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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Part six of Carl Marx an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This Libraryvox recording is in the public domain. Six. A
generation which has seen this doctrine supported by machine guns
and baynets is unlikely to belittle its importance. Nor can
it be denied that not a little of social evolution
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has taken the course marks predicted. Anyone who reads the
history of the industrial struggle in Colorado or West Virginia
will find it difficult to discover a limit of unreason
which capitalism is not willing consistently to overpass. The treatment
of communists in Hungary and Finland has exactly the characteristics
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he foretold. An isolated community like the miners of South
Wales becomes naturally communist in the background of incompetence and
ill treatment from their employers and representative government, at least
in its classical form, seems unlikely to justify the high
hopes of its Benthamite exponents. Every country in the world
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that has experimented with universal suffrage has experienced a sense
of disillusion. It is even commonplace to argue that reason
has little place in political struggle, and to pin faith
to an irrational impulse which seeks no more than the
satisfaction of individual desire. If there has been an improvement
in the general standard of civilization, an increasing unwillingness, for example,
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to inflict onnecessary pain, there are no signs of the
mitigation of the class conflict. On the contrary, the events
of the last decade point directly to its exacerbation, and
we have obviously entered upon a period in which the
rights of property are challenged at their foundation. Certainly, it
is unquestionable that the purchase price of capitalist survival is
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the offer of concessions which a generation ago would have
seemed not less unnecessary than unthinkable. Yet the approximation of
the general atmosphere to the condition Marks had in view
hardly justifies the principles on which he placed his reliance.
To begin with. The preparation for revolution is a qualitatively
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different problem from what it was in the days of
the Paris Barricades. It is possible, in a mood of defeat,
for a civilian population to destroy a regime which the
army and navy no longer uphold, and, as was demonstrated
long ago by Cromwell, a military force which is dissatisfied
with its civilian superiors can without difficulty become their master.
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But for a party of men in the position of
communists in the modern state, the situation is very different.
Unless they are the majority and consequently the government, the
hostility of the army and navy is certain. Nor can
they obtain on any large scale the necessary equipment for insurrection.
They would have to obtain control of the national arsenals,
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and that would mean the dispersion of forces in any
case small by hypothesis, they would have to meet in
the people at large at least a mood of acquiescence.
They would have to guarantee a supply of food, which
in any but a dominantly agricultural society would be practically
impossible if international credit were seriously impaired by the revolution.
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Even if we regard a general strike as tantamount in
the conditions of modern industry to a revolution, the difficulties
are overwhelming. A general strike might well succeed as a
protest against war for its penumber, might in the future
arouse emotions of determination that would be irresistible. But upon
any less dramatic issue, it seems tolerably certain that once
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again the army and navy must be in the control
of the strikers if success is to be assured. For
a modern army can supply all services connected with transportation,
it can secure the distribution of food, and the problem
of fuel is becoming less and less a matter of
mining coal. The Marxian view of a secretly armed minority
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assuming power at a single stroke is unthinkable in the
modern state. He would have to imply either the existence
of a government so weak that it had practically ceased
to be a government at all, or what is perhaps
an equivalent, a population actively sympathetic to the revolutionary minority.
The resources of publicity in modern civilization make impossible the
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private preparation of the gigantic effort assumed by the Marxian hypothesis.
But this is only the beginning of the difficulty. Marks
assumed throughout his analysis a system of compact states, the
life of which was mainly determined by economic considerations, and
each relatively independent of its neighbors. Each of these assumptions
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is only partially true of the modern world. A state
like England, which is wholly dependent on foreign trade, could
not undergo a successful revolution except upon the assumption that
an neighbours viewed its results with benevolence. Such an attitude
on the part, for instance, of America is very unlikely,
and the rupture of Anglo American trade would be fatal
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to any revolution in this country. Nor is that all.
It is quite clear that the division a revolution would
imply must in its workings be very partially determined by
economic considerations. In a country like America, for example, there
would be at least three other factors of vital importance.
An American communist revolution would have to cope with problems
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of distance, which would probably render it abortive at a
very early stage. It would not, as in France, be
a matter of the immense impact of the capital and
the life of the nation. Washington is relatively insignificant in
the perspective of America. To control the whole continent would
involve controlling the most complicated railway system in the world,
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and even if that difficulty could be surmounted, a complex
of national differences would have to be assuaged. German, French, English, Irish, Polish.
These have their special characteristics which the American capitalist has
been able to exploit to their common disadvantage. It is
difficult to see how an appeal to a communist minority
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of each would result in the transcendence of these differences.
Even then, the religious problem remains, and the whold of
the churches upon the mind, particularly of the Latin peoples,
would not be easy to loosen. For Marx, insisting only
upon the economic motive, it is easy to ignore these difficulties,
but it is far too narrow an outlook not to
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realize that the outset that appeal can be made to
other incentives every wit as strong. And even if it
were argued that marks could in our own time assume
that the day of such prejudice as nationality and religion
and gender is passing, which is doubtful, and that the
barriers built by economic difference and now alone important, his
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conclusion would not follow. For in a period of universal suffrage,
it ought then to be possible to capture the seat
of power at the poles and throw upon the capitalist
the onus of revolting against a socialist democracy. There are, however,
other approaches to the problem which Marx did not adequately consider.
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There is, in the first place, the general result upon
society of the practice of violence, particularly when the destructive
nature of modern warfare is borne in mind, and in
the second there is a special psychological result upon the
agents of the opposing forces in such a regime. Marx
did not consider these possibilities, in part because he judged that,
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in any case, the conflict was inevitable, and also because
he was convinced that whatever sacrifices had to be made
would be ultimately justified by the results. Such an attitude
is of course simply an instance of his general failure
to waste sufficiently the substance of a political psychology. In
part also, it is the corollary of a determinism which
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the facts in issue at no point justify. For it
is obvious that if revolution, with its attendant violence, is
justified for any cause in which you happen to believe profoundly,
no modern state can hope for either security and order.
The war has shown clearly that the impulses of savagery,
which are checked by peace, are, when loosed, utterly destructive
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of the foundations of a decent existence. If life became
an organized and continuous jacquery, civilization could quite easily be
reduced to the state. Where As in mister Wells's imaginary
but far from impossible picture, some aged survivor may tell
of an organized Europe as a legend which his grandchildren
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cannot hope to understand. Violence on the grand scale. In fact,
so far from proving an avenue to communism, would be
the one kind of existence in which the impulses demanded
by a communist state had no hope of emergence. For
the condition of communism is the restraint of exactly those
appetites which violence releases, and Marx has nowhere indicated how
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this difficulty could be met. Even beyond this issue, a
further point must be raised. Marx has assumed the seizure
of power and a period of rigorous control until the
people are prepared for communism, but he has not shown
what approximate length that period is to be, nor what
certainty we have that those who act as controllers of
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the dictatorship will be willing to surrender their power at
the proper time. It is a commonplace of history that
power is poisonous to those who exercise it. There is
no reason to assume that the Marxian dictator will in
this respect be different from other men, and ex HYPOTHESI
it will be more difficult to defeat his malevolence, since
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his regime will have excluded the possibility of opposition. No
group of men who exercise the powers of a despot
can ever retain the habit of democratic responsibility that is obvious,
for instance, in the case of men like Sir Henry
Mayne and Fits James Stephen, who, having learned in India
the habit of autocratic government, become impatient on their return
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to England of the slow process of persuasion which democracy implies.
To sit continuously in the seat of office is inevitably
to become separated from the mind and wants of those
over whom you govern. For the governing class acquires an
interest of its own, a desire for permanence, a wish
perhaps to retain the dignity and importance which belong to
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their function, and they will make an effort to secure them. That,
after all, is only to insist that every system of
government breeds a system of habits, and to argue, as
a corollary, therefrom that the Marxian dictatorship would breed habits
fatal to the emergence of the regime marks had ultimately
in view. The special vice of every historic system of
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government has been its inevitable tendency to identify its own
private good with the public welfare. To suggest that communists
might do the same is no more than to postulate
their humanity. And it may be added that if they
surrendered power at a reasonable time, the grounds for so
doing being obviously in their nature non economic, would thereby
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vitiate the truth of the materialistic interpretation of history. All this,
it is worth noting, is to omit from consideration the
ethical problems that are involved. It is obvious, for example,
that it involves the complete erosion of the whole historic process.
But the erosion of responsibility in the governing class is
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the destruction of personality in their subjects. In such a regime,
notions of liberty and equality are out of place. Yet
it is obvious that the two main defects of capitalism
are its failure to produce liberty and equality for the
mass of humble men and women. That is to say,
contemplated a condition which reproduces exactly the chief vices of capitalism,
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without offering any solid proof of their ultimate extinction. For
after all, the chief effort that is worth making is
towards a civilization in which what mister Graham Wallace has
termed the capacity of continuous initiative is implied in the
fact of citizenship. It is clear enough that the possibility
upon which the existence of that capacity turns is a
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wide distribution of power. A man whose thought and acts
are at the disposal of other men is deprived of
his personality, and that deprivation is implied in the rigorous
centralization to which Marx looked forward. Unquestionably, he was right
in his insistence that the distribution of economic power in
a capitalist state makes the enjoyment of such personality impossible
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to most. But it does not seem any more likely
to emerge in the successor to it that he contemplated.
We may go further and argue that it is impossible
in any state where the main purpose of and motive
to effort is the increase of material wealth. No society
can realize itself in any full sense of the word
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until the mainspring of its existence is a capacity to
value things of the mind as more precious than material commodities.
That involves the sociology in which the economic motive which
Marks emphasized is appraised at a low level. Obviously, to
achieve the condition in which that appraisal is possible involves
an educational system far different both in scope and purpose
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from what we now have. It involves a complete transformation
of values, in which things like the wider appreciation of art,
the study of science and philosophy, the release, in short
of the creative energies of men from their present bondage
are regarded as the main and immediate effort of political organization. Yet,
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if historic experience is to count for anything, and Marks
this philosophy is nothing if not the interpretation of historical experience.
It is exactly this transformation of values which cannot take
place in the development Marks had in view. The Barbarian
invasions of Rome did not produce a great art and
a great culture. They produced the Dark Ages. The Thirty
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Years War impeded constructive effort in Germany until the threshold
of the nineteenth century. Nor has our own experience been different.
The idealism of nineteen fourteen has perished before the greater
strength of the purely destructive forces released in the struggle.
What we have realized is how tenuous and fragile are
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the bonds of civilization, how little likely they are to
be reinforced by any efforts save that of peace. In
such a background, the conflict that marx envisaged looms before
us as the harbinger of precisely those evils from which
we are seeking release. It emphasizes in men the impulses
against which civilization is a protest that wrong can be
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wiped out with wrong. That we are to regard ourselves
as the victims of blind and impersonal forces against which
it is useless to strive. That the possessive impulses of
men cannot be transcended by creative effort. These and things
like these are a gospel of impossible despair in that aspect.
Surely the older socialists were right who made the basis
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of their creed a doctrine of right and fraternity and justice.
For right and fraternity and justice imply love as their foundation.
They do not spring, even at the last vain, striving
from a doctrine founded upon hate. End of Part six