07 - Karl Marx- An Essay by Harold J. Laski

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)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Part seven of Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Seven. The
real power and influence of Marx lie in a direction
essentially different from what is generally assumed. He was the
first thinker to expose, in all its hollowness, the moral

(00:23):
inadequacy of a commercial civilization. He showed that in any
society where the main effort is the attainment of wealth,
the qualities that are basically noble cannot acquire their full vigor.
He did, in fact, for the economic relationships of peoples
what grociers did for their international relationships. He founded both

(00:44):
a science and an ideal. For he made finally impossible
any economic system which makes the volume of trade the
test of national well being. Had he put in the
forefront of social discussion the ultimate question of the condition
of the people, had he performed the inc calculable service
to his generation of bringing to it a message of
hope in an epoch where men seem to themselves to

(01:07):
have become the hapless victims of a misery from which
there was no release. In every country of the world
where men have set themselves to the task of social improvement.
Mars has been always the source of inspiration and prophecy.
His weaknesses, of course, are obvious and important. He diagnoses
a disease admirably, says mister Wells in an excellent phrase,

(01:31):
and then suggests rather an incantation than a remedy. Yet
the diagnosis is an essential part of the cure. No
one can read or move. The picture he drew of
the results of the Industrial Revolution, massive in its outline,
convincing in its detail. It was an indictment such as
neither Carlyle nor Ruskin had power or strength to draw.

(01:53):
It is relatively unimportant that his explanations of the phenomena
he depicted have not stood the test of criticism. What
is vital in the whole was his perception that a
society dominated by business men and organized for the prosperity
of business men had become intolerable. Hardly less splendid was
his insistence that no social order is adequate in which

(02:15):
the collective energies of men are not devoted to their
common life. It does not matter that such perception had
been given to others, that such insistence was not new.
No thinker of the nineteenth century drove home the lesson
with force so irresistible or with urgency so profound. Even
his advocacy of catastrophic revolution has this much of truth

(02:38):
in it that a point is reached in the development
of any social system where men will refuse to accept
any longer a burden they find too great to bear,
and in that moment, if they cannot mitigate, they will
become determined to destroy. The condition, in fact, upon which
a state may hope to endure is its capacity for

(02:58):
making freedom in each generation more widespread and more intense.
Where Marx was wrong was in his belief that the
catastrophe was in itself worthy of attainment, and in his
emphasis upon its ultimate benefit. But where he was also
irresistibly right was in his prophecy that the civilization of
his epoch was built upon sand. And even the faults

(03:21):
of his prophecy may be pardoned to an agitator in exile,
to whom the cause of the oppressed was dearer than
his own welfare her bottom. The main passion by which
he was moved was the passion for justice. He may
have hated too strongly, he was jealous, and he was proud,
But the mainspring of his life was the desire to
take from the shoulders of the people the burden by

(03:44):
which it was oppressed. He realized that what, in all
varieties of time and place has caused the downfall of
a governing class has never been some accidental or superficial event.
The real cause of revolution is the unworthiness of those
who controlled the destinies of a people, indifference to suffering, selfishness,

(04:06):
lack of moral elevation. It was for those defects that
he indicted the class from which he sprang. He transformed
the fears of the workers into hopes. He translated their
effort from interest in political mechanisms to interest in social foundations.
He did not trust in the working of laws. He
sought always for the spirit that lay behind the order

(04:28):
of which they were the expression. He was often wrong,
he was rarely generous, He was always bitter. Yet when
the role of those to whom the emancipation of the
people is due comes to be called, few will have
a more honorable and none a more eminent place. End
of Part seven