History of Economic Analysis part 41 ppt

The orthodox Marxist, for whom the prophet’s every word is eternal truth and for whom dissent spells not only error but sin, will return a negative answer, but in this particular sense:

3 PLAN OF THE PART

We are going to change our method of presentation In Part II we had not only to cover a vast span of years but also to contend with the difficulty that there was no generally accepted system to describe Strictly speaking, no such system existed in the period covered by Part III But there was something that was almost though not quite as good That is to say, the great majority of the people who, as we have put it, recognized one another as economists agreed sufficiently about the fundamentals of subject matter, method, and results to make it possible to systematize their contributions, although they disagreed—individually or groupwise—on practically every individual problem within that frame of fundamentals There was even more of common ground and, as between successive decades, of continuity than the individual writers would have been prepared to admit For, then as now, most economists were apt to stress differences more than agreements, though there were important exceptions to this, the most important being

J.S.Mill It is true that there were many dissentients toto coelo, men who condemned the

growing quasi-system of ‘classical’ economics root and branch But most of these do not meet our test of analytic competence And others objected on nonanalytic, that is, mainly

on political, moral, or cultural grounds, so that their objections are not necessarily1 relevant for us, even where we sympathize with them

Availing ourselves of these facts, we shall be able to do in this Part what we were not able to do in Part II, namely, after having recalled the salient features of the political and

intellectual scenery (Chapters 2 and 3), to draw a picture of analytic developments with

reference to a cross section This cross section will be represented (in Chapter 5) by

J.S.Mill’s Principles But in order to simplify matters, we shall relieve Chapter 5 of some

of its burden, by introducing ourselves to the most important individuals and groups beforehand (Chapter 4) and by reserving the details of pure theory and of money, as much as possible, for two separate chapters (6 and 7) Chapter 7 will also take care of the little that must be said on banking and cycles

4 CONCERNING THE MARXIST SYSTEM Our plan is simple and works well in all cases save one: the case of the Marxist system The difficulty is not, as might be supposed, that Marxist economics stands aloof in splendid isolation and is incommensurable with the rest of the work to be discussed We shall see, on the contrary, that it is part and parcel of that period’s general economics, which is precisely why it must be fitted in here I was not thinking of Marx when I spoke

of dissentients toto cælo in the preceding section, and he can and will be treated in this

book exactly as are other

1

The reader will understand, of course, that a moral objection may constitute a motive for finding

factual or logical objections that are relevant for us

economists.1 Nor does the difficulty arise from the fact that he was also a sociologist For his sociology can be fitted into its appropriate place just as well as can his economics The difficulty is that in Marx’s case we lose something that is essential to understanding him when we cut up his system into component propositions and assign separate niches

to each, as our mode of procedure requires To some extent this is so with every author: the whole is always more than the sum of the parts But it is only in Marx’s case that the loss we suffer by neglecting this2 is of vital importance, because the totality of his vision,

as a totality, asserts its right in every detail and is precisely the source of the intellectual fascination experienced by everyone, friend as well as foe, who makes a study of him The way in which I propose to meet this difficulty cannot be satisfactory to the orthodox Marxist for whom Marx is the central sun of social science Nor can it be satisfactory to him who wants artistic pictures of individual thinkers But it is perfectly satisfactory for every reader who wants the picture of the evolution of technical economics that this book

is intended to present We recognize fully, but do not mean to duplicate, the distinct task

of Marxology We shall not disturb our plan We shall take Marx’s work to pieces and shall use, with strict economy, only what is relevant to our purpose, in the places indicated by our purpose But we shall use the rest of this section in order to comment on the whole

I Marx figures in this book only as a sociologist and an economist Of course, that creed-creating prophet was much more than this And his creed-creating activity, on the one hand, and his policy-shaping and agitatorial activity, on the other hand, are inextricably interwoven with his analytic activity So much is this the case that the question arises whether he can be called an analytic worker at all This question may be answered in the negative from two very different standpoints The orthodox Marxist, for whom the prophet’s every word is eternal truth and for whom dissent spells not only error but sin, will return a negative answer, but in this particular sense: on Marx’s Hegelian eminence, acting and reasoning, reality and thought, become identical; analysis cannot,

on that level, be divorced from practice; therefore, if we do call Marx’s thought analytic,

we ought to add at once that it was analytic in a sense that differs essentially from the usual one; hence, his work is not analytic in the usual sense, and the author of this book, congenitally incapable of doing justice to it, ought to keep his unholy hands off it Some anti-Marxists would agree in the result, though they might formulate it differently by advising me to keep my hands off the unholy thing: for them, Marx’s work is a series of essentially unscientific diatribes, penned by a man congenitally unable to see a fact or to reason straight

1

Since this point is both very important and likely to cause surprise to some readers, I wish, besides referring them to what they will read in subsequent chapters, to state at once that this surprise is entirely due to the atmosphere of prophetic wrath in which Marx presented his economic analysis and which, to layman and philosopher, makes it look like something entirely different from any other It is true, in addition, that the Anglo-American professional literature, both in this and the next period, treated him as an outsider But in that literature other foreign economists of first rank fared no better in this respect

2

We never neglect this quite In all the more important cases, economists are ‘introduced’ to the

reader and these introductions give us the opportunity to look at personal performances as a whole But I cannot go too far in this, for theorems and not persons are the heroes of our story

My answer to our question is, however, in the affirmative The warrant for this

affirmative answer is in the proposition that the bulk of Marx’s work is analytic by virtue

of its logical nature, for it consists in statements of relations between social facts For instance, the proposition that a government is essentially an executive committee of the bourgeois class may be entirely wrong; but it embodies a piece of analysis in our sense, acceptance or refutation of which is subject to the ordinary rules of scientific procedure

It would be absurd indeed to describe the Communist Manifesto, in which this proposition

occurs, as a publication of scientific character or to accept it as a statement of scientific truth It is not less absurd to deny that, even in Marx’s most scientific work, his analysis was distorted not only by the influence of practical purposes, not only by the influence of passionate value judgments, but also by ideological delusion.3 Finally, it would be absurd

to deny the difficulty that in some cases rises to impossibility of disentangling his analysis from its ideological element But ideologically distorted analysis is still analysis

It may even yield elements of truth To sum up: we shall not chant O Altitudo each time Marx’s name turns up in the following pages; but neither do we put him out of court a limine; we simply recognize him as a sociological and economic analyst whose

propositions (theories) have the same methodological meaning and standing and have to

be interpreted according to the same criteria as have the propositions of every other sociological and economic analyst; we do not recognize any mystic halo.4

II Since Marx counts for us only as far as he was a ‘scientific’ sociologist and economist, we need not consider any aspects of his career, activities, or personal character that are not relevant to his ‘scientific’ work I wish to disclaim any intention to

‘size him up’ as a man, and this also applies to his friend and faithful ally, Engels Some facts, however, are necessary in order to see the work of each in its proper light They are presented in the footnote below.5 Let us underline a few of them First, nobody will 3

On the difference between these three kinds of distortion, see above, Part I

4

Let me repeat this: due account being taken of differences in definitions and in degree of

abstraction, every Marxist proposition is to carry the meaning which it would carry if penned by, say, Ricardo This formulation takes care of a claim often, and sometimes justly, made by Marxists, viz that critics (and even followers) of Marx are likely to miss his meaning by failing to attend to the facts that (1) Marx’s terminology differs from that of other economists (the word Value e.g., simply means different things with Marx and J.S.Mill); and (2) that he reasons, in different parts of his work, on widely differing levels of abstraction At the same time, that formulation spells refusal

to admit another claim, noticed above, that is sometimes made by Marxists and is implied in their answer to the question concerning the logical nature of Marx’s analysis, namely, the claim that Marxist propositions have, as it were, an astral body that is exempt from the ordinary rules of scientific procedure Our reply to this is: Marx reasons about the empirical world by the methods of empirical analysis; hence his propositions—as every Marxist who discusses criticisms at all, recognizes by implication—have the usual empirical meaning or none On the influence on him of Hegelian philosophy, see below, ch 3, sec 1b

5

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–83) was the product of a thoroughly bourgeois environment that failed

to provide economic independence, and of a thoroughly bourgeois education that made him (as it makes so many) an intellectual, a radical, and a scholar—the radicalism being of the bourgeois brand of his time and the scholarship being of the historico-philosophical, as distinguished from the mathematico-physical, type As much by choice as by necessity, he took to journalism rather than

to the academic career and in 1843 went to Paris, where he met Engels and economics (which he had touched only peripherically before) and where he made his position definitively socialist In

1849, he settled in London for good and, for such a voracious reader, this is almost equivalent to

saying that he settled in the British Museum library for good Active revolutionism—such as he had practiced in 1848 in Germany—was finished, and his research work was for the rest of his life interfered with only by the necessity of earning his bread (in part by journalistic work), by his activity in the First International (1864–72), and later on also by failing health The standard biography is still F.Mehring’s (1918) Though in some respects less marred by narrow prejudice than are other works of this writer and in general commendable, it calls for a protest on behalf of Marx in one respect: it entirely failed to do justice to the scientific element in Marx’s work We ourselves may find in his works abundant proofs of ideological bias, but Mehring goes too far when

he credits Marx with nothing but an intention to formulate proletarian ideology (of course he means

to be complimentary)

understand Marx and Engels who does not properly weigh the implications of their bourgeois cultural background, which is one of the reasons, though not the only one, why Marxism must be considered as a product of the bourgeois mind, a product that grew from eighteenth and early nineteenth-century bourgeois roots The belief that it ever meant or could mean anything to the masses or in fact to any group, except a limited number of intellectuals, is one of the most pathetic elements in the personal ideology of Marx and Engels.6 Second, our information enables us to form a pretty clear idea of Friedrich Engels (1820–95) interspersed a fairly successful business career with revolutionary activities until 1869, when he retired from business in order to serve the cause of Marxist socialism for the rest of his life Among other things he became the warden of Marx’s literary remains after the latter’s death and, in addition, something of an oracle and elder statesman (hence the object of attack by a younger generation) to the German Social Democratic party His self-effacing loyalty cannot but command our highest respect Throughout he aspired only to be the faithful henchman and mouthpiece of the Lord Marx It is therefore only from necessity that I point out—for it is necessary to do so to enable the reader to understand our situation with respect to the Marxist manuscripts that Engels edited—that he was not Marx’s intellectual equal and that, while fairly up

to the latter’s philosophy and sociology, he was particularly deficient in technical economics Of

his own economic publications, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845) will be

mentioned again: however biased, it is a creditable piece of factual research, nourished by direct observation The ‘Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie’ (in Ruge’s and Marx’s

Deutschfranzösische Jahrbücher, 1844) and his Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Unwälzung der

Wissenschaft (1878; English trans Anti-Dühring, 1907) are distinctly weak performances His

philosophical and sociological publications, though not original, keep a higher level We shall have

no occasion to mention either again But these remarks, let me repeat, should not induce us to think less of the man whose name is fully entitled to the honorific position it holds in the history of German socialism In par-ticular nothing is further from my mind than a wish to suggest that he was Marx’s slave In the 1840’s he may even have helped to educate Marx in economics and in socialism, for at that time he was much further along There are several biographies It suffices to

mention D.Ryazanov’s Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels (English trans., 1927, Russian original

unknown to me); there is a bibliography of works on both Marx and Engels in Marx-Engels

Institute (later the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute), Marx-Engels Archiv, vol I, 1926 [The first two volumes of the Marx-Engels Archiv were published in German and in a parallel Russian edition;

subsequent volumes have been published in Russian only.]

6

Marx took himself in and helped to foster the same delusion in his followers by building into his structure a sufficient number of phrases—very coarse ones among them—which indeed everyone can understand and which are what Marxism means to the vulgar, perhaps even to people who are not covered by this term

Marx’s opportunities for concentrated work At times, he indulged in activities and lived under conditions that are bound to get on a man’s nerves and to be more destructive of his scientific work than we might infer from the hours actually absorbed Nevertheless,

he had, on the average, an amount of time ‘to himself’ that compares favorably with the amount that is left, also on the average, to the typical American professor of our own day And he used it to the full Again, nobody will ever understand Marx and his work who does not attach appropriate weight to the erudition that went into it—the fruit of incessant labor that, starting from primarily- philosophical and sociological interests in his early years, was concentrated increasingly on economics as time went on, until his working hours were all but monopolized by it Nor was his the kind of mind in which scholarly

coal puts out the fire: with every fact, with every argument that impinged upon him in his reading, he wrestled with such passionate zest as to be incessantly diverted from his main

line of advance On this I cannot insist too strongly This fact would be my central theme

were I to write a Marxology Perusal of his Theorien über den Mehrwert suffices to

convince one of it And, once proved, it serves to establish in turn another fact and to solve a much discussed riddle: it serves to establish that he was a born analyst, a man who felt impelled to do analytic work, whether he wanted to or not and no matter what

his intentions were; and it serves to solve the riddle why he failed to finish his work but

instead left us heaps of disorderly manuscripts that no labor of love availed to put into an acceptable shape

Third, our information warrants the statements that he was very much a philosopher dabbling in sociology and politics (as do so many philosophers) until he went to Paris; that there he quickly made headway and found his feet as an economist; and that by the

time he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (1847; published 1848); that is to

say, at the age of 29,7 he was in possession of all the essentials that make up the Marxist Social Science, the only important lacunae being in the field of technical economics For the rest, the main line of his intellectual life may be described as a series of efforts to

work out that Social Science and to fill those lacunae—tasks which, I believe, Marx did not expect would involve any insurmountable difficulties, though he did expect that a great deal of further work would be required to straighten out and co-ordinate everything that was to find a place within the vast structure

This interpretation is not the usual one It attributes to Marx an early conception of all that is fundamental in his scheme of thought and, barring points of comparative detail, a large amount of consistency in developing it, springing from a theoretical purpose and plan that never varied in essentials Even Marxists, who may be expected to sympathize with this view, will find it too simple; but Marx critics will declare it to be downright wrong Accordingly some defense is necessary The relevant facts are these In 1859,

Marx published Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, which evidently was to be the first

installment of a comprehensive exposition and therefore constitutes proof that he must have thought himself equipped to write one The fact that he abandoned this torso proves 7

If this be so, it would afford another illustrative instance for Ostwald’s theory that thinkers conceive their truly original ideas before they are 30

that he was not, and that he felt he had made an unsatisfactory beginning But what of it? This is exactly what must be expected to happen in an enterprise of such magnitude— which, moreover, involves, on the economic side, a large amount of detail, theoretical still more than factual—and cannot be taken as proof that something had gone wrong with fundamentals He started afresh and, after struggles that are most instructively reflected in some of the manuscript material eventually published in three volumes by

Kautsky (Theorien über den Mehrwert, 1905–10), brought out a new first installment (Das Kapital, first vol., 1867).8 The fact that no second volume followed during Marx’s lifetime and that Engels had to edit the second volume (1885) and to compile a third one (1894), both from unfinished manuscripts, is interpreted by anti-Marxists to mean confession of failure: Marx, so they said, became conscious of the presence in his system

of irreconcilable inconsistencies (especially in his value theory), and therefore refused to

go on From the Theorien über den Mehrwert it can be shown, however, that Marx, when

he published the first volume, was perfectly aware of, and had planned for, what to his critics appeared to be irreconcilable inconsistencies His correspondence, it is true, establishes the fact that he deferred the completion of the second volume for reasons that

do not read too convincingly But surely this can be explained by the growing resistance

of an aging organism that was afraid of new efforts Thus, the facts mentioned cannot be held to disprove my interpretation The positive reasons I have for preferring it are his method of work that has been alluded to above, and my theorist’s knowledge of what Marx’s theoretical difficulties were—from his standpoint, they were not insurmountable This is, of course, quite compatible with my conviction that Marx’s system is seriously at fault I mean only that he could have presented a comprehensive economic theory without violating logic—he would always have had to do violence to facts

III Since we have decided to do what Marxists—perhaps rightly—resent, namely, to take the Marxist structure to pieces and to discuss each of these pieces in the places in which they belong, we shall not get an over-all view of it anywhere The following comments are intended to offer a partial substitute for such a view

The ‘pieces’ divide up into two groups, one sociological and the other economic The sociological pieces include contributions of the first order of importance such as the Economic Interpretation of History, which, as I shall argue, may be considered as Marx’s own, quite as much as Darwin’s descent of man is Darwin’s own But the rest of Marx’s sociology—the sociological framework that, like every economist, he needed for his economic theory—is neither objectively novel nor subjectively original His preconceptions about the nature of the relations between capital and labor, in particular,

he simply took from an ideology that was already dominant in the radical literature of his time.9 If, however, we wish to trace them further back, we can do so without difficulty A

8

This is all I have to say on the question whether and why Marx changed his plan The question, interesting as it is for Marxology, is quite irrelevant to my interpretation Any changes of plan are readily understandable in all cases of protracted efforts See, however, H.Grossmann: ‘Die

Ănderung des ursprünglichen Aufbauplans des Marxschen “Kapitals” und ihre Ursachen,’ Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1929

9

It is in this field that Mehring’s interpretation of Marxist doctrine (as a verbalization of proletarian ideology) comes nearest to being true Our quarrel with him is only that he extended this

interpretation to the whole of Marx’s work

very likely source is the Wealth of Nations A.Smith’s ideas on the relative position of

capital and labor were bound to appeal to him, especially as they linked up with a definition of rent and profits—as ‘deductions from the produce of labour’ (Book I, ch 8,

‘Of the Wages of Labour’)—that is strongly suggestive of an exploitation theory But these ideas were quite common during the enlightenment and their real home was France

French economists, ever since Boisguillebert, had explained property in land by violence,

and Rousseau and many philosophers had expanded on the subject There is, however, one writer, Linguet, who, more explicitly than others, drew exactly the picture that Marx made his own: the picture not only of landlords who subject and exploit rural serfs, but also of industrial and commercial employers who do exactly the same thing to laborers who are nominally free, yet actually slaves.10

This sociological framework offered most of the pegs that Marx needed in order to have something upon which to hang his glowing phrases And since historians are primarily interested in these, no matter whether they admire them or are shocked by them, it is difficult to gain assent to what is the obvious truth about the nature of the purely economic pieces of the Marxist system This obvious truth is that, as far as pure theory is concerned, Marx must be considered a ‘classic’ economist and more specifically

a member of the Ricardian group.11 Ricardo is the only economist whom Marx treated as

a master I suspect that he learned his theory from Ricardo But much more important is the objective fact that Marx used the Ricardian apparatus: he adopted Ricardo’s conceptual layout and his problems presented themselves to him in the forms that Ricardo had given to them No doubt, he transformed these forms and he arrived in the end at widely different conclusions But he always did so by way of starting from, and

criticizing, Ricardo—criticism of Ricardo was his method in his purely theoretical work

Only three outstanding illustrations can be mentioned here: Marx substantially accepted the Ricardian theory of value (see below, ch 6) and defended it by the Ricardian arguments but, recognizing that Ricardian values cannot be expected to be proportional to prices, tried to work out a different theory of the relation between the two; Marx,

10

S.N.H.Linguet (1736–94), a barrister and journalist, was a prolific and bellicose writer, who is

difficult to classify He criticized the physiocrats (Réponse aux docteurs modernes…1771) and

took part in many controveries of his day without making any mark But one of his books is of

great interest for us, his Théorie des loix civiles (1767), neither because of its attack upon

Montesquieu nor because of Morellet’s biting reply, but because it unfolded a quite elaborate historical sociology, the central theme of which was the enslavement of the masses I do not know that the book had much influence But, as a symptom at least, it stands at or near the fountainhead

of the ideology that Marx and many others, nonsocialists among them, have substituted for

capitalist reality, and on which sophomoric enthusiasms feed even today Linguet supplied not only the picture but also the characteristic spirit with which to look at it An example will illustrate Linguet adopts the theory that in the dawn of civilization there were agrarian populations, living in substantially equalitarian conditions, and that a kind of feudal society arose through the subjection

of those populations by warlike tribes who established themselves as their lords There is much to

be said for this theory, which is in fact accepted by some modern prehistorians Now, however, among the results of this subjection that created lords and serfs is everything we include in the term

‘culture.’ But Linguet has no eye for this It is the fact of subjection that matters to him and nothing else And his conclusion is moral indignation and nothing else

11 Observe that, so far as theory is concerned, this makes Marx an English economist And he was one

following Ricardo’s lead, ran up, as Ricardo did, against the problem of surplus value but, recognizing that Ricardo’s solution really was no solution at all, developed his exploitation theory from the Ricardian set-up; Marx wholly accepted, down to details, Ricardo’s theory of technological unemployment but, finding it inadequate for his purposes, tried to turn into a general ‘law’ what with Ricardo was no more than a possibility It is hoped that these points will become clearer as we proceed (chs 5 and 6) Here they are mentioned by way of anticipation to give definiteness to the meaning of my statements that Ricardo was Marx’s master, and that Marx, though he transformed the theoretical material he found, yet worked with tools that he found and not with tools that

he created This is only another way of expressing that, however ‘secular’ a phenomenon Marx may have been in some respects, he was essentially period-bound as a theoretical technician—a fact that later on created many a difficulty for followers who felt unable to admit that Marx could ever grow out of date in any respect

However, in order to drive home a point that seems important, I have strictly confined myself in the preceding paragraph to Marx’s theoretical technique But there are two features of Marxist theory that transcend technique And these were not period-bound

The one is his tableau économique In his analysis of the structure of capital, Marx

developed Ricardo once more But there is an element in it that does not hail from Ricardo but may hail from Quesnay: Marx was one of the first to try to work out an explicit model of the capitalist process.12 The other is still more important Marx’s theory

is evolutionary in a sense in which no other economic theory was: it tries to uncover the mechanism that, by its mere working and without the aid of external factors, turns any given state of society into another.13

IV This is all that our space permits us to say about the Marxist system in general and about the manner in which the component parts of it will be taken into account in this book.14 A reader’s guide should follow now But I feel unable to produce one Marx was 12

The next economist to try his hand at this task was Böhm-Bawerk (see below, Part IV, chs 5 and 6) The affinity between the two is hidden by phraseology and by trappings, but is nevertheless real and close

13

Marxologists sometimes speak of Marx’s methods’ being essentially ‘historical.’ This phrase carries in this connection two different meanings: it means, first, that different parts of Marxist theory may have been intended by Marx to apply to different states of society; and it means, second, what is meant above by the word ‘evolutionary.’ Both meanings are capable of defense But the phrase is infelicitous all the same, because it also carries other meanings—among them the one that is most naturally associated with the word ‘historical’—that do not apply to Marxist theory (On the evolutionary aspect of Marx’s theory, see below, ch 3, sec 4b.)

14

The reader need not, perhaps, be told again how incomplete all this is But there is one point that merits explicit notice I have emphasized the influence that Smith and Ricardo exerted upon Marx

I have mentioned the influence of Quesnay only as a possibility, because Marx’s model might have been developed independently from the Ricardian base But some other possible influences I have not mentioned at all Many have been asserted by other historians and, since Marx’s knowledge of literature was very nearly exhaustive, the possibility that they are right cannot be excluded But

there is no cogent reason for assuming other influences more specific than what is inevitably

implied in his having read, analyzed, and criticized very many other people I have therefore economized space by not mentioning any of the suggestions that have been offered In fact, as soon

as one has grasped the importance of Ricardo’s influence, which Marx did nothing to hide, and, in addition, the caliber of Marx’s mind, one will automatically cease to be interested in those

suggestions, let alone accusations of plagiarism

so diffuse and repetitive a writer, and, barring the first volume of Das Kapital, his

theoretical works reflect so unfinished a state of his argument, that it is impossible to point out what is most signifi-cant with any confidence Instead of attempting an impossible task, I shall refer my readers to a book by Dr Sweezy (the work of an accomplished theorist and a monument of unswerving loyalty) which presents Marx’s economics in the most favorable light and, in addition, is the best introduction to Marxist literature I know.15 Relying on this reference, I shall confine myself to tendering the following pieces of advice

There is no point whatever in perusing selected bits of Marx’s writings or even in

perusing the first volume of Das Kapital alone Any economist who wishes to study

Marx at all must resign himself to reading carefully the whole of the three volumes of

Das Kapital and of the three volumes of Theorien über den Mehrwert.16 Further, there is

no point whatever in tackling Marx without preparation Not only is he a difficult author but, owing to the nature of his scientific apparatus, he cannot be understood without a working knowledge of the economics of his epoch, Ricardo in particular, and of economic theory in general This is all the more important because the necessity for it does not show on the surface Again, the reader must be on his guard against being misled by traces of Hegelian terminology It will be argued below that Marx did not allow his analysis to be influenced by Hegelian philosophy But he sometimes uses terms

in their specifically Hegelian sense, and a reader who takes them in their usual sense misses Marx’s meaning Finally, a reader who wishes for anything other than indoctrination must, of course, learn to distinguish both facts and logically valid reasoning from the ideological mirage Marx himself helps us in this: sometimes, becoming semiconscious of ideological delusion, he rises, in defense, to the heights of his vituperative rhetoric, which therefore serves to indicate the spots at which there is something wrong

15

Paul M.Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (and ed., 1946) My recommendation

does not imply agreement with all of Sweezy’s interpretations, especially with his attempt to make

a Keynesian of Marx Attention is drawn to the well-chosen entries in the bibliography, to which I have only one item to add: W.Lexis [J.A.S here inserted the title of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of

Marx, Zum Abschluss des Marxschen Systems (1896)—obviously a slip He probably intended to refer to a review article written by Lexis after the publication of vol III of Das Kapital, namely,

‘The Concluding Volume of Marx’s “Capital”’ in the Quarterly Journal of Economies, October

1895] The importance of Bortkiewicz’s contribution has been abundantly emphasized in Sweezy’s text

16

The Communist Manifesto is also indispensable, of course But for any purpose short of

becoming a Marxologist, I think that nothing need be added except the Class Struggles in France,

articles written in 1848–50, published as a book, with an introduction by Engels in 1895 Only the Marxologist need go into Marx’s correspondence

Socio-Political Backgrounds

DURING THE LAST decade or so before the French Revolution, some of the traits became visible of a social and political pattern that, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their immediate consequences were over, more or less established itself for the rest of the nineteenth century It seems, desirable to touch upon a few of its essential features, if only to correct some misapprehensions the reader’s mind may harbor and to soften the unrealistically definite colors in which the various ideological traditions have painted it

In doing so we shall have to struggle with a difficulty that is not new to us We are going to try to visualize an economic and social structure—in process of incessant change, of course—and the cultural superstructure that was either associated with it or, according to Marxist doctrine, generated by it: we call it the civilization or the spirit of

the times, or the Zeitgeist.1 But this Zeitgeist is never a structural unit It is always an

imperfect synthesis of warring elements and can never be described truthfully in terms of

a few consistent ‘principles.’ The most obvious reason for this is that at any given time

both the economic and social structure of a society and its Zeitgeist contain elements that

hail from historically prior states But there are other and more fundamental reasons, less easy to explain, which make it impossible to analyze what happens in a social organism

in terms of processes that conform to the immanent logic of its state and in terms of processes that are induced by the resistance of survivals or, still more superficially, as

‘progress’ and ‘reaction.’ The conceptual arrangement we are going to use bears witness

to this difficulty

On the whole, however, it may be averred that, though the peak of bourgeois

ascendancy occurred in the subsequent period, it was in the period under survey that the ascent of the business class was most nearly unimpeded, most nearly unchallenged In the

great nations, the bourgeoisie did not rule politically, the most important exceptions being the United States and, for the seventeen years of Louis Philippe’s regime, France But in all countries the gov-ernments, however unbourgeois in origin and structure, not excluding those that have been voted most ‘reactionary’ by bourgeois oppositions, backed the economic interests of the business class almost without question and did their

1 The Marxist term Überbau is satisfactorily rendered by its literal translation, superstructure But for the German word Zeitgeist there is no perfect equivalent Hence I am going to use it (as I do

other foreign terms that are hard to translate exactly) just as American physicists use

Eigenschwingung and American philosophers, Weltanschauung