable outcome of the reactionary regime into which he
was born, and he would doubtless have countered that description
by insisting that destruction is the parent of creativeness. His
work dealt with the historic foundations of the permanent source
(00:43):
of revolution, and the only weapon, as he realized, for
flesh that has mortified is the knife. The view that
makes of him the compeer of Darwin, the discoverer of
the universal law of economic evolution, has not a little
truth in it. But it is less true than that
which places him alongside of Rousseau and Carlile as one
of the greatest prophets of the human race. For it
(01:08):
is essentially by the qualities of the prophet that he
is distinguished. He was unmoved by oracles other than his own.
Impatient of difference, as with Prudon and Bacunin, contemptuous, as
his correspondence with Engels shows, of all who did not
think exactly in his fashion. He never learned the essential
art of colleagueship. He was too prone to regard a
(01:30):
hostile view as proof of moral crime. He had not
a little of that zest for priority he was so
unwilling to recognize in the discoveries of others. He was
rarely generous in his recognition of intellectual stimulus. With Mars.
To enter a movement was to dominate it, and he
was incapable of taking the second place. Hatred, wrote Matsini,
(01:53):
of him, outweighs love in his heart, which is not right,
even if the hatred may in itself have foundation. There
is a penetrating truth in that criticism marks. His absorption
in the wrongs of the disinherited undoubtedly blinded him to
the universality of human nature. He had brooded so long
over the method of their redress that he became incapable
(02:16):
of weighing the value of alternative channels. He never realized
how partial and incomplete were the views upon which he
based his conclusions, and vast and patient, as were the
researches he undertook, he was not always exact in his
measurement of evidence. He is, in fact a noble but
not an attractive figure. That there was a Marx eminently
(02:39):
lovable in himself, the testimony of friends makes certain, but
it was not the marks of public life. There is
something unhealthy in the venom with which he assails early
friends like Bruno Bauer, or not less ardent seekers after
light like Prudon. His accusations against Prudon, even when the
temptation to destroy is remembered, were singularly ungenerous, learned, courageous,
(03:04):
capable of profound sympathy with the mass of men, He
was never able to grasp the secret of dealing with individuals.
Much doubtless is to be pardoned to an exile who
never enjoyed comfort and had often risked his personal safety.
But Matsini was able to emerge from trials not less difficult,
with the sweetness unembittered. Nor could Marx accustom himself to
(03:27):
the necessary compromises of political life. One is tempted to
feel that marks confined his introspection to other men and
never attempted that sober examination of self which is often
the beginning of political wisdom. That effort, after all, is fundamental.
The unstated assumptions of a thinker's personality are the more
(03:48):
urgent because they do not appear in the printed word.
Every great philosophic interpretation is at bottom a spiritual autobiography,
and Marx never realized how greatly his work is a
palimpsest within which one can read the history of his
personal experience. It is significant for his books that his
early radicalism should have proved a barrier to his university career.
(04:12):
It is significant also that he should have known the
pains and penalties of exile. Nor is it irrelevant that,
after thirty years in London he was still at the
end a German stranger, testing facts and constructing theories in
terms quite alien from the circumstances around him. The impalpable
penumbra of his thought never impressed him, even while it
(04:34):
remained the subconscious touchstone by which he judged the thought
and acts of other men. Thus, while he wrote with
superb profundity about the material environment of men's lives, he
rarely penetrated into the inner substance of those lives. With
such tracts of experience religion, for example, as were alien
from his own knowledge, he could neither sympathize nor understand.
(04:58):
He wrote a philosophy which expresses in the mass the
aspirations of man. But it is not a philosophy like
that of Rousseau, which, with all its defects, springs directly
from their deepest emotions. In a sense, that is to say,
the seeming logic of his attitude is deceptive, for it
in part rests upon a failure to test his own assumptions,
(05:20):
and imparts upon an abstract view of human nature, with
which the totality of facts is in direct contradiction. Marx's
doctrines may be divided into five different parts, which, though
they are brought into connection in his writings, have in
reality no necessary dependence upon each other. Their central economic
(05:41):
position is a theory of value, by which he endeavored
to explain the methods by which the workers are exploited
under capitalism, and as a corollary, a view of the
increasing concentration of capital, from which he derived important consequences
in his prophecy of the future. Historically, it is an
attempt to explain the growth of movements and institutions entirely
(06:02):
in economic terms. Predominantly, Marx insists the antagonism of classes
is the motive power which underlies the historic process, and
it is to the impulses which are at work in
the satisfaction of economic demand, that all changes are to
be traced. Philosophically, this view results in a purely materialistic
(06:23):
view of human nature, a view, be it noted, which
has obvious and important connections with the general attitude of
the Benthamite school. Politically, the doctrines of Marx resolve themselves
into a defense of revolution as the method by which
the workers are to attain power, and dictatorship as the
method by which they so consolidate it as ultimately to
(06:44):
secure a condition of general freedom. Upon Marx's theory of value,
it is not necessary to spend much time. It has
not stood the test of criticism, It is out of
harmony with the facts, and it is far from self consistent.
It represents essentially a narrow interpretation of some loose sentences
(07:04):
of Ricardo. The latter had argued, with certain qualifications, that
the value of any commodity is to be measured by
the quantity of labor which goes into its production marks. However,
ignored the qualifications, and the proof he offered of the
thesis is essentially different from that of Ricardo. Exchange value,
(07:24):
he argued, is not the singular quality of the commodity
in which it inheres. Exchange value is the quality which
it possesses, alike with all other qualities for which it
can be exchanged. Since human labor is the only quality
which all commodities possess in common, human labor must be
the measure of exchange value. And be it noted by
(07:46):
human labor is meant undifferentiated human labor. It is a
quantitative and not a qualitative equation. It is a measure
simply of effort in time, and not of effort in
results or quality of results. Labor is paid differently simply
in relation to the different amount of labor congealed in
any given commodity produced. That which will suffice to produce
(08:09):
the necessaries of life of the laborer is therefore the
price of labor. Power wages, as it clearly follows, are
the value of the workers necessaries of life. But the
worker produces in a day more than suffices for his
necessaries of life. If we assume that by working six
hours each day, the worker can produce his necessaries, while
(08:30):
his working day is eight hours long, then the value
of what he produces is as eight hours is to six,
that is to say, one third greater. Marks term this
extra production surplus value, and he assumed that the capitalist,
taking his surplus as his profit, robbed the worker of it.
For by buying labor power at its market price, the
(08:51):
capitalist at once grows rich and exploits his workers. And
in any capitalistic society, especially where there is free competition,
this is bound to be the case, for which it
of course follows that only by the abolition of capitalism
can we stop the exploitation of labour. It is unnecessary
to dwell at any length upon the fallacies implicit in
(09:13):
this analysis. As a matter of logic, Marks had no
right to assume that the quality of labour is other
differences being subtracted the common basis of measurement. Nor did
he mention that, in addition to labour, all commodities to
have value must have this at least in common, that
they satisfy some need. Utility, in other words, is a
(09:35):
necessary factor in value. It would be impossible to produce
aeroplanes except upon the assumption that some people wanted to
fly in them. Nor can undifferentiated human labour be taken
as a measure of value. It is an economic platitude
that differences in wages are not merely due to differences
in the effort in time of production. It costs no
(09:57):
less to produce a bad carpenter than a good one.
But the quality of a good carpenter's work has a
value quite apart from cost as effort. It has the
type of value which the economists call a quasi rent,
and this quasi rent appears in the value in exchange
of the product. Nor is this all Wherever there is
(10:17):
a type of production, the phenomena of which result in rent,
the measurement of value is not the mean cost of production,
but the marginal cost of production. Marks fail to note
this limitation, with the result that he cannot understand the
nature of rent and was led into obvious contradictions. And
he fails also to take any account of the fluctuating
(10:39):
character of demand. He seems to have regarded demand as
purely static, and falls, as a consequence, into all the
difficulties which boon Barbeck and the Austrian school have emphasised
to say, moreover, with Marx, that the cost of a
laborer is the socially necessary cost, the lowest cost, that is,
at which it can be produced, is immediately to bring
(11:01):
within purview tests of his hypothesis, which he entirely failed
to apply. For if wages represent the cost of necessaries,
the existence of a proletariat whose wages are above the
bare cost of necessaries clearly invalidates the whole process, and
in fact, the question of a wages level is an
historical problem in which logical considerations do not play the
(11:23):
whole part. Social conscience, for example, as with the trade,
boards may insist upon a rate of wages historically above
the socially necessary cost, and trade unions may, by the
combined strength they represent, lead to the same result. If
a state, even though it be a capitalistic state, chose
(11:44):
to adopt a policy of a minimum basis of civilized
life in which a wage standard was fixed, the iron
law of wages, which Marks deduced from his theory of value,
would immediately be obsolete. He must not be forgotten moreover
that in the Marks analysis whatever does not appear as
wages is always regarded as unearned profits of rent and interest.
(12:07):
This is perhaps no unfair account, but it is outside
the evidence of facts to argue that the task of
directing business the work of the entrepreneur, is not to
count as labor and does not create value. Even when
a suspicion of this impossibility dawned upon Marks, he dismissed
the earnings of direction simply as cunning and argued that
(12:28):
all profits contain an element of surplus value which differs
from interest, wages, and payment to the entrepreneur. But if
profits are not a payment for work, then it should
surely follow that the capitalist must take it also, otherwise
he is gifted with a quality of moderation with which
Marks does not normally endow him. In such a general background,
(12:51):
the Marxian theory of value seems clearly untenable, not less
on theoretic grounds than from an analysis of the facts
of business. Yet it is equally undeniable that Marx's view
has obtained the assent of a whole class of society
to its truth, and it is therefore worth while for
a moment to inquire exactly what magic it possesses from
(13:12):
which its strengthening hold is derived that, it may be suggested,
is simple enough. For the technical economist, the difference between
profits and rent was fundamental. Men like Ricardo and Nassausenia
saw a natural distinction in source of origin, which manufacturers
like Bright embodied in the legitimate earnings of a hard
(13:33):
working milowna whatever his wealth, and the illegitimate because on
earned income of a land owning duke. They saw it
the more clearly when, as in the period of Marx's
own maturity, they were struggling to free his business from
the environment of a hostile squirearchy. But to the laborer,
as Marx clearly saw, such a distinction was for practical
(13:54):
purposes irrelevant. The world was divided for him into those
who lived by wages and those who did not. Those
who lived by wages were poor, those who did not
live by wages were rich. Assume, as Marks assumed, that
the surplus theory of value is true, and the riches
of those who do not live by wages adue to
(14:15):
the poverty of those who do. The worker was able
to see that he was poor. He saw also that
he produced more than he could consume, and that his
surplus production was divided among a relatively small class of
rich and often idle men. A theory such as Marxies
inevitably appealed to him as the natural explanation of his
(14:35):
suppressed condition. He clung to it not by virtue of
any logical estimation of its theoretic adequacy, but because it
summarized the most poignant experience he knew. The Marxian law
of wages, moreover, will from its very nature win you
adherents at every period of commercial depression. At any moment
(14:56):
when there is a decline in the effective demand for commodities,
or when the the strength of trade union resistance is
at a low ebb, the impact of capitalism upon the
wage earner will closely resemble what Marks insisted is its
normal relation, For few business men have imagination enough to
realize that there are other ways to the rehabilitation of
markets than the reduction of price by means of lower wages. Inevitably, therefore,
(15:21):
the worker will move from the acceptance of surplus value
to the philosophy which Marks constructed as its natural environment.
The law of the concentration of capital stands upon firmer ground.
The greater the degree of complexity involved in the productive
process argues marks the fewer will be the number of
(15:42):
persons controlling its instruments. Everything contributes to the intensification of
this process. New means of communication are established, the problems
of which are beyond the solution of the small capitalist.
Important mechanical inventions are beyond its financial means. Territorial consolidation
(16:02):
destroys the local market in which he was once a
privileged person. The process, indeed, is neither immediate nor direct.
It took the bourgeoisie three centuries to expropriate the artisan
and create the proletariat, but once the process had begun,
the development was inexorable. Over production created a new army
(16:23):
of reserve workers. The substitution of pasture for arable farming
concentrated a large rural population in the towns. The economies
of large scale production forced hitherto independent producers into the
ranks of wage earners. The capitalistic system moves from a
national to an international character. Its market becomes the world.
(16:46):
Its nature involves increasing centralization until the control of the
forces of production reaches a point where its further development
in private hands is impossible. For alongside the development of
accumulation is the increase of the proletariat. The workers cannot
any longer endure the misery that is involved in the
capitalist regime. They have learned discipline from the training that
(17:10):
is necessitated by the mechanism of the process of which
they are the victims. The knell of capitalist private property
then sounds. The expropriators are expropriated to the great capitalist.
There succeeds the state, which is captured by the workers
for their own purpose. The result of capitalism is in
(17:30):
fact its own destruction. It produces, in Hegelian fashion, its
own antithesis. The very condition of its growth is that
it should involve the laws which imply its inevitable ruin.
We need not accept the conclusion of the arguments who
insist on the important truth that it contains the wastage
(17:52):
of competition in large scale enterprise is a commonplace of
modern business, and the trust or cartel is the characteristic
symptom of the industrial development. There are, indeed, certain important
limitations to the simplicity of the Marxian view. The growth
of joint stock enterprise distributes over a wider circle the
number of those interested in the receipt of profits, even
(18:15):
while it limits those who actually control the industrial process itself,
while there are many minor industries, of which photography and
the repair of motor cars are examples, in which the
tendency is to the increase of small firms rather than
to the development of great ones. But parallel with this
evolution has gone a very striking centralization of credit, which
(18:36):
concentrates in continuously fewer hands the finances of the community. Agriculture. Indeed,
despite the large scale farming of Western America and the
development of agrarian cooperation, remains persistently individualist in temper. Yet
on the balance of inquiry, it is impossible to deny
the emergence of an increasingly collectivist spirit, and its real
(19:00):
action upon industry is the more important because it leads
without question to the demand by the workers of certain
nominal standards from the state, which are increasingly insisted upon
as the condition of business enterprise. Nor is that all.
It becomes obvious that certain industries are from their very
nature too vital in their results to be left to
(19:21):
the chaotic possibilities of private efforts. If the expropriators are
not actually expropriated, there comes, as with mines and railways,
a demand for some form of nationalization, and just as
the investigations of the thirties and forties produced the factory acts,
so it is legitimate to argue that the results of
inquiries like the Coal Commission of nineteen nineteen and the
(19:43):
Docker's Inquiry of nineteen twenty are likely to put a
term to the continuance of private enterprise. Capitalism, in fact,
prepares monopolies which immediately affect the community towards some form
of state administration. So regarded, of course, this view does
not involve the theory of revolution, which Marks regarded as
(20:06):
the inevitable corollary of capitalistic concentration. It need not, indeed
involve a transition towards a socialistic state at all. All
that would seem to be implied would be the removal
of industries essential to the welfare of the community from
the danger of exploitation by private interests. The logic of
(20:26):
a necessary conflict resultant upon the concentration of capital is
derived by Marks from other sources. It is the corollary
of his interpretation of history that, broadly speaking, may be
summarized by saying that all the phenomena of history are
the result of economic motives. To them are traceable legal
(20:47):
and social institutions, not less than the religion and philosophy
of each age. The system of production is the ultimate factor,
in short, by which the mass of human relationships is determined. Protestantism,
Engels wrote, is essentially a bourgeois religion. So too, in
a feudal period, we should expect the legislation to reflect
(21:09):
not general ideas of right, but those ideas of right
which are compatible with the maintenance of feudalism. But ideas change,
and in Marx's view, the source of changes to be
discovered in the transformation of one economic system into another.
A new external world produces new internal ideas. Let women
(21:29):
enter industry in the mass, and, as mister Bertrand Russell
has pointed out, ideas which not even the logic of
Plato and Stuart Mill could make obvious, become accepted without question.
Two hundred years ago it was unthinkable that a peer
should go into the city. Today, finances enmeshed political life
within its fold, so that no company prospects us is
(21:52):
complete until the peerage is represented there. No one can
doubt the very large measure of truth in this outlook.
No one can write the history of English Puritanism, of
the Struggle for Toleration or of the American Revolution, without
making the defense of an economic incentive fundamental to their explanation.
(22:12):
But it is equally clear that the insistence upon an
economic background as the whole explanation is radically false. No
economic motive can explain the suicidal nationalism of the Balkans.
The War of nineteen fourteen may have been largely due
to conflicting commercial imperialisms, but there was also a competition
(22:33):
of national ideas which was at no point economic. Historically, too,
the part played by religion in the determination of social
outlook was, until at least the Peace of Westphalia as
important as that played by material conditions. Luther represents something
more than a protest against the financial exactions of Rome.
(22:55):
The impulses of men, in fact, are never referable to
any single source. The love of power, heard, instinct, rivalry,
the desire of display, all these are hardly less vital
than the acquisitiveness which explains the strength of material environments.
Engels indeed seems to have realized the narrowness of the
(23:16):
Orthodox view, for in the later years of his life
he insisted that the dominant part ascribed by Marks to
the economic motive was due mainly to its neglect by
his opponents, and there was not always time, place, and
opportunity to do justice to the other considerations. But with Marx,
the economic motive is not only final, it is final
(23:38):
in a particular way. The only durable source of faction,
says Madison, is property, and for Marx, the emergence of
private property and history is the beginning of the class struggle.
Immediately society can be divided into those who do and
those who do not possess private property. A power is
released which explains the changes of history. For the class
(24:01):
which possesses property molds the civilization of that society and
the service of its own interests. He controls the government,
it makes, the laws, it bills, the social institutions of
the commonwealth in accordance with its own desires. Slave and
free man, master and servant. These have been the eternal
antitheses of history. With the advent of capitalism, the struggle
(24:25):
is at once simplified and made more intense. Thenceforward the
final stage of the class war, the struggle between bourgeoisie
and proletariat emerges, and just as each social order of
the past is secreted within its womb the germ of
its successor. As for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does
(24:45):
the latter contain within itself the germ of its communists successor. Capitalism,
said Marx, produces its own gravedigger. The conflict, in his view,
was an inevitable and a bitter one, and it was
bound to result in the victory of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie,
he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, is incapable of continuing
(25:07):
in power because it is incapable of securing a bare
subsistence to its slaves, and the result is a growing
sense of revolt in the worker, who, ultimately, by a
revolutionary act, assumes the reigns of power. In a large sense,
it is obvious that the substance of this interpretation is accurate.
(25:27):
The fact of the class struggle, as Marx himself pointed out,
is a commonplace of historians and economists, and it may
be added that to deny its importance is to make
history unintelligible. Where Marx parted company with his predecessors was
in the deductions he drew from his perception of its
significance for Whereas with men like Madison and Guizeaux, the
(25:49):
fact of conflict produced a sense of horror at its
implications and a search for a technique that its dangers
might be obviated. With Marx, the conflict was fundamentally and
both its method and ultimate outcome were to hymn alike obvious.
Whereas with Madison there is an ever present uncertainty whether
a just victory may not suffer betrayal or a wrong
(26:11):
object be pursued. With Marx the processes predetermined, and, save
for a brief period in eighteen seventy, no hesitation seems
to have crossed his mind. The method by which the
proletariat was to secure power lies at the very root
of Marx's doctrine, and it has been in our own
day perhaps the main source of his influence. The method
(26:35):
was revolution, and a dictatorship of iron rigor would consolidate
the new system until the period of transition had been
effectively bridged. Marx did not blind himself to what all
this implied. The history of capitalism was the history of
a relentless defense of each phase of the rights of property.
They were maintained by methods at each point unconnected with
(26:57):
ethical demands. If the conflict was extreme, as in the
days of June eighteen forty eight or with the Commune
of Paris, the last ounce of misery was wrung from
its opponents that capitalism might be secure. A period of
comparative quiescence may produce the concession of social reform, but
this is merely deception. Once a really vital point is
(27:21):
touched by the workers demands, they are met by armed resistance.
That means, of course, that only by conscious, violent intervention
can communism be realized. The proletariat must seize a propitious
moment for the revolution, but until it comes, they must
do all in their power to disturb the existing regime,
(27:42):
even if minor successes have been achieved by the aid
of the liberal minded bourgeoisie. From the first hour of victory,
the workers must level their distrust against their former allies.
They must create a working class organization of their own
workers committees, local workers councils to oppose proletarian institutions and
(28:02):
their influence to those of the middle class state. The
communists must arm the proletariat and do all they can
to cut down the army of the state. As the
chief weapon of defense possessed by the bourgeoisie. Whether workers
are in the militia, they must form within it a
secret organization. To obtain its control. They must form their own, independent,
(28:23):
if hidden, military force, and acquire arms by every method.
Influential democrats to whose word the working class seems to
respond must be discredited. The old social order, in fact,
must be attacked at every point. Communists have two functions,
only to prepare for the revolution and to consolidate it successfully.
(28:45):
When it has been prepared, they must think of themselves
not as realizing an ideal, but only as setting free
the elements of a new society concealed within the womb
of the old. The period of consolidate nation, moreover, must
be a period of high in dictatorship. Marx had no
illusions about the possibility of a democratic governance in such
(29:08):
an hour. The ideals of freedom were impossible to maintain
until the ground so conquered had been made secure. Revolution
provokes counter revolution, and a victorious proletariat must be on
its guard against reaction. Revolution, in fact demands of the
revolutionary class that it secure its purpose by every method
(29:29):
at its disposal. It has neither time nor opportunity for
compassion or remorse. Its business is to terrorize its opponents
into acquiescence. It must disarm antagonism by execution, imprisonment, forced labor,
control of the press. For as it cannot allow any
effort at the violent overthrow of what it has established,
(29:51):
so must its stamp out such criticism as might be
the prelude to further attack. Revolution is war, and war
is founded upon terror. The methods of capitalism must be
used for the extinction of capitalism. For as capitalism has
made of life itself the cheapest of commodities, there need
be no repining at its sacrifice. And the result in
(30:13):
any case is worth the cost, since it destroys the
possibility of future sale. It would have been a wanton
betrayal of trust, said Marx of the Paris Commune. To
observe the traditional forms of liberalism. The end, in fact,
is too great to be nice about the means employed.
Nor can we expect that a peaceful revolution is possible.
(30:36):
While Marx had certain doubts of England on the whole,
he was certain that a violent struggle was inevitable. The
workers might capture Parliament at the poles, but political power
of that kind is in any case a shadow, and
were it used for an assault upon property, it would
inevitably provoke an armed resistance. Marks indeed went further and
(30:57):
was openly contemptuous of democracy. It was a bourgeois invention,
unrelated to the real and used only to deceive the people.
Again and again, the proletariat is betrayed. And throughout Marx's
writings there is the assumption that reliance must be placed
upon a class conscious minority, for in his view, there
(31:18):
is no place in history for the majority principle. The
record of states is the clash between determined minorities contending
for the seat of power. To introduce considerations of consent.
To wait on in the belief that the obvious rightness
of communist doctrine will ultimately persuade men to its acceptance
is entirely to ignore reality. The mass of men will
(31:41):
always acquiesce in or be indifferent to, whatever solutions are afforded.
Communists must proceed upon the assumption that nothing matters save
the enforcement of their will. Upon the end, this revolution
is to serve the forms its purpose will adopt. Marx
has written, but les obviously with justice on his side,
(32:03):
for speculation in distant historical futures is the worst form
of gambling. It was with the destruction of capitalism and
the period of transition therefrom that he was mainly concerned.
A new productive system was bound to involve new institutions
which no man could foresee. That the communist maxim from
each according to his powers, to each according to his
(32:25):
wants would become operative was of course obvious to him.
The performance would be measured in terms of labor time,
a possibly inconsistent hypothesis he took for granted, But he
was always emphatic that the future must settle itself. He
insisted that the measure of distribution would be necessarily unequal
(32:46):
in the period of transition umay as he saw destroyed
by catastrophe. But creation is not an immediate and spontaneous process,
so that he nowhere set limits to the duration of
this intermediate period. It was necessary to wait until the
habits engendered by a new productive system created a psychology
in which the dogma of equality superseded the bourgeois hypothesis
(33:10):
of individual rights. The main thing was the destruction of
a regime in which class distinction made possible the servitude
of the many. It was possible to have confidence in
an order in which the whole force of social effort
was deliberately placed at the disposal of the commonwealfare. End
of Part five
Part five of Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Five Marx,
his personality is no easy one to dissect. There is
no trace of the rebel in his inheritance, and his
early education would have fitted him for any career rather
(00:22):
than the one he chose. If he became the head
and center of the destructive forces of Europe, that was
the inevitable outcome of the reactionary regime into which he
was born, and he would doubtless have countered that description
by insisting that destruction is the parent of creativeness. His
work dealt with the historic foundations of the permanent source
(00:43):
of revolution, and the only weapon, as he realized, for
flesh that has mortified is the knife. The view that
makes of him the compeer of Darwin, the discoverer of
the universal law of economic evolution, has not a little
truth in it. But it is less true than that
which places him alongside of Rousseau and Carlile as one
of the greatest prophets of the human race. For it
(01:08):
is essentially by the qualities of the prophet that he
is distinguished. He was unmoved by oracles other than his own.
Impatient of difference, as with Prudon and Bacunin, contemptuous, as
his correspondence with Engels shows, of all who did not
think exactly in his fashion. He never learned the essential
art of colleagueship. He was too prone to regard a
(01:30):
hostile view as proof of moral crime. He had not
a little of that zest for priority he was so
unwilling to recognize in the discoveries of others. He was
rarely generous in his recognition of intellectual stimulus. With Mars.
To enter a movement was to dominate it, and he
was incapable of taking the second place. Hatred, wrote Matsini,
(01:53):
of him, outweighs love in his heart, which is not right,
even if the hatred may in itself have foundation. There
is a penetrating truth in that criticism marks. His absorption
in the wrongs of the disinherited undoubtedly blinded him to
the universality of human nature. He had brooded so long
over the method of their redress that he became incapable
(02:16):
of weighing the value of alternative channels. He never realized
how partial and incomplete were the views upon which he
based his conclusions, and vast and patient, as were the
researches he undertook, he was not always exact in his
measurement of evidence. He is, in fact a noble but
not an attractive figure. That there was a Marx eminently
(02:39):
lovable in himself, the testimony of friends makes certain, but
it was not the marks of public life. There is
something unhealthy in the venom with which he assails early
friends like Bruno Bauer, or not less ardent seekers after
light like Prudon. His accusations against Prudon, even when the
temptation to destroy is remembered, were singularly ungenerous, learned, courageous,
(03:04):
capable of profound sympathy with the mass of men, He
was never able to grasp the secret of dealing with individuals.
Much doubtless is to be pardoned to an exile who
never enjoyed comfort and had often risked his personal safety.
But Matsini was able to emerge from trials not less difficult,
with the sweetness unembittered. Nor could Marx accustom himself to
(03:27):
the necessary compromises of political life. One is tempted to
feel that marks confined his introspection to other men and
never attempted that sober examination of self which is often
the beginning of political wisdom. That effort, after all, is fundamental.
The unstated assumptions of a thinker's personality are the more
(03:48):
urgent because they do not appear in the printed word.
Every great philosophic interpretation is at bottom a spiritual autobiography,
and Marx never realized how greatly his work is a
palimpsest within which one can read the history of his
personal experience. It is significant for his books that his
early radicalism should have proved a barrier to his university career.
(04:12):
It is significant also that he should have known the
pains and penalties of exile. Nor is it irrelevant that,
after thirty years in London he was still at the
end a German stranger, testing facts and constructing theories in
terms quite alien from the circumstances around him. The impalpable
penumbra of his thought never impressed him, even while it
(04:34):
remained the subconscious touchstone by which he judged the thought
and acts of other men. Thus, while he wrote with
superb profundity about the material environment of men's lives, he
rarely penetrated into the inner substance of those lives. With
such tracts of experience religion, for example, as were alien
from his own knowledge, he could neither sympathize nor understand.
(04:58):
He wrote a philosophy which expresses in the mass the
aspirations of man. But it is not a philosophy like
that of Rousseau, which, with all its defects, springs directly
from their deepest emotions. In a sense, that is to say,
the seeming logic of his attitude is deceptive, for it
in part rests upon a failure to test his own assumptions,
(05:20):
and imparts upon an abstract view of human nature, with
which the totality of facts is in direct contradiction. Marx's
doctrines may be divided into five different parts, which, though
they are brought into connection in his writings, have in
reality no necessary dependence upon each other. Their central economic
(05:41):
position is a theory of value, by which he endeavored
to explain the methods by which the workers are exploited
under capitalism, and as a corollary, a view of the
increasing concentration of capital, from which he derived important consequences
in his prophecy of the future. Historically, it is an
attempt to explain the growth of movements and institutions entirely
(06:02):
in economic terms. Predominantly, Marx insists the antagonism of classes
is the motive power which underlies the historic process, and
it is to the impulses which are at work in
the satisfaction of economic demand, that all changes are to
be traced. Philosophically, this view results in a purely materialistic
(06:23):
view of human nature, a view, be it noted, which
has obvious and important connections with the general attitude of
the Benthamite school. Politically, the doctrines of Marx resolve themselves
into a defense of revolution as the method by which
the workers are to attain power, and dictatorship as the
method by which they so consolidate it as ultimately to
(06:44):
secure a condition of general freedom. Upon Marx's theory of value,
it is not necessary to spend much time. It has
not stood the test of criticism, It is out of
harmony with the facts, and it is far from self consistent.
It represents essentially a narrow interpretation of some loose sentences
(07:04):
of Ricardo. The latter had argued, with certain qualifications, that
the value of any commodity is to be measured by
the quantity of labor which goes into its production marks. However,
ignored the qualifications, and the proof he offered of the
thesis is essentially different from that of Ricardo. Exchange value,
(07:24):
he argued, is not the singular quality of the commodity
in which it inheres. Exchange value is the quality which
it possesses, alike with all other qualities for which it
can be exchanged. Since human labor is the only quality
which all commodities possess in common, human labor must be
the measure of exchange value. And be it noted by
(07:46):
human labor is meant undifferentiated human labor. It is a
quantitative and not a qualitative equation. It is a measure
simply of effort in time, and not of effort in
results or quality of results. Labor is paid differently simply
in relation to the different amount of labor congealed in
any given commodity produced. That which will suffice to produce
(08:09):
the necessaries of life of the laborer is therefore the
price of labor. Power wages, as it clearly follows, are
the value of the workers necessaries of life. But the
worker produces in a day more than suffices for his
necessaries of life. If we assume that by working six
hours each day, the worker can produce his necessaries, while
(08:30):
his working day is eight hours long, then the value
of what he produces is as eight hours is to six,
that is to say, one third greater. Marks term this
extra production surplus value, and he assumed that the capitalist,
taking his surplus as his profit, robbed the worker of it.
For by buying labor power at its market price, the
(08:51):
capitalist at once grows rich and exploits his workers. And
in any capitalistic society, especially where there is free competition,
this is bound to be the case, for which it
of course follows that only by the abolition of capitalism
can we stop the exploitation of labour. It is unnecessary
to dwell at any length upon the fallacies implicit in
(09:13):
this analysis. As a matter of logic, Marks had no
right to assume that the quality of labour is other
differences being subtracted the common basis of measurement. Nor did
he mention that, in addition to labour, all commodities to
have value must have this at least in common, that
they satisfy some need. Utility, in other words, is a
(09:35):
necessary factor in value. It would be impossible to produce
aeroplanes except upon the assumption that some people wanted to
fly in them. Nor can undifferentiated human labour be taken
as a measure of value. It is an economic platitude
that differences in wages are not merely due to differences
in the effort in time of production. It costs no
(09:57):
less to produce a bad carpenter than a good one.
But the quality of a good carpenter's work has a
value quite apart from cost as effort. It has the
type of value which the economists call a quasi rent,
and this quasi rent appears in the value in exchange
of the product. Nor is this all Wherever there is
(10:17):
a type of production, the phenomena of which result in rent,
the measurement of value is not the mean cost of production,
but the marginal cost of production. Marks fail to note
this limitation, with the result that he cannot understand the
nature of rent and was led into obvious contradictions. And
he fails also to take any account of the fluctuating
(10:39):
character of demand. He seems to have regarded demand as
purely static, and falls, as a consequence, into all the
difficulties which boon Barbeck and the Austrian school have emphasised
to say, moreover, with Marx, that the cost of a
laborer is the socially necessary cost, the lowest cost, that is,
at which it can be produced, is immediately to bring
(11:01):
within purview tests of his hypothesis, which he entirely failed
to apply. For if wages represent the cost of necessaries,
the existence of a proletariat whose wages are above the
bare cost of necessaries clearly invalidates the whole process, and
in fact, the question of a wages level is an
historical problem in which logical considerations do not play the
(11:23):
whole part. Social conscience, for example, as with the trade,
boards may insist upon a rate of wages historically above
the socially necessary cost, and trade unions may, by the
combined strength they represent, lead to the same result. If
a state, even though it be a capitalistic state, chose
(11:44):
to adopt a policy of a minimum basis of civilized
life in which a wage standard was fixed, the iron
law of wages, which Marks deduced from his theory of value,
would immediately be obsolete. He must not be forgotten moreover
that in the Marks analysis whatever does not appear as
wages is always regarded as unearned profits of rent and interest.
(12:07):
This is perhaps no unfair account, but it is outside
the evidence of facts to argue that the task of
directing business the work of the entrepreneur, is not to
count as labor and does not create value. Even when
a suspicion of this impossibility dawned upon Marks, he dismissed
the earnings of direction simply as cunning and argued that
(12:28):
all profits contain an element of surplus value which differs
from interest, wages, and payment to the entrepreneur. But if
profits are not a payment for work, then it should
surely follow that the capitalist must take it also, otherwise
he is gifted with a quality of moderation with which
Marks does not normally endow him. In such a general background,
(12:51):
the Marxian theory of value seems clearly untenable, not less
on theoretic grounds than from an analysis of the facts
of business. Yet it is equally undeniable that Marx's view
has obtained the assent of a whole class of society
to its truth, and it is therefore worth while for
a moment to inquire exactly what magic it possesses from
(13:12):
which its strengthening hold is derived that, it may be suggested,
is simple enough. For the technical economist, the difference between
profits and rent was fundamental. Men like Ricardo and Nassausenia
saw a natural distinction in source of origin, which manufacturers
like Bright embodied in the legitimate earnings of a hard
(13:33):
working milowna whatever his wealth, and the illegitimate because on
earned income of a land owning duke. They saw it
the more clearly when, as in the period of Marx's
own maturity, they were struggling to free his business from
the environment of a hostile squirearchy. But to the laborer,
as Marx clearly saw, such a distinction was for practical
(13:54):
purposes irrelevant. The world was divided for him into those
who lived by wages and those who did not. Those
who lived by wages were poor, those who did not
live by wages were rich. Assume, as Marks assumed, that
the surplus theory of value is true, and the riches
of those who do not live by wages adue to
(14:15):
the poverty of those who do. The worker was able
to see that he was poor. He saw also that
he produced more than he could consume, and that his
surplus production was divided among a relatively small class of
rich and often idle men. A theory such as Marxies
inevitably appealed to him as the natural explanation of his
(14:35):
suppressed condition. He clung to it not by virtue of
any logical estimation of its theoretic adequacy, but because it
summarized the most poignant experience he knew. The Marxian law
of wages, moreover, will from its very nature win you
adherents at every period of commercial depression. At any moment
(14:56):
when there is a decline in the effective demand for commodities,
or when the the strength of trade union resistance is
at a low ebb, the impact of capitalism upon the
wage earner will closely resemble what Marks insisted is its
normal relation, For few business men have imagination enough to
realize that there are other ways to the rehabilitation of
markets than the reduction of price by means of lower wages. Inevitably, therefore,
(15:21):
the worker will move from the acceptance of surplus value
to the philosophy which Marks constructed as its natural environment.
The law of the concentration of capital stands upon firmer ground.
The greater the degree of complexity involved in the productive
process argues marks the fewer will be the number of
(15:42):
persons controlling its instruments. Everything contributes to the intensification of
this process. New means of communication are established, the problems
of which are beyond the solution of the small capitalist.
Important mechanical inventions are beyond its financial means. Territorial consolidation
(16:02):
destroys the local market in which he was once a
privileged person. The process, indeed, is neither immediate nor direct.
It took the bourgeoisie three centuries to expropriate the artisan
and create the proletariat, but once the process had begun,
the development was inexorable. Over production created a new army
(16:23):
of reserve workers. The substitution of pasture for arable farming
concentrated a large rural population in the towns. The economies
of large scale production forced hitherto independent producers into the
ranks of wage earners. The capitalistic system moves from a
national to an international character. Its market becomes the world.
(16:46):
Its nature involves increasing centralization until the control of the
forces of production reaches a point where its further development
in private hands is impossible. For alongside the development of
accumulation is the increase of the proletariat. The workers cannot
any longer endure the misery that is involved in the
capitalist regime. They have learned discipline from the training that
(17:10):
is necessitated by the mechanism of the process of which
they are the victims. The knell of capitalist private property
then sounds. The expropriators are expropriated to the great capitalist.
There succeeds the state, which is captured by the workers
for their own purpose. The result of capitalism is in
(17:30):
fact its own destruction. It produces, in Hegelian fashion, its
own antithesis. The very condition of its growth is that
it should involve the laws which imply its inevitable ruin.
We need not accept the conclusion of the arguments who
insist on the important truth that it contains the wastage
(17:52):
of competition in large scale enterprise is a commonplace of
modern business, and the trust or cartel is the characteristic
symptom of the industrial development. There are, indeed, certain important
limitations to the simplicity of the Marxian view. The growth
of joint stock enterprise distributes over a wider circle the
number of those interested in the receipt of profits, even
(18:15):
while it limits those who actually control the industrial process itself,
while there are many minor industries, of which photography and
the repair of motor cars are examples, in which the
tendency is to the increase of small firms rather than
to the development of great ones. But parallel with this
evolution has gone a very striking centralization of credit, which
(18:36):
concentrates in continuously fewer hands the finances of the community. Agriculture. Indeed,
despite the large scale farming of Western America and the
development of agrarian cooperation, remains persistently individualist in temper. Yet
on the balance of inquiry, it is impossible to deny
the emergence of an increasingly collectivist spirit, and its real
(19:00):
action upon industry is the more important because it leads
without question to the demand by the workers of certain
nominal standards from the state, which are increasingly insisted upon
as the condition of business enterprise. Nor is that all.
It becomes obvious that certain industries are from their very
nature too vital in their results to be left to
(19:21):
the chaotic possibilities of private efforts. If the expropriators are
not actually expropriated, there comes, as with mines and railways,
a demand for some form of nationalization, and just as
the investigations of the thirties and forties produced the factory acts,
so it is legitimate to argue that the results of
inquiries like the Coal Commission of nineteen nineteen and the
(19:43):
Docker's Inquiry of nineteen twenty are likely to put a
term to the continuance of private enterprise. Capitalism, in fact,
prepares monopolies which immediately affect the community towards some form
of state administration. So regarded, of course, this view does
not involve the theory of revolution, which Marks regarded as
(20:06):
the inevitable corollary of capitalistic concentration. It need not, indeed
involve a transition towards a socialistic state at all. All
that would seem to be implied would be the removal
of industries essential to the welfare of the community from
the danger of exploitation by private interests. The logic of
(20:26):
a necessary conflict resultant upon the concentration of capital is
derived by Marks from other sources. It is the corollary
of his interpretation of history that, broadly speaking, may be
summarized by saying that all the phenomena of history are
the result of economic motives. To them are traceable legal
(20:47):
and social institutions, not less than the religion and philosophy
of each age. The system of production is the ultimate factor,
in short, by which the mass of human relationships is determined. Protestantism,
Engels wrote, is essentially a bourgeois religion. So too, in
a feudal period, we should expect the legislation to reflect
(21:09):
not general ideas of right, but those ideas of right
which are compatible with the maintenance of feudalism. But ideas change,
and in Marx's view, the source of changes to be
discovered in the transformation of one economic system into another.
A new external world produces new internal ideas. Let women
(21:29):
enter industry in the mass, and, as mister Bertrand Russell
has pointed out, ideas which not even the logic of
Plato and Stuart Mill could make obvious, become accepted without question.
Two hundred years ago it was unthinkable that a peer
should go into the city. Today, finances enmeshed political life
within its fold, so that no company prospects us is
(21:52):
complete until the peerage is represented there. No one can
doubt the very large measure of truth in this outlook.
No one can write the history of English Puritanism, of
the Struggle for Toleration or of the American Revolution, without
making the defense of an economic incentive fundamental to their explanation.
(22:12):
But it is equally clear that the insistence upon an
economic background as the whole explanation is radically false. No
economic motive can explain the suicidal nationalism of the Balkans.
The War of nineteen fourteen may have been largely due
to conflicting commercial imperialisms, but there was also a competition
(22:33):
of national ideas which was at no point economic. Historically, too,
the part played by religion in the determination of social
outlook was, until at least the Peace of Westphalia as
important as that played by material conditions. Luther represents something
more than a protest against the financial exactions of Rome.
(22:55):
The impulses of men, in fact, are never referable to
any single source. The love of power, heard, instinct, rivalry,
the desire of display, all these are hardly less vital
than the acquisitiveness which explains the strength of material environments.
Engels indeed seems to have realized the narrowness of the
(23:16):
Orthodox view, for in the later years of his life
he insisted that the dominant part ascribed by Marks to
the economic motive was due mainly to its neglect by
his opponents, and there was not always time, place, and
opportunity to do justice to the other considerations. But with Marx,
the economic motive is not only final, it is final
(23:38):
in a particular way. The only durable source of faction,
says Madison, is property, and for Marx, the emergence of
private property and history is the beginning of the class struggle.
Immediately society can be divided into those who do and
those who do not possess private property. A power is
released which explains the changes of history. For the class
(24:01):
which possesses property molds the civilization of that society and
the service of its own interests. He controls the government,
it makes, the laws, it bills, the social institutions of
the commonwealth in accordance with its own desires. Slave and
free man, master and servant. These have been the eternal
antitheses of history. With the advent of capitalism, the struggle
(24:25):
is at once simplified and made more intense. Thenceforward the
final stage of the class war, the struggle between bourgeoisie
and proletariat emerges, and just as each social order of
the past is secreted within its womb the germ of
its successor. As for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does
(24:45):
the latter contain within itself the germ of its communists successor. Capitalism,
said Marx, produces its own gravedigger. The conflict, in his view,
was an inevitable and a bitter one, and it was
bound to result in the victory of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie,
he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, is incapable of continuing
(25:07):
in power because it is incapable of securing a bare
subsistence to its slaves, and the result is a growing
sense of revolt in the worker, who, ultimately, by a
revolutionary act, assumes the reigns of power. In a large sense,
it is obvious that the substance of this interpretation is accurate.
(25:27):
The fact of the class struggle, as Marx himself pointed out,
is a commonplace of historians and economists, and it may
be added that to deny its importance is to make
history unintelligible. Where Marx parted company with his predecessors was
in the deductions he drew from his perception of its
significance for Whereas with men like Madison and Guizeaux, the
(25:49):
fact of conflict produced a sense of horror at its
implications and a search for a technique that its dangers
might be obviated. With Marx, the conflict was fundamentally and
both its method and ultimate outcome were to hymn alike obvious.
Whereas with Madison there is an ever present uncertainty whether
a just victory may not suffer betrayal or a wrong
(26:11):
object be pursued. With Marx the processes predetermined, and, save
for a brief period in eighteen seventy, no hesitation seems
to have crossed his mind. The method by which the
proletariat was to secure power lies at the very root
of Marx's doctrine, and it has been in our own
day perhaps the main source of his influence. The method
(26:35):
was revolution, and a dictatorship of iron rigor would consolidate
the new system until the period of transition had been
effectively bridged. Marx did not blind himself to what all
this implied. The history of capitalism was the history of
a relentless defense of each phase of the rights of property.
They were maintained by methods at each point unconnected with
(26:57):
ethical demands. If the conflict was extreme, as in the
days of June eighteen forty eight or with the Commune
of Paris, the last ounce of misery was wrung from
its opponents that capitalism might be secure. A period of
comparative quiescence may produce the concession of social reform, but
this is merely deception. Once a really vital point is
(27:21):
touched by the workers demands, they are met by armed resistance.
That means, of course, that only by conscious, violent intervention
can communism be realized. The proletariat must seize a propitious
moment for the revolution, but until it comes, they must
do all in their power to disturb the existing regime,
(27:42):
even if minor successes have been achieved by the aid
of the liberal minded bourgeoisie. From the first hour of victory,
the workers must level their distrust against their former allies.
They must create a working class organization of their own
workers committees, local workers councils to oppose proletarian institutions and
(28:02):
their influence to those of the middle class state. The
communists must arm the proletariat and do all they can
to cut down the army of the state. As the
chief weapon of defense possessed by the bourgeoisie. Whether workers
are in the militia, they must form within it a
secret organization. To obtain its control. They must form their own, independent,
(28:23):
if hidden, military force, and acquire arms by every method.
Influential democrats to whose word the working class seems to
respond must be discredited. The old social order, in fact,
must be attacked at every point. Communists have two functions,
only to prepare for the revolution and to consolidate it successfully.
(28:45):
When it has been prepared, they must think of themselves
not as realizing an ideal, but only as setting free
the elements of a new society concealed within the womb
of the old. The period of consolidate nation, moreover, must
be a period of high in dictatorship. Marx had no
illusions about the possibility of a democratic governance in such
(29:08):
an hour. The ideals of freedom were impossible to maintain
until the ground so conquered had been made secure. Revolution
provokes counter revolution, and a victorious proletariat must be on
its guard against reaction. Revolution, in fact demands of the
revolutionary class that it secure its purpose by every method
(29:29):
at its disposal. It has neither time nor opportunity for
compassion or remorse. Its business is to terrorize its opponents
into acquiescence. It must disarm antagonism by execution, imprisonment, forced labor,
control of the press. For as it cannot allow any
effort at the violent overthrow of what it has established,
(29:51):
so must its stamp out such criticism as might be
the prelude to further attack. Revolution is war, and war
is founded upon terror. The methods of capitalism must be
used for the extinction of capitalism. For as capitalism has
made of life itself the cheapest of commodities, there need
be no repining at its sacrifice. And the result in
(30:13):
any case is worth the cost, since it destroys the
possibility of future sale. It would have been a wanton
betrayal of trust, said Marx of the Paris Commune. To
observe the traditional forms of liberalism. The end, in fact,
is too great to be nice about the means employed.
Nor can we expect that a peaceful revolution is possible.
(30:36):
While Marx had certain doubts of England on the whole,
he was certain that a violent struggle was inevitable. The
workers might capture Parliament at the poles, but political power
of that kind is in any case a shadow, and
were it used for an assault upon property, it would
inevitably provoke an armed resistance. Marks indeed went further and
(30:57):
was openly contemptuous of democracy. It was a bourgeois invention,
unrelated to the real and used only to deceive the people.
Again and again, the proletariat is betrayed. And throughout Marx's
writings there is the assumption that reliance must be placed
upon a class conscious minority, for in his view, there
(31:18):
is no place in history for the majority principle. The
record of states is the clash between determined minorities contending
for the seat of power. To introduce considerations of consent.
To wait on in the belief that the obvious rightness
of communist doctrine will ultimately persuade men to its acceptance
is entirely to ignore reality. The mass of men will
(31:41):
always acquiesce in or be indifferent to, whatever solutions are afforded.
Communists must proceed upon the assumption that nothing matters save
the enforcement of their will. Upon the end, this revolution
is to serve the forms its purpose will adopt. Marx
has written, but les obviously with justice on his side,
(32:03):
for speculation in distant historical futures is the worst form
of gambling. It was with the destruction of capitalism and
the period of transition therefrom that he was mainly concerned.
A new productive system was bound to involve new institutions
which no man could foresee. That the communist maxim from
each according to his powers, to each according to his
(32:25):
wants would become operative was of course obvious to him.
The performance would be measured in terms of labor time,
a possibly inconsistent hypothesis he took for granted, But he
was always emphatic that the future must settle itself. He
insisted that the measure of distribution would be necessarily unequal
(32:46):
in the period of transition umay as he saw destroyed
by catastrophe. But creation is not an immediate and spontaneous process,
so that he nowhere set limits to the duration of
this intermediate period. It was necessary to wait until the
habits engendered by a new productive system created a psychology
in which the dogma of equality superseded the bourgeois hypothesis
(33:10):
of individual rights. The main thing was the destruction of
a regime in which class distinction made possible the servitude
of the many. It was possible to have confidence in
an order in which the whole force of social effort
was deliberately placed at the disposal of the commonwealfare. End
of Part five
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.