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Karl Marx An Essay - Harold J. Laski · Karl Marx Classics Podcast

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Speaker 1: Part one of Carl Marx An Essay by Harold J. Laski.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Carl Marx An Essay by Harold J. Laski, London,
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Speaker 1: The Fabian Society, twenty five tott Hill Street, Westminster, Southwest
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Speaker 1: one and Allen and Unwin Limited, forty Museum Street, London,
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Speaker 1: w C one one shilling to H. G. Wells. This
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Speaker 1: work has been published at the expense of the Tullock
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Speaker 1: and Bar Publishing Fund, instituted as a memorial of Lieutenant
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Speaker 1: William Tullock and Captain Hugh Barr mb ra MC, two
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Speaker 1: members of the Fabian Society who lost their lives in
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Speaker 1: the Great War One. His name in the history of
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Speaker 1: social ideas occupies a place more remarkable than that of
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Speaker 1: Karl Marx, save Machiavelli and Rousseau. No thinker has been
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Speaker 1: the subject of a condemnation so unsparing, and like Rousseau,
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Speaker 1: it has been his fortune to preside after death over
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Speaker 1: a revolution conceived in his name. His books have received
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Speaker 1: from a chosen band a scrutiny as earnest as ever
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Speaker 1: the Bible or the Digest have obtained. Yet the precise
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Speaker 1: grounds of the position he occupies among socialists is a
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Speaker 1: more complex problem than is usually assumed. His theory of
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Speaker 1: value is no more than a formidable adaptation of a
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Speaker 1: concept already worked out in full by a group of
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Speaker 1: English predecessors. Men like Harrington and James Madison realized hardly
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Speaker 1: less clearly than he the significance of the materialist interpretation
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Speaker 1: of history. His appreciation of the fact of class antagonism
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Speaker 1: had been anticipated in detail by Saint Simon. His passionate
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Speaker 1: sympathy with the inarticulate aspirations of the working class was
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Speaker 1: no more profound than that of Charles hall and Owen
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Speaker 1: and John Stuart Mill. His position, indeed, cannot be appreciated
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Speaker 1: unless it is seen in its historical perspective. Born between
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Speaker 1: two revolutions, he utilized the method produced by the reaction
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Speaker 1: from the excesses of France to the service of its
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Speaker 1: fundamental principles, the disciple of Hegel. He was the first
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Speaker 1: of those who felt his master's influence to apply his
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Speaker 1: dialectic to the analysis of social facts. Hardly less important
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Speaker 1: was the material of which he made use, beginning to
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Speaker 1: write when the full implications of capitalism were becoming visible,
2:44
Speaker 1: he utilized its own description of its economic consequences as
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Speaker 1: the proof of its moral inadequacy. The evidence was impressive
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Speaker 1: and complete, and the induction therefrom of a social order
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Speaker 1: at once new and inevitable, suited to a nicety the
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Speaker 1: yearning of his generation. The main result of the Hegalian
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Speaker 1: movement was to lend a new sanction to philosophic conservatism.
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Speaker 1: The impact of the revolutionary wars seems to have turned
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Speaker 1: the mind of its founder towards the justification of established order.
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Speaker 1: In that sense, Hegel is a chief of reactionary romanticism,
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Speaker 1: and his affinity to men like Burke and Sabineer is obvious.
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Speaker 1: Yet the essence of Hegalianism is at the same time
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Speaker 1: the idea of evolution, and to an age which, as
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Speaker 1: with Demstra, was chiefly concerned with finding the basis of
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Speaker 1: a permanent social scheme. The notion of evolution was a
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Speaker 1: definitely radical one, for Hegel insists on the impermanence of institutions.
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Speaker 1: Each age is its predecessor, with a difference. There is
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Speaker 1: a change of tone and outlook, a tendency to emphasize
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Speaker 1: the antithesis of what has been characteristic of the earlier
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Speaker 1: period to the period of religious intensity. There succeeds the
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Speaker 1: age of religious indifference. Bussuet begets Voltaire as Lord Eldon
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Speaker 1: implies the reforming zeal of Henry Brutham. The law of
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Speaker 1: life is the warring of contradictions, with growth as its consequence.
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Speaker 1: This process, which Hegel called dialectic, is, as it were,
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Speaker 1: a kind of rhythm which moves from the concrete hardness
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Speaker 1: of some definite idea to its opposite. From that repulsion,
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Speaker 1: it shifts towards a synthesis in which the two first
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Speaker 1: stages inter penetrate each other to form a new concept
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Speaker 1: by their union. This notion is the ruling method of
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Speaker 1: Marxian thought. Obviously enough, it provides a means whereby the
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Speaker 1: foundations of any given social system may be criticized at
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Speaker 1: their base. But if we can be certain that any
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Speaker 1: interpretation of a period is necessarily a partial view, we
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Speaker 1: have only to emphasize its antithesis to call forth the
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Speaker 1: possibility of a new standpoint. Hegalianism, for example, might insist
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Speaker 1: on the moral adequacy of the Prussian state, but under
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Speaker 1: its very banner, Young Germany might make protest against its
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Speaker 1: rigorous impermeability to freedom. Where Hegelian doctrine had emphasized birth
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Speaker 1: and position, Young Germany could point to the frustration of
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Speaker 1: talent and the tragedies of the poor. Where it insisted
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Speaker 1: on the value of religion, the newer thinkers might question
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Speaker 1: the very foundations of faith. The disciples of Hegel in fact,
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Speaker 1: turned the weapons of their master to the service of
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Speaker 1: a cause he had denied. Strauss and Feuerbach, Bruno, Bauer
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Speaker 1: and Heine are essentially a part of the same general
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Speaker 1: tendency of which Marx is the representative. In social ideas.
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Speaker 1: They are the heralds of revolt against the reaction. Their
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Speaker 1: difference from Marx consists in their failure to see the
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Speaker 1: political implications of their position. Marx grasped them from the outset,
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Speaker 1: and the Hegelian dialectic in his hands is an effort
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Speaker 1: at the overthrow of the existing social order. The time, indeed,
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Speaker 1: was singularly fitted for the ideas of which he was
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Speaker 1: the protagonist. The shadow of two French revolutions bestrode Europe
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Speaker 1: like a colossus. And the very reaction they had provoked
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Speaker 1: was compelled to make grudging concessions to ensure even its
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Speaker 1: temporary survival. The mood of the people was everywhere bitter
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Speaker 1: and discontented, and the criticism of existing institutions secured a
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Speaker 1: widespread and eager welcome. In France, the work of San Simon,
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Speaker 1: of Fourier and en Fontine had shown how prolific of
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Speaker 1: novelty the revolution remained, and its influence was hardly less
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Speaker 1: apparent in the new liberalism of Sismondi and the Catholic
6:39
Speaker 1: experiments of Laminae. England was in the throes of a convulsion,
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Speaker 1: not the less profound because it was silent. Bentham had
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Speaker 1: at last come into his own and under the stress
6:51
Speaker 1: of his urgent protests, English institutions were being transformed into
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Speaker 1: the organs of a middle class state. The relics of
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Speaker 1: feudalism had at last summit smitted to the assaults of
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Speaker 1: Ricardo and his school and the new born industrialism. Even
7:04
Speaker 1: if to an observant eye it seemed but the grim
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Speaker 1: doctrines of Calvin translated to an economic sphere, completely altered
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Speaker 1: the atmosphere of social life. The revolution indeed did not
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Speaker 1: achieve its purpose without suffering. As early as eighteen hundred five,
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Speaker 1: Charles Hall had uttered a remarkable protest against the implications
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Speaker 1: of the new civilization, and that half forgotten school of economists,
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Speaker 1: who form a link between the individualism of Bentham and
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Speaker 1: the cooperation of Owen were riddling its protective armour in
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Speaker 1: the name of social justice. The masses had regarded the
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Speaker 1: Reform Act of eighteen thirty two as the prelude to
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Speaker 1: the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and their disappointment
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Speaker 1: expressed itself in the revolutionary activity of the trade unions
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Speaker 1: and the formation of the Chartist movement. Thinkers like William
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Speaker 1: Thompson and JF. Bray. Noble minded agitators like Francis Placer
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Speaker 1: William Lovett are every wit as indicative of the new
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Speaker 1: capitalism as the great merchants and the incredible machines of
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Speaker 1: Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Industrial Revolution reaped what it had sown.
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Speaker 1: It ground a whole generation into intolerable despair, and dreams
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Speaker 1: of its destruction were the sole refuge of its victims.
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Speaker 1: Those dreams were the background which made possible the emergence
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Speaker 1: of Karl Marx. They gave him the foundation of his
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Speaker 1: social philosophy. End of Part one, Part two of Karl Marx,
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Speaker 1: an essay by Harold J. Laski. This liberyvox recording is
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Speaker 1: in the public domain. Two. Karl Marx was born at
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Speaker 1: Treve on May fifth, eighteen eighteen, of Jewish parents who
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Speaker 1: were descended on both sides from rabbinic ancestors. Neither his father,
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Speaker 1: who was a lawyer, nor his mother, seems to have
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Speaker 1: had any special ability, and Marx himself was the only
9:04
Speaker 1: one of several children who attained intellectual distinction. When he
9:09
Speaker 1: was six years old, the family was converted to Christianity,
9:12
Speaker 1: not it appears, from any desire to avoid the stigma
9:15
Speaker 1: then attached to the Jewish faith, but as a result
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Speaker 1: of that romantic idealizing of Christianity, of which Chateaubriand was
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Speaker 1: the most famous representative. It is not easy to measure
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Speaker 1: exactly what influence this change had upon Marx. If it
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Speaker 1: later opened to him avenues that would otherwise have been closed,
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Speaker 1: he never availed himself of them. To the end of
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Speaker 1: his life. He remains something of an anti Semite, but
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Speaker 1: this does not seem traceable to any emotion of apostasy.
9:45
Speaker 1: Marx's childhood was passed in the normal atmosphere of a
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Speaker 1: patriotic lawyer's life. His father was a zealous Prussian, to
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Speaker 1: whom the defeat of Napoleon offered, the opportunity of which
9:56
Speaker 1: his son did not take advantage of a lyrical hymn
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Speaker 1: to pro Oian victory. He went to the grammar school
10:03
Speaker 1: of his native town, where his ability was immediately marked
10:06
Speaker 1: by his teachers. There too, he was intimate with the
10:10
Speaker 1: Privy Counselor von vest Farlan, whose house was a kind
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Speaker 1: of salon for the intellectual youth of treyev At least,
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Speaker 1: Marx learned there a love of literature, and the dedication
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Speaker 1: of his doctor's thesis his testimony to his grateful regard
10:24
Speaker 1: for his future father in law. For even before his
10:27
Speaker 1: departure in eighteen thirty five to Bonn University, he had
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Speaker 1: become secretly engaged to Jenny von vest Farlan, whose beauty
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Speaker 1: and strength of mind had awakened in him an affection
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Speaker 1: which did not diminish through life. Marx remained a year
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Speaker 1: in Bonn studying jurisprudence, but he seems to have devoted
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Speaker 1: himself to the more convivial side of the university, and
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Speaker 1: it was not until his removal to Berlin in eighteen
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Speaker 1: thirty six that he threw himself into intellectual work. Berlin
10:58
Speaker 1: was then at the very height of its reputation, and
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Speaker 1: the influence of Hegel was still paramount in its instruction.
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Speaker 1: No sort of learning seems to have come amiss to Marx.
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Speaker 1: History and philosophy, geography and jurisprudence, literature and esthetic, All
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Speaker 1: of them aroused in him the typical enthusiasm of an
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Speaker 1: undergraduate in search of omniscience. Nor it is a grateful
11:21
Speaker 1: thought did he fail to write poetry, And if his
11:24
Speaker 1: verses are a fair index to his state of mind,
11:27
Speaker 1: he was full of a restless insatiability for knowledge and
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Speaker 1: a zealous desire to solve the problems of the universe,
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Speaker 1: from which at least there must have been derived many
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Speaker 1: hours of happy work. He tried his hand at composing
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Speaker 1: philosophic systems. He attempted to compile an outline of jurisprudence.
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Speaker 1: He went hardly at all into society, and he was
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Speaker 1: not until the winter of eighteen thirty seven that his
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Speaker 1: experiments resolved themselves into a settled system. He surrendered the
11:55
Speaker 1: neo idealism of Kant and took refuge in a complete
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Speaker 1: acceptance of Hegelian metaph physic. That this change represented for
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Speaker 1: him a very real mental crisis is evident from the passionate,
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Speaker 1: if turgid letter to his father of November tenth, eighteen
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Speaker 1: thirty seven. There he summarizes the intense struggle through which
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Speaker 1: he had passed the desire to dive into the deeps
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Speaker 1: of the ocean, bringing up chased pearls into the sunlight.
12:23
Speaker 1: He was ill and troubled. His poems and short stories
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Speaker 1: were burned. He sought escape from the seductions of Hegel
12:29
Speaker 1: in discussion at the Graduates Club, only to find himself
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Speaker 1: the more securely enmeshed Therein. It is the typical intellectual
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Speaker 1: history of an ardent mind, conscious of great powers and
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Speaker 1: eager to secure a foothold from which to survey the universe.
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Speaker 1: Not unnaturally, he greatly disturbed his father. He good Man
12:51
Speaker 1: was anxious above all to see carlat work in a
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Speaker 1: lawyer's office, or even better, in government service. Why did
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Speaker 1: he not do as other studentudents, attend his lectures, meet
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Speaker 1: the right people, and embark upon his future career. He
13:05
Speaker 1: did not understand this mental torment, save to see that
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Speaker 1: it involved physical ill health and a good deal of
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Speaker 1: miscellaneous reading totally unconnected with the law. But Marx's ideals
13:17
Speaker 1: had already passed beyond so pedestrian an existence, and his
13:21
Speaker 1: father seems to have reconciled himself to the new ambitions.
13:25
Speaker 1: Marx determined upon a university post, and for that purpose
13:28
Speaker 1: devoted himself to the study of philosophic jurisprudence. With friends
13:33
Speaker 1: like Bruno Bauer and Friedrich Coppen. He buried himself in
13:37
Speaker 1: study and discussion. A thesis was written on the philosophical
13:41
Speaker 1: systems of Democritus and Epicurus, and in eighteen forty one
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Speaker 1: Marx became a doctor of the University of Jena. He
13:49
Speaker 1: rejoined Bauer at Bonn and awaited the offer of a
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Speaker 1: lectureship in the university. Had that offer come, the history
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Speaker 1: of European socialism might have been very different. But the
14:01
Speaker 1: Prussian educational system did not look with affection upon eager
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Speaker 1: young men whose views did not square with orthodox teaching.
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Speaker 1: The post did not arrive, and it was shortly enough
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Speaker 1: obvious that it was not likely to arrive. An academic
14:15
Speaker 1: career being thus impossible, Mark set to work to find
14:19
Speaker 1: a living in journalism, and in eighteen forty two an
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Speaker 1: opportunity of an attractive kind presented itself. The first number
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Speaker 1: of the Rhinisher Zeitung was published on January first, eighteen
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Speaker 1: forty two, and Marx was a warm friend of the editor,
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Speaker 1: who had met him at the graduates club in Berlin.
14:38
Speaker 1: Invited to assist, he wrote philosophical articles which not only
14:43
Speaker 1: brought him to the notice of a wider circle, among
14:45
Speaker 1: whom were men like Feuerbach and Moses Hesse, but also
14:49
Speaker 1: secured for him the direction of the journal on the
14:51
Speaker 1: retirement of its first editor in the next October. Thereby
14:56
Speaker 1: Marx was compelled to deal and for the first time,
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Speaker 1: with immediate political issues. He came into contact with French
15:04
Speaker 1: and German socialism, then in their utopian stage. The agrarian
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Speaker 1: problem in the Rhine provinces and the discussion of the
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Speaker 1: tariff gave him the first stimulus to investigate economic questions.
15:17
Speaker 1: French socialist ideas were already being discussed in the paper,
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Speaker 1: but Marx, as always determined upon a thorough grasp of
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Speaker 1: the issue, did not as yet pronounce upon their worth.
15:28
Speaker 1: An editor who takes time to make up his mind
15:30
Speaker 1: is obviously lost, and the directors of the paper decided
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Speaker 1: to make a change in its management. Marx, who had
15:37
Speaker 1: just married, seems to have resigned without regret and to
15:40
Speaker 1: have buried himself for the next two years in those
15:43
Speaker 1: economic studies from which he emerged as socialists. Of the
15:48
Speaker 1: inner history of those years we know practically nothing certain.
15:52
Speaker 1: Alone it is that as early as May eighteen forty
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Speaker 1: three he detected within society a breach which the old
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Speaker 1: system cannot heal. And it was not long before he
16:03
Speaker 1: showed in his letters an intimate knowledge of Fourier, Pruden
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Speaker 1: and Cabet. Already he had done with utopias. The problem
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Speaker 1: was to explain the struggles and yearnings of the time.
16:15
Speaker 1: In the winter of eighteen forty three, when he had
16:18
Speaker 1: settled with his wife in Paris, he wrote the introduction
16:21
Speaker 1: to Hegel's Philosophy of Law, which remains perhaps his profoundest
16:25
Speaker 1: piece of technical criticism. Already he was thinking in terms
16:30
Speaker 1: of revolution and insisting that the task of the proletariat
16:33
Speaker 1: was to free itself from the existing social order. Poverty.
16:37
Speaker 1: He viewed thus early as the artificial product of a
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Speaker 1: bourgeois society, and the denial of the right of private
16:44
Speaker 1: property had become for him the fundamental avenue of release.
16:48
Speaker 1: But we catch glimpses only of this time. All that
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Speaker 1: can be said with certainty is the fact that reflection
16:56
Speaker 1: had made him a socialist. He had realized too the
16:59
Speaker 1: an aadasiquacies of the abstract remoteness of French socialism. He
17:04
Speaker 1: had seen that the political state was, at any given
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Speaker 1: time the reflection in structure of the ideas of that epoch.
17:11
Speaker 1: He had realized that the main need was to make
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Speaker 1: plain to the mass of men the implications of the
17:16
Speaker 1: state and the end to which their half conscious struggle
17:19
Speaker 1: should lead them. His thought, indeed was abstract enough, and
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Speaker 1: still fettered within the narrow walls of the Hegelian dialectic,
17:27
Speaker 1: but at least it was moving forward. Meanwhile, the problem
17:32
Speaker 1: of how to live had still to be solved. He
17:35
Speaker 1: had gone to Paris in October eighteen forty three to
17:38
Speaker 1: become editor of the Franco German Year Books, but that
17:42
Speaker 1: periodical lasted only for a single issue, and for Marx
17:45
Speaker 1: his chief importance was the appearance therein of a long
17:49
Speaker 1: and frankly bad article by Friedrich Engels on political economy.
17:54
Speaker 1: The article led to correspondence between them, and in the
17:57
Speaker 1: autumn of eighteen forty four Engels went up Paris to
18:00
Speaker 1: visit Mars. That visit was the commencement of a friendship
18:05
Speaker 1: which even death did not terminate. Friedrich Engels was the
18:10
Speaker 1: son of a rich manufacturer in the Rhineland. His father
18:14
Speaker 1: owned a cotton mill near Manchester, to which in eighteen
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Speaker 1: forty two Engels had been sent to study English business conditions.
18:22
Speaker 1: He was already an eager critic of social conditions and
18:25
Speaker 1: how carefully he observed the life about him. His condition
18:28
Speaker 1: of the working classes in England in eighteen forty four,
18:32
Speaker 1: which he published in eighteen forty five, bears witness. A
18:36
Speaker 1: sympathizer with the Chartist movement and a contributor to Owen's
18:39
Speaker 1: New moral world. He was exactly in the frame of
18:43
Speaker 1: mind to be receptive to Marx. His ideas and his
18:46
Speaker 1: personal qualities admirably fitted him to be the complement of Marx.
18:51
Speaker 1: Thoroughly loyal, without an atom of personal ambition, generous and
18:55
Speaker 1: self effacing, practical and energetic. He brought to Marx all
18:59
Speaker 1: that necessary characteristic of a fied psychates his unstinting literary
19:05
Speaker 1: assistance hardly less than his constant financial aid with the
19:09
Speaker 1: materials which determined Marx's future career. It is indeed almost
19:14
Speaker 1: impossible to dissent angle the labours of the two. Clearly enough,
19:19
Speaker 1: it was to Engles that Marx owed both his knowledge
19:22
Speaker 1: of English blue books as a source of economic theory
19:25
Speaker 1: and his introduction to the work of the English Socialist School.
19:29
Speaker 1: Without Engles, too, it would have been difficult for Marx
19:32
Speaker 1: to undertake the research to which the first volume of
19:35
Speaker 1: The Capital bears witness, and the posthumous publication of the
19:39
Speaker 1: two latter volumes was the tribute that Engles paid to
19:42
Speaker 1: the memory of his master. That Marx would have been
19:45
Speaker 1: an important figure without Engles is clear enough, but the
19:49
Speaker 1: aid rendered by the latter made all the difference between
19:52
Speaker 1: the comparative calm of London and the restless wanderings of
19:55
Speaker 1: which hapless exiles like Bakunin were the miserable victims. The
20:01
Speaker 1: sudden end of the Franco German yearbooks made Marx turn
20:04
Speaker 1: to more solid production. The Holy Family eighteen forty five
20:09
Speaker 1: is important not only because it contains the first clear
20:12
Speaker 1: outline of the materialistic conception of history, but also because
20:16
Speaker 1: its attack on Bruno Bauer is evidence that Marx had
20:19
Speaker 1: already broken with the younger Galians. He had come to
20:23
Speaker 1: place all his faith in the significance of mass movements,
20:27
Speaker 1: where Bauer believed that the ideas by which mankind is
20:30
Speaker 1: moved cannot hope for more than superficial understanding from the
20:34
Speaker 1: mass and depend for their success upon the efforts of
20:37
Speaker 1: great men. Simultaneously, also he was answering Ruger's attacks upon
20:43
Speaker 1: the German proletariat with an impassioned defense of socialism and revolution.
20:49
Speaker 1: Vitling is held up as a proof of proletarian virtue
20:52
Speaker 1: against the mediocrity of the political literature of the German bourgeoisie,
20:56
Speaker 1: and in the polemic against Ruger, it is insisted that
20:59
Speaker 1: the time for political revolution, the only revolution of which
21:03
Speaker 1: the German bourgeoisie is capable, had passed. The capacity of
21:07
Speaker 1: Germany is the capacity of its workers, and it is
21:10
Speaker 1: to a social revolution that Marks directs attention. This Paris
21:15
Speaker 1: period is important not only for the advent of Engels
21:19
Speaker 1: mingling with the German workers then living in Paris, Marx
21:23
Speaker 1: naturally met those who were already in sympathy with his
21:26
Speaker 1: own views. From them to Pruden was a natural step,
21:30
Speaker 1: for Prudence was already the dominant socialist influence in France.
21:35
Speaker 1: Prudon was interested in the Hegelian dialectic, and he and
21:39
Speaker 1: Marx spent countless hours in discussing its application to social science.
21:44
Speaker 1: But this fruitful intercourse was interrupted by his expulsion from
21:48
Speaker 1: France January eighteen forty five. Had the demand of the
21:52
Speaker 1: Prussian government, Marx went from Paris to Brussels, where he
21:56
Speaker 1: remained but for short intervals, until the outbreak of the
21:59
Speaker 1: Resolution of eighteen forty eight. Engels gave him a selection
22:04
Speaker 1: of his library, and Marx devoted himself to the composition
22:07
Speaker 1: of his singularly able and unpleasant criticism of Prudence. This
22:12
Speaker 1: was published in eighteen forty seven, and it may be
22:15
Speaker 1: said to mark his transition to the full vigor of
22:17
Speaker 1: his matured philosophy. Prudon's reputations as social philosopher has undergone
22:24
Speaker 1: an interesting reconstruction in our own day. As an economist,
22:29
Speaker 1: he has hardly survived the analysis of Marx. A self
22:33
Speaker 1: taught man originally a printer, he came into prominence by
22:36
Speaker 1: the publication in eighteen forty of his prize essay What
22:40
Speaker 1: Is Property, in which, with much brilliance of style and
22:43
Speaker 1: no small genius for paradox, he repeated in the economic
22:47
Speaker 1: sphere the substance of those criticisms of social organization which
22:51
Speaker 1: Rousseau had expressed in a prize essay not less famous.
22:56
Speaker 1: But Prudon's aspirations were not limited by his knowledge. With
23:00
Speaker 1: undoubted ability and with a real gift of social insight,
23:04
Speaker 1: he yet lacked that rigorous training in the method of
23:06
Speaker 1: intellectual inquiry, without which the production of a logical system
23:11
Speaker 1: is rarely possible. Discovering the work of Hegel, he attempted
23:15
Speaker 1: an interpretation of social life in terms of the dialectic.
23:19
Speaker 1: It is broadly a mass of ill arranged jargon, with
23:22
Speaker 1: some brilliant asides. But the work was written while in
23:26
Speaker 1: contact with Marx and the philosophida. Le Misaire is the
23:30
Speaker 1: exposition of exactly that type of utopia mongering which aroused
23:34
Speaker 1: marks his anger. It depended for its success mainly upon
23:38
Speaker 1: the unconscious ease with which it determines the most complex
23:41
Speaker 1: economic problems, and the reckless certitude of its own conclusions.
23:47
Speaker 1: It is indeed, at the same time a very attractive book.
23:51
Speaker 1: Prudon realized not less keenly than Marx the evils of capitalism,
23:56
Speaker 1: and he was not less anxious to point the way
23:58
Speaker 1: to an economic order of which the motives were freedom
24:00
Speaker 1: and justice. In the Duprancip Federertif and the Justice Don Revolution. Indeed,
24:08
Speaker 1: he outlined a type of federalism of which the suggestiveness
24:11
Speaker 1: is immense, and it would be legitimate to argue that
24:15
Speaker 1: not the least significant source of the ancestry of guild
24:17
Speaker 1: socialism could be traced to his writings. But the conflict
24:23
Speaker 1: between Marx and Prudent was an inevitable one. At bottom,
24:27
Speaker 1: the ideals of Prudon were those of a peasant socialism
24:30
Speaker 1: in which the authority of a central state was reduced
24:33
Speaker 1: to a minimum. He was reformist in outlook, despite the
24:37
Speaker 1: vigor of his phrases, and his economic views were always
24:40
Speaker 1: subordinate to certain ethical assumptions. Marx was the typical representative
24:46
Speaker 1: of the new industrialism, and the source of change for
24:48
Speaker 1: him was solely to be traced to developments in industrial technique.
24:53
Speaker 1: Authoritarian and materialist in both outlook and temper, there was
24:57
Speaker 1: no real contact between Prudon and himself. Marx, moreover, was
25:02
Speaker 1: a trained scholar to whom the luxuriance of Prudon's speculations
25:06
Speaker 1: was never an adequate substitute. For fact, he was able,
25:10
Speaker 1: without difficulty to show that prudence understood neither the theory
25:14
Speaker 1: of value nor the process of production. At bottom, as
25:18
Speaker 1: he insists, prudence had done little more than urge first
25:22
Speaker 1: that labour was the source of value, and next that
25:25
Speaker 1: riches and poverty coexist. Prudence could see that the source
25:29
Speaker 1: of economic justice lay somewhere within the system of production,
25:33
Speaker 1: but he could not with any clarity explain its development.
25:37
Speaker 1: Marx overwhelmed him with ridicule, abuse and sarcasm. And it
25:41
Speaker 1: must be admitted that from the standpoint of an economist,
25:44
Speaker 1: right is on his side. And Marx's answer The Poverty
25:48
Speaker 1: of Philosophy is noteworthy also for its firm grasp of
25:52
Speaker 1: the economic processes of history, and for his insistence upon
25:55
Speaker 1: the part that an oppressed class has always played in
25:58
Speaker 1: the development of any cinys founded upon class antagonism. But
26:03
Speaker 1: the main value of the book consists less in any
26:05
Speaker 1: positive doctrine that it announces, that in the atmosphere by
26:08
Speaker 1: which it is permeated. It is definitely revolutionary, and it
26:13
Speaker 1: is revolutionary because it is historical. Its lesson is the
26:17
Speaker 1: argument that social evolution implies economic revolution. That was a
26:23
Speaker 1: new note to strike in the history of European socialism.
26:28
Speaker 1: End of Part two, Part three of Karl Marx, an
26:37
Speaker 1: essay by Harold J. Laski. This Libraryvox recording is in
26:42
Speaker 1: the public domain. Three. The controversy with prudence was the
26:48
Speaker 1: natural prelude to the communist Manifesto. It had been evident
26:52
Speaker 1: to Marx for several years before eighteen forty eight that
26:56
Speaker 1: Europe was on the verge of revolt. England was passing
27:00
Speaker 1: through a period of intense agitation, Socialism was growing in
27:04
Speaker 1: Germany by leaps and bounds, and the lyrical falsifications of
27:07
Speaker 1: Lamartine seemed to the Paris workmen infinitely preferable to the
27:12
Speaker 1: mediocre corruption of Guizo and Luisphilippe. Marx indeed did not
27:17
Speaker 1: see that the political situation was far too complex to
27:20
Speaker 1: admit of an interpretation in uniform terms democratic nationalism like
27:26
Speaker 1: that of Mazzini, individualist republicanism like that of Ledrux, Roland,
27:31
Speaker 1: such hostility to dynamic oppression as cossof embodied state socialism
27:36
Speaker 1: as typified by Louis Blanc. The forces of upheaval were
27:39
Speaker 1: too various and incompatible to admit of any continuous cooperation.
27:45
Speaker 1: Bitterly as the worker might resent the consequences of industrialism,
27:48
Speaker 1: he had not yet reached the stage where the seizure
27:51
Speaker 1: of political power for economic ends seemed to him the
27:54
Speaker 1: one ideal worthy of attainments, and he was to no
27:58
Speaker 1: small degree still acted by the kind of unrealistic thinking
28:02
Speaker 1: of which Robert Owen was so prolific, the sense that
28:05
Speaker 1: the difficulties of the time might be evaded by extra
28:08
Speaker 1: political organization. Marx realized that this attitude was definitely unconstructive.
28:15
Speaker 1: The seizure of the state was to him the starting
28:18
Speaker 1: point of successful effort, and when Frederick William the Fourth
28:22
Speaker 1: summoned the United Assembly in February eighteen forty seven, it
28:25
Speaker 1: was not unnatural for him to assume that the hour
28:28
Speaker 1: for action was at hand. From the outset of his
28:32
Speaker 1: life in Brussels, Marx had mingled with the German socialist residence. There,
28:38
Speaker 1: he had come into contact with the League of the Just,
28:40
Speaker 1: an organization of German workers with branches and the chief
28:44
Speaker 1: European towns. This society, founded in eighteen thirty six, had
28:49
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty moved its headquarters to London, probably to
28:53
Speaker 1: escape the unwelcome attentions of the political police. The attention
28:58
Speaker 1: of the London group had been drawn to Mars by
29:01
Speaker 1: the members in Paris and Brussels. The London branch commissioned
29:05
Speaker 1: enquiries to be made about him, and when the first
29:08
Speaker 1: Congress of the League was held in London at the
29:10
Speaker 1: summer of eighteen forty seven, Engles and Wilhelm Vulf, the
29:14
Speaker 1: latter through Engles a disciple of Marx, were present as
29:18
Speaker 1: its deliberations. Engles has spent the year in efforts at
29:22
Speaker 1: revolutionary propaganda in Paris and the Rhineland, and it is
29:25
Speaker 1: probably due in the main to him that the League
29:28
Speaker 1: of the Just was transformed into the Communist League. The
29:32
Speaker 1: ground was thus prepared for Marx, who appeared at the
29:35
Speaker 1: second Congress, also in London, in December eighteen forty seven.
29:40
Speaker 1: Engels had already conferred with him as to the ground
29:43
Speaker 1: to be taken there, and he had sent marks the
29:45
Speaker 1: outline of a programme to be offered to the Congress
29:48
Speaker 1: for acceptance. Engels outline contains the substance of the famous Manifesto,
29:54
Speaker 1: but it lacks the ringing challenge and firm grasp of
29:57
Speaker 1: its successor. At the Congress, Marked and Engels were commissioned
30:01
Speaker 1: to draw up a program. They were prepared for the effort,
30:05
Speaker 1: and the German edition of the Communist Manifesto appeared a
30:08
Speaker 1: few days before the outbreak of the Paris Revolution. It
30:13
Speaker 1: is not easy to overestimate the significance of the Manifesto.
30:17
Speaker 1: He gave direction and a philosophy to what had been
30:20
Speaker 1: before little more than an inchoate protest against injustice. It
30:25
Speaker 1: began the long process of welding together the scattered groups
30:29
Speaker 1: of the disinherited into an organized and influential party. It
30:33
Speaker 1: freed socialism from its earlier situation of a doctrine cherished
30:37
Speaker 1: by conspirators in defiance of government, and gave to it
30:41
Speaker 1: at once a purpose and a historic background. It almost
30:45
Speaker 1: created a proletarian consciousness by giving and for the first
30:49
Speaker 1: time to the workers, at once a high sense of
30:51
Speaker 1: their historic mission and a realization of the dignity implicit
30:55
Speaker 1: in their tasks. It destroyed as a stroke both the
30:59
Speaker 1: belief that socialism could triumph without long preparation, and the
31:03
Speaker 1: hope that any form of economic organization was possible save
31:07
Speaker 1: that which was implicit in the facts of the time.
31:10
Speaker 1: It insisted upon no natural rights. He did not lay
31:14
Speaker 1: down any metaphysic. It was, on the contrary, a careful
31:18
Speaker 1: and critical historic survey of the institutional process, regarded as
31:22
Speaker 1: a whole. To insist upon its epoch making character is
31:27
Speaker 1: not to regard it as an original or definitive document,
31:31
Speaker 1: or to suggest that it is free from inconsistencies. It
31:35
Speaker 1: owes much clearly to Consideren's manifested A Democratis, which was
31:40
Speaker 1: published four years before footnote, but considerent. Though his picture
31:45
Speaker 1: of the economic situation is like that of Marx, rejects
31:49
Speaker 1: revolutionary communism. End of footnote. There have been utopian socialisms
31:54
Speaker 1: in despite of Marx, and we are doubtless not at
31:57
Speaker 1: the end of them. The belief in natural rights revives
32:01
Speaker 1: with every age of discontent, and it would be possible
32:04
Speaker 1: to prove that the idea of natural rights is necessarily
32:07
Speaker 1: implicit in the juridical structure of socialism, nor is its
32:12
Speaker 1: treatment of the middle class at all adequate. At one
32:15
Speaker 1: point it is subject to a vituperation so scathing and
32:19
Speaker 1: relentless as to make it seem the nurse of all
32:21
Speaker 1: social evil. At another, its great historic achievements are exalted
32:26
Speaker 1: beyond all praise. Its immediate program of action is borrowed,
32:30
Speaker 1: in almost every particular from those earlier socialists who are
32:34
Speaker 1: so unsparingly condemned. Nor can Marx his claim that he
32:38
Speaker 1: substituted a critical insight into the facts, progress, and general
32:42
Speaker 1: results of the actual social movement for the systems of
32:46
Speaker 1: his predecessors be entirely accepted. For after all, it is
32:50
Speaker 1: not the least merit of Fourier and Saint Simon that
32:53
Speaker 1: they are described with not less sober accuracy than that
32:56
Speaker 1: of Marx the economic conditions of their time. Even the
33:00
Speaker 1: use of the class war as the Keita history was
33:03
Speaker 1: brilliantly anticipated in the Genevan letters of Saint Simon. Yet
33:08
Speaker 1: the general superiority of the Manifesto to previous socialist writing
33:12
Speaker 1: is incontestable. It contains, broadly speaking, four definite groups of ideas.
33:19
Speaker 1: Beginning with a history of the growth of the middle class,
33:22
Speaker 1: it recounts its victory over feudal privilege, its emergence into
33:26
Speaker 1: the full development of capitalistic enterprise and its necessary result
33:30
Speaker 1: in a revolutionary proletariat. A second section deals with the
33:35
Speaker 1: philosophic interpretation of this history. It argues that the doctrine
33:40
Speaker 1: of the class struggle, the necessary and inevitable conflict between
33:43
Speaker 1: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with the consequent revolutionary role
33:47
Speaker 1: that is assigned to the latter, are the plain deductions
33:50
Speaker 1: to be drawn. Ways and means are then discussed, the
33:54
Speaker 1: main object of which is to bring within the ambit
33:57
Speaker 1: of state control the whole economic life of the peace.
34:01
Speaker 1: There then follows a criticism of previous socialist literature, of
34:05
Speaker 1: which it must be said that, forcible and eloquent as
34:07
Speaker 1: it is, much of it is inaccurate, and the whole unfair.
34:11
Speaker 1: No description can do justice to the brilliant vigor of
34:14
Speaker 1: the whole. Every phrase of it is a challenge, and
34:18
Speaker 1: much of it has the same moving passion that distinguishes
34:21
Speaker 1: the exordium of the social contract or. In a very
34:24
Speaker 1: different type of polemic, the parol d'un quiont of Laminae.
34:29
Speaker 1: It is the book of men who have viewed the
34:31
Speaker 1: whole process of history from an eminence, and discovered therein
34:34
Speaker 1: an inescapable lesson. It is at once an epilogue and
34:38
Speaker 1: a prophecy, an epilogue to the deception from which the
34:41
Speaker 1: workers suffered in the Revolution of seventeen eighty nine, and
34:44
Speaker 1: a prophecy of the land of promise. They may still
34:47
Speaker 1: hope to enter a movement that could produce a challenge
34:51
Speaker 1: so profound came hardly less to fulfill than to destroy.
34:57
Speaker 1: It had hardly appeared before the revolution broke out in Paris,
35:01
Speaker 1: and Marx, as a precautionary measure, was banished from Brussels
35:04
Speaker 1: by the Belgian government. Tyranny has banished you, wrote the
35:09
Speaker 1: French provisional government. But a free France opens her gates
35:12
Speaker 1: to you. Marx proceeded to Paris, but remained there only
35:17
Speaker 1: a short time. Germany was already seething with revolt, and
35:21
Speaker 1: the natural vantage ground for him was obviously the Rhineland,
35:25
Speaker 1: Gathering about him the members of the Communist League. Marx
35:29
Speaker 1: went to Cologne, where the editorship of the revolutionary paper,
35:32
Speaker 1: the Nouer Rhinish Azetung was entrusted to him. Brief as
35:37
Speaker 1: was its life, its substance was not merely brilliant, but
35:40
Speaker 1: of great significance as an indication of the Marxian tactic.
35:44
Speaker 1: Engels and Wilhelm Wulf were its chief contributors, and Freiligrath
35:49
Speaker 1: and LaSalle sent poems and essays. Maring has published a
35:53
Speaker 1: selection of the chief articles of Marx in this paper. Dominantly.
35:58
Speaker 1: They insist upon three ideas, the disarming of the bourgeoisie,
36:02
Speaker 1: the erection of a revolutionary terror to abridge and concentrate
36:06
Speaker 1: the hideous death agonies of society, and the creation of
36:09
Speaker 1: a revolutionary army. There is no room in Marx's thought,
36:13
Speaker 1: save perhaps as an ultimate for any democratic system. Revolution
36:19
Speaker 1: opposes counter revolution, and a reign of terror is the
36:22
Speaker 1: path to triumph. Liberty is dismissed as a purely bourgeois
36:26
Speaker 1: ideal which impedes proletarian advance to its goal. The idea
36:31
Speaker 1: of a general upheaval Russia linking hands with France, Berlin
36:36
Speaker 1: uniting with Vienna is emphasized, though it should be added
36:39
Speaker 1: that Marx had no full realization either of the difficulties
36:43
Speaker 1: the revolution would encounter or the speediness of its destruction.
36:47
Speaker 1: The paper hardly lived were a year when troubles with
36:50
Speaker 1: the censorship put an end to its existence. Marx left
36:54
Speaker 1: Cologne and returned to Paris, but only to witness the
36:58
Speaker 1: bloody suppression of the Days of June, banished by the
37:01
Speaker 1: French government in July eighteen forty nine to a remote
37:04
Speaker 1: corner of Brittany. He decided to move to London. Thither
37:09
Speaker 1: he went with his family, and he remained in England,
37:11
Speaker 1: with one or two brief intervals, for the rest of
37:14
Speaker 1: his life. End of Part three, Part four Karl Marx
37:25
Speaker 1: an essay by Harold J. Laski. This libriyvox recording is
37:30
Speaker 1: in the public domain. Four. Marx's London period is creatively
37:37
Speaker 1: the most important part of his career, but it was
37:40
Speaker 1: a difficult and tragic struggle for existence, and his work
37:43
Speaker 1: was accomplished only by heroic effort. For the first ten years,
37:48
Speaker 1: the family was hardly over the verge of starvation, and
37:51
Speaker 1: Marx had even to pawn his clothes for necessary expenses.
37:56
Speaker 1: Nor was his intellectual environment easy the disappointed makers of
38:00
Speaker 1: a revolution and never comfortable neighbours, and his pamphlet he
38:04
Speaker 1: Evoked eighteen sixty is a proof that German communists did
38:08
Speaker 1: not differ from their fellows of France or Russia. For
38:12
Speaker 1: ten years eighteen fifty one to sixty, Marx acted as
38:15
Speaker 1: European correspondent of the New York Tribune, a post which
38:19
Speaker 1: was the sole source of any continuous income. It was, however,
38:23
Speaker 1: very poorly paid, and if the selection of his articles
38:26
Speaker 1: therein published by Eleanor Marx after his death is at
38:30
Speaker 1: all representative, it is clear that the taste of the
38:33
Speaker 1: American reader has changed in remarkable fashion since the sixties.
38:37
Speaker 1: For Marx does not abate one iota of his convictions
38:40
Speaker 1: in his correspondence, and the manner of interpretation is that
38:44
Speaker 1: of the philosopher rather than the journalist. The income apart,
38:49
Speaker 1: Marx had no consistent means of livelihood during his first
38:53
Speaker 1: ten years in London. Then came one or two family
38:56
Speaker 1: legacies and a generous tribute from villem Wulf. Later Engels
39:01
Speaker 1: was able from his own means to allow Marks some
39:04
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Yet with all
39:07
Speaker 1: their penury, these were not unhappy years. His wife seems
39:11
Speaker 1: to have had a real genius for deriving contentment from misfortune.
39:15
Speaker 1: Judges like Heine and poor Lafargue paid her the tribute
39:19
Speaker 1: of profound admiration. His children were growing up, and Marx
39:23
Speaker 1: was passionately fond of his children. Their nurse Helen des Mouth,
39:28
Speaker 1: was a source of infinite help and comfort, and there
39:31
Speaker 1: was always the sure knowledge of the inevitable triumph of
39:34
Speaker 1: the revolutionary cause. For Marx did not share in the
39:39
Speaker 1: sense of depression which fell upon the liberals after the
39:42
Speaker 1: failure of eighteen forty eight, he shut himself in the
39:45
Speaker 1: British Museum, and, sometimes working sixteen hours a day, set
39:50
Speaker 1: himself to the composition of a socialist economics. One or
39:54
Speaker 1: two minor pamphlets were written, as the unsparing Denunciation of
39:58
Speaker 1: the coud'etat of eighteen fifty one, which he called the
40:01
Speaker 1: Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, and the
40:05
Speaker 1: Critique of Political Economy eighteen fifty nine, which is important
40:10
Speaker 1: in part because it is the groundwork of the Capital itself,
40:13
Speaker 1: and in part because of the valuable light it throws
40:16
Speaker 1: upon his own conception of his method. But outside his
40:20
Speaker 1: relations with the international, it was to the Capital that
40:23
Speaker 1: these years were devoted, and they were years of unremitting
40:26
Speaker 1: and devoted service. He was at the museum as it
40:30
Speaker 1: opened and never left until the attendants turned him out
40:34
Speaker 1: a chosen band of helpers, all fellow exiles used to
40:38
Speaker 1: accompany him and aid in the researches he conducted, though
40:41
Speaker 1: it should perhaps be added that they were not admitted
40:43
Speaker 1: as assistants until they had shown their agreement with Marks
40:47
Speaker 1: and passed certain craniological tests. Phrenology was not typical merely
40:52
Speaker 1: of the utopian period of socialism. Marx moreover, never considered
40:57
Speaker 1: the exchange of conviction for comfort. Offers of position came
41:01
Speaker 1: to him, as when Buchhar sounded him, possibly on Bismarck's behalf,
41:06
Speaker 1: but he never dreamed of desertion. There is certainly no
41:10
Speaker 1: more remarkable instance of great sacrifice for intellectual discovery than
41:14
Speaker 1: that of which marks his life. Is a record. Darwin,
41:17
Speaker 1: it is true, devoted twenty years to the testing of
41:20
Speaker 1: his hypotheses, but he had ample means at his command.
41:25
Speaker 1: Marx was surrounded by difficulties, of which not the least
41:28
Speaker 1: was the knowledge that his self imposed task condemned his
41:32
Speaker 1: wife and family to profound suffering. Neither he nor they
41:36
Speaker 1: seem to have flinched from the consequences, and one may
41:39
Speaker 1: judge not unfairly that their pride in his work was
41:42
Speaker 1: for Marx his happiest achievements. Of Marx's intellectual environment in
41:48
Speaker 1: London we know all too little men like John Stuart
41:52
Speaker 1: Mill he never met. Though he was on friendly terms
41:55
Speaker 1: with the leading trade unionists as Odja and Applegarth. With
41:59
Speaker 1: the Lafe, however, he had no intimate political relations, and
42:03
Speaker 1: in the contemporary history of English labour his name has
42:06
Speaker 1: no large place. That perhaps was natural enough for English
42:10
Speaker 1: trade unionism was then a system of compromises with which
42:14
Speaker 1: Marx's revolutionary dogmas had little connection. For the most part,
42:19
Speaker 1: his affiliations were with Engels and the German exiles in London,
42:22
Speaker 1: though only the former seems to have enjoyed his full confidence.
42:27
Speaker 1: He had, moreover, a close relationship with that mysterious figure,
42:31
Speaker 1: half fanatic and half knight, errant David Urquhart, whose loathing
42:35
Speaker 1: of Russia Marx seems fully to have shared. Both of
42:39
Speaker 1: them saw spies at every street corner, and at one
42:42
Speaker 1: time or another, in each case, without a shadow of justification,
42:46
Speaker 1: Marx was able to convince himself that Hervey and Bakunin
42:50
Speaker 1: were government emissaries. It is of course sufficiently intelligible that
42:55
Speaker 1: an exile who had himself been the object of police attentions,
42:58
Speaker 1: should live in an atmosphere of nervous suspicion. But it
43:02
Speaker 1: is a regrettable corollary of Marx's accusations that both Hervey
43:06
Speaker 1: and Bakunin belonged to different sections of the Socialist Party.
43:10
Speaker 1: Marx never welcomed opposition or rivalry, and he was too
43:14
Speaker 1: prone to assume that a doubt of his rightness was
43:17
Speaker 1: a doubt also of his opponent's integrity. Yet it must
43:21
Speaker 1: be counted to his great credit in these years that
43:23
Speaker 1: he is in no small degree responsible for the sympathies
43:26
Speaker 1: shown to the North by the working class during the
43:29
Speaker 1: American Civil War. It was Marx who advised the Union
43:33
Speaker 1: of the Labor Leaders with Cobden and Bright to arouse
43:36
Speaker 1: the enthusiasm of the trade unions, and it was Marx
43:40
Speaker 1: who proposed in the General Council of the International that
43:43
Speaker 1: a vote of congratulation be sent to Lincoln on his
43:46
Speaker 1: re election as President of the United States. Marx played
43:50
Speaker 1: some part also in arousing the trade unions to protest
43:53
Speaker 1: against the brutal suppression by Russia of the Polish Revolt
43:57
Speaker 1: of eighteen sixty three. But apart from the preparation of capital.
44:02
Speaker 1: Marx's chief occupation in London was with the early stages
44:06
Speaker 1: of the First International. In eighteen sixty two, a group
44:10
Speaker 1: of Paris workmen paid a visit to the London Exhibition
44:13
Speaker 1: of that year. A trade union committee received them and
44:17
Speaker 1: a joint international council was founded. When the Polish Rebellion
44:21
Speaker 1: of eighteen sixty three broke out, it was this council
44:24
Speaker 1: which prepared the gigantic protest meetings against Russian barbarity, which
44:29
Speaker 1: represented the first intervention failure, though it was of British
44:33
Speaker 1: labor in foreign politics. It was in connection with this
44:37
Speaker 1: campaign that Odger, a member of the junta, suggested that
44:41
Speaker 1: the needs of the working class involved the holding of
44:44
Speaker 1: regular international meetings. The idea was taken up with enthusiasm,
44:49
Speaker 1: and a great Meeting was held in London in September
44:52
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four to organize the movement. Marx, who had
44:57
Speaker 1: held rather aloof from the initial stages, was present at
45:00
Speaker 1: the meeting and joined the founder's committee that was created.
45:04
Speaker 1: He perceived at once the significance of the new movement,
45:07
Speaker 1: and though he seems to have had little but contempt
45:10
Speaker 1: for its leaders, he was appointed to draw up the
45:12
Speaker 1: inaugural address. The committee had given him a basis prepared
45:17
Speaker 1: by the French delegates and accepted by it as adequate.
45:21
Speaker 1: Marx characteristically enough destroyed the basis and produced instead an
45:26
Speaker 1: address of his own, detailing the progress of the working
45:29
Speaker 1: class in England during the past thirty years, and insisting
45:33
Speaker 1: that its meaning must be read in terms only of
45:35
Speaker 1: his own theories. It is, in fact a new edition
45:39
Speaker 1: of the Communist Manifesto, with the revolutionary period of trade
45:42
Speaker 1: unionism as the basis of its deductions instead of universal history.
45:47
Speaker 1: The special interest of the address, however, lies in Marx's
45:51
Speaker 1: use of the history of the Factory Acts as a
45:53
Speaker 1: proof of the value of working class agitation. In the
45:57
Speaker 1: bright sunlight of day, he said, the bourgeois political economy
46:01
Speaker 1: was here vanquished for the first time by the political
46:04
Speaker 1: economy of the working class. The Factory Acts were indeed
46:08
Speaker 1: revolutionary in the sense that they were a direct admission
46:11
Speaker 1: of the inadequacy of laissez faire, but their passage was
46:14
Speaker 1: hardly due to the type of influence Marx had in mind.
46:18
Speaker 1: At least in other moods he would not have called
46:20
Speaker 1: Lord Shaftesbury a revolutionary communist. Marx henceforward devoted much energy
46:27
Speaker 1: to the International, and as he hurried it forth from
46:30
Speaker 1: its cradle, so he may be said to have hastened
46:33
Speaker 1: it towards the grave. Its origin began in dissension, the
46:37
Speaker 1: struggle between the idealist nationalism of Matsini and the revolutionary
46:41
Speaker 1: and class conscious aggressiveness of Marx. On the latter's victory,
46:46
Speaker 1: Matzini withdrew, though with characteristic selflessness, he advised his followers
46:51
Speaker 1: to continue their support. Marx henceforth dominated the organization, though
46:56
Speaker 1: he waged a continuous warfare to maintain his supremacy. To him,
47:01
Speaker 1: the movement was essentially an effort to propagate the ideas
47:04
Speaker 1: of the Communist Manifesto, and thus to prepare the way
47:08
Speaker 1: for the revolution. But to the English members, the International
47:12
Speaker 1: was essentially an organ for promoting trade unionism, and when
47:15
Speaker 1: Ojure perceived in the Commune of eighteen seventy one, and
47:19
Speaker 1: marks his defense of it, the real drift of its purpose,
47:22
Speaker 1: he resigned from the organization. The English section always remained
47:27
Speaker 1: aloof from the Directorate, for it was that special brand
47:30
Speaker 1: of radicalism of which William Lovett was perhaps the finest
47:33
Speaker 1: representative that they were really concerned to foster. Nor was
47:38
Speaker 1: the English section the only difficulty. For the first two years.
47:42
Speaker 1: The followers of Prudon were notable rivals, and they had
47:45
Speaker 1: no sympathy with Marx's idea of a direct and immediate
47:48
Speaker 1: political revolution. They were moreover hostile to communism, and racial
47:53
Speaker 1: differences played their part. Even when the Prudonians had been defeated,
47:58
Speaker 1: Backunin and his follow remained. They were anarchists and bitterly
48:03
Speaker 1: opposed to the centralized dictatorship of which Marx was the exponent,
48:07
Speaker 1: and there were grave differences between them on the degree
48:10
Speaker 1: to which property was to be confiscated. Bakunin, it must
48:14
Speaker 1: be admitted, was as difficult as Marx himself in colleagueship.
48:19
Speaker 1: He founded a rival organization and did much intriguing against
48:22
Speaker 1: Marx when he was readmitted on its abandonment. By eighteen
48:27
Speaker 1: seventy two, his influence has so increased that a frontal
48:30
Speaker 1: attack upon him was impossible. In the Hague Congress of
48:34
Speaker 1: that year, Marx therefore proposed the removal of the headquarters
48:38
Speaker 1: to New York. The motion was carried, but it was
48:41
Speaker 1: obviously impossible to direct European socialism from a position three
48:45
Speaker 1: thousand miles away. By eighteen seventy five, the International was
48:50
Speaker 1: extinct and hostile, as were the attentions given to it
48:53
Speaker 1: by the governments of Europe. It rather perished of internal dissension,
48:57
Speaker 1: the struggle between two powerful and antithetic personalities, than from
49:01
Speaker 1: external attack. Not however, before it had rendered one great service.
49:08
Speaker 1: The Second Empire perished in the defeat of S'dan, and
49:11
Speaker 1: the provisional government created by Tierre was not merely hostile
49:15
Speaker 1: to a democratic reorganization, but even looked forward to the
49:18
Speaker 1: building of a new monarchy. The working men of Paris
49:22
Speaker 1: had no sympathy with these ideas, and the commune was
49:25
Speaker 1: their answer to them. The effort lasted only seven weeks
49:29
Speaker 1: when it was overthrown amid scenes of unexampled butchery. Marx
49:34
Speaker 1: had been definitely hostile to its inception. For him, the
49:38
Speaker 1: essential function of the workers was to strengthen their own
49:41
Speaker 1: organizations and to prepare themselves thereby for their coming freedom.
49:46
Speaker 1: But when the Communards perished in their heroic folly and
49:49
Speaker 1: were pursued, as even more modern history has pursued them,
49:52
Speaker 1: by a campaign of virulent and lying attack, Marx came
49:56
Speaker 1: to their defense in what is the Communist Manifesto, a
50:00
Speaker 1: part the most brilliant pamphlet he ever wrote. The Civil
50:04
Speaker 1: War in France, published as an official statement of the International,
50:08
Speaker 1: is of course a partial and incomplete view of the
50:11
Speaker 1: complicated events it narrates. But nothing that has been written
50:15
Speaker 1: since so admirably depicts the ideas and sentiments by which
50:19
Speaker 1: the communads were inspired, or more energetically displays the savage
50:23
Speaker 1: brutality with which they were treated. The defense was the
50:27
Speaker 1: more generous when Marx's low opinion of the French socialist
50:30
Speaker 1: movement is remembered, as also his conviction that Sedan was
50:34
Speaker 1: the just price of Buonapartist imperialism. Yet even in the
50:39
Speaker 1: hour of a victory, he welcomed Mark's addressed the German
50:42
Speaker 1: workers in a manifesto which demanded a fair and honorable
50:46
Speaker 1: place for the vanquished. Meanwhile, the great labour of his
50:51
Speaker 1: life had been partially completed by the publication in eighteen
50:55
Speaker 1: sixty seven of the first volume of the Capital. It
50:58
Speaker 1: cannot be said to have rescis received the welcome it deserved. Written,
51:03
Speaker 1: of course, as it was in a German particularly cumbrous
51:06
Speaker 1: and involved in structure, it was necessarily caviat of the multitude.
51:11
Speaker 1: The Saturday Review perceived the value of the material of
51:14
Speaker 1: which it made use, though not even Professor Beasley's persuasiveness
51:18
Speaker 1: could induce George Henry Lewis to insert a long notice
51:21
Speaker 1: from Engels in the Fortnightly. Russian and French translations soon followed,
51:27
Speaker 1: and in Russia particularly, the book soon made its way
51:30
Speaker 1: to that position of commanding influence. It has never lost. Marx,
51:34
Speaker 1: it must be remembered, was already well known in Russia.
51:38
Speaker 1: Vlinski had already praised the Franco German year books, and
51:42
Speaker 1: Enkoff had published a long critique for Marx on Pruden,
51:45
Speaker 1: and his relations with Herzen and Bakunin had made him
51:48
Speaker 1: a notable figure among international socialists in Germany. The book
51:53
Speaker 1: seems to have made its way but slowly, and the
51:56
Speaker 1: second edition eighteen seventy three contains a long proto Marx
52:01
Speaker 1: against what he deemed an organized conspiracy of silence. It had,
52:06
Speaker 1: of course, presently to undergo the inevitable attack incidental to
52:09
Speaker 1: all learned German controversy, on the ground that its doctrines
52:13
Speaker 1: had been anticipated, and Marx was ludicrously assumed to have
52:17
Speaker 1: stolen his thunder from Rodbertus, but within five years from
52:21
Speaker 1: its publication, Capital had become the pivotal part of German
52:25
Speaker 1: socialist literature, and his name assumed the position from which
52:29
Speaker 1: all other socialisms might be surveyed. Marx was, not, however,
52:34
Speaker 1: destined to complete it. The long struggle against poverty had
52:38
Speaker 1: left its mark upon his frame, and the last twelve
52:41
Speaker 1: years of his life were in incessant fight against pain
52:44
Speaker 1: and disease. Asthma and inflammation of the lungs left him
52:49
Speaker 1: little chance of continuous work, though typically enough he devoted
52:53
Speaker 1: his rest to the study of the Russian language that
52:55
Speaker 1: he might speak the more authoritatively upon its agriculture, and
52:59
Speaker 1: to such record creations as to physiology and advanced mathematics.
53:04
Speaker 1: He wrote too, in eighteen seventy five, his criticism of
53:07
Speaker 1: the Gutter Program, which contains perhaps the clearest statement of
53:11
Speaker 1: his attitude towards the transition to socialism. He was able
53:16
Speaker 1: further in eighteen seventy seven to eighteen eighty eight to
53:19
Speaker 1: do something towards preparing the second volume of Capital for
53:22
Speaker 1: the press, but visits to Carlsbad and Algiers did not
53:26
Speaker 1: improve his shattered health, and he did not lift his
53:28
Speaker 1: head again after the death of his wife on December second,
53:31
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty one. To her Marx had intended, as Engels
53:36
Speaker 1: has told us, to dedicate the completed structure of his work.
53:41
Speaker 1: He had no strength for the effort. On March fourteenth,
53:45
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty three, he died peacefully after a slight hemorrhage
53:49
Speaker 1: of the lungs. His old nurse, Helene and Engels were
53:53
Speaker 1: present as his death, and three days later he was
53:56
Speaker 1: laid to rest in the cemetery at Highgates, and Wilhelm
54:00
Speaker 1: Leipnecht spoke at his graveside, and the former devoted the
54:04
Speaker 1: remaining twelve years of his life to completing the unfinished
54:08
Speaker 1: edifice of his master. Marx would have wished no other
54:12
Speaker 1: wreath upon his tomb. End of Part four, Part five
54:23
Speaker 1: of Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski. This
54:27
Speaker 1: LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Five. Marx's personality
54:35
Speaker 1: is no easy one to dissect. There is no trace
54:38
Speaker 1: of the rebel in his inheritance, and his early education
54:41
Speaker 1: would have fitted him for any career rather than the
54:44
Speaker 1: one he chose. If he became the head and center
54:48
Speaker 1: of the destructive forces of Europe. That was the inevitable
54:51
Speaker 1: outcome of the reactionary regime into which he was born,
54:54
Speaker 1: and he would doubtless have countered that description by insisting
54:58
Speaker 1: that destruction is the parent of creativeness. His work dealt
55:02
Speaker 1: with the historic foundations of the permanent source of revolution,
55:06
Speaker 1: and the only weapon, as he realized, for flesh that
55:08
Speaker 1: has mortified is the knife. The view that makes of
55:12
Speaker 1: him the compere of Darwin, the discoverer of the universal
55:16
Speaker 1: law of economic evolution, has not a little truth in it.
55:20
Speaker 1: But it is less true than that which places him
55:22
Speaker 1: alongside of Rousseau and Carlile as one of the greatest
55:25
Speaker 1: prophets of the human race. For it is essentially by
55:30
Speaker 1: the qualities of the prophet that he is distinguished. He
55:34
Speaker 1: was unmoved by oracles other than his own, impatient of difference,
55:39
Speaker 1: as with Prudon and Bagunin, contemptuous, as his correspondence with
55:43
Speaker 1: Engels shows, of all who did not think exactly in
55:46
Speaker 1: his fashion, he never learned the essential art of colleagueship.
55:50
Speaker 1: He was too prone to regard a hostile view as
55:53
Speaker 1: proof of moral crime. He had not a little of
55:56
Speaker 1: that zest for priority he was so unwilling to recognize
55:59
Speaker 1: in the disas discoveries of others. He was rarely generous
56:03
Speaker 1: in his recognition of intellectual stimulus with Mars. To enter
56:07
Speaker 1: a movement was to dominate it, and he was incapable
56:10
Speaker 1: of taking the second place. Hatred, wrote Matseni of him,
56:15
Speaker 1: outweighs love in his heart, which is not right, even
56:19
Speaker 1: if the hatred may in itself have foundation. There is
56:23
Speaker 1: a penetrating truth in that criticism marks. His absorption in
56:27
Speaker 1: the wrongs of the disinherited undoubtedly blinded him to the
56:30
Speaker 1: universality of human nature. He had brooded so long over
56:35
Speaker 1: the method of their redress that he became incapable of
56:38
Speaker 1: weighing the value of alternative channels. He never realized how
56:42
Speaker 1: partial and incomplete with the views upon which he based
56:45
Speaker 1: his conclusions, and vast and patient as were the researches
56:49
Speaker 1: he undertook, he was not always exact in his measurement
56:52
Speaker 1: of evidence. He is, in fact a noble but not
56:57
Speaker 1: an attractive figure. That there was a marks eminently lovable
57:01
Speaker 1: in himself. The testimony of friends makes certain, but it
57:05
Speaker 1: was not the marks of public life. There is something
57:08
Speaker 1: unhealthy in the venom with which he assails early friends
57:11
Speaker 1: like Bruno Bauer, or not less ardent seekers after light
57:15
Speaker 1: like Prudon. His accusations against Prudon, even when the temptation
57:20
Speaker 1: to destroyers remembered were singularly ungenerous, learned, courageous, capable of
57:26
Speaker 1: profound sympathy with the mass of men, he was never
57:29
Speaker 1: able to grasp the secret of dealing with individuals. Much
57:34
Speaker 1: doubtless is to be pardoned to an exile who never
57:36
Speaker 1: enjoyed comfort and had often risked his personal safety. But
57:41
Speaker 1: Mazzini was able to emerge from trials not less difficult,
57:45
Speaker 1: with the sweetness unembittered. Nor could Marx accustom himself to
57:49
Speaker 1: the necessary compromises of political life. One is tempted to
57:53
Speaker 1: feel that Marks confined his introspection to other men and
57:57
Speaker 1: never attempted that sober examination of self, which is often
58:00
Speaker 1: the beginning of political wisdom. That effort, after all, is fundamental.
58:07
Speaker 1: The unstated assumptions of a thinker's personality are the more
58:10
Speaker 1: urgent because they do not appear in the printed word.
58:14
Speaker 1: Every great philosophic interpretation is at bottom a spiritual autobiography,
58:19
Speaker 1: and Marx never realized how greatly. His work is a
58:22
Speaker 1: palimpsest within which one can read the history of his
58:25
Speaker 1: personal experience. It is significant for his books that his
58:29
Speaker 1: early radicalism should have proved a barrier to his university career.
58:34
Speaker 1: It is significant also that he should have known the
58:36
Speaker 1: pains and penalties of exile. Nor is it irrelevant that
58:40
Speaker 1: after thirty years in London he was still at the
58:43
Speaker 1: end a German stranger, testing facts and constructing theories in
58:47
Speaker 1: terms quite alien from the circumstances around him. The impalpable
58:52
Speaker 1: penumbra of his thought never impressed him, even while it
58:56
Speaker 1: remained the subconscious touchstone by which he judged the thought
58:59
Speaker 1: and acts of others men. Thus, while he wrote with
59:02
Speaker 1: superb profundity about the material environment of men's lives, he
59:07
Speaker 1: rarely penetrated into the inner substance of those lives. With
59:11
Speaker 1: such tracts of experience religion, for example, as were alien
59:15
Speaker 1: from his own knowledge, he could neither sympathize nor understand.
59:20
Speaker 1: He wrote a philosophy which expresses in the mass the
59:23
Speaker 1: aspirations of man, But it is not a philosophy like
59:26
Speaker 1: that of Rousseau, which, with all its defects, springs directly
59:30
Speaker 1: from their deepest emotions in a sense, that is to say,
59:35
Speaker 1: the seeming logic of his attitude is deceptive, for it
59:38
Speaker 1: in part rests upon a failure to test his own assumptions,
59:41
Speaker 1: and imparts upon an abstract view of human nature with
59:45
Speaker 1: which the totality of facts is in direct contradiction. Marx's
59:50
Speaker 1: doctrines may be divided into five different parts, which, though
59:54
Speaker 1: they are brought into connection in his writings, have in
59:57
Speaker 1: reality no necessary dependence upon on each other. Their central
1:00:02
Speaker 1: economic position is a theory of value, by which he
1:00:05
Speaker 1: endeavored to explain the methods by which the workers are
1:00:08
Speaker 1: exploited under capitalism, and as a corollary, a view of
1:00:11
Speaker 1: the increasing concentration of capital from which he derived important
1:00:15
Speaker 1: consequences in his prophecy of the future. Historically, it is
1:00:20
Speaker 1: an attempt to explain the growth of movements and institutions
1:00:23
Speaker 1: entirely in economic terms. Predominantly, Marx insists the antagonism of
1:00:29
Speaker 1: classes is the motive power which underlies the historic process,
1:00:33
Speaker 1: and it is to the impulses which are at work
1:00:35
Speaker 1: in the satisfaction of economic demand, that all changes are
1:00:39
Speaker 1: to be traced. Philosophically, this view results in a purely
1:00:43
Speaker 1: materialistic view of human nature, a view, be it noted,
1:00:47
Speaker 1: which has obvious and important connections with the general attitude
1:00:51
Speaker 1: of the Benthamite school. Politically, the doctrines of Marx resolve
1:00:56
Speaker 1: themselves into a defense of revolution as the method by
1:00:59
Speaker 1: which the work are to attain power, and dictatorship as
1:01:02
Speaker 1: the method by which they so consolidate it as ultimately
1:01:05
Speaker 1: to secure a condition of general freedom. Upon Marx's theory
1:01:11
Speaker 1: of value, it is not necessary to spend much time.
1:01:15
Speaker 1: It has not stood the test of criticism, It is
1:01:17
Speaker 1: out of harmony with the facts, and it is far
1:01:20
Speaker 1: from self consistent. It represents essentially a narrow interpretation of
1:01:25
Speaker 1: some loose sentences of Ricardo. The latter had argued, with
1:01:29
Speaker 1: certain qualifications, that the value of any commodity is to
1:01:33
Speaker 1: be measured by the quantity of labour which goes into
1:01:35
Speaker 1: its production. Marx, however, ignored the qualifications, and the proof
1:01:40
Speaker 1: he offered of the thesis is essentially different than that
1:01:43
Speaker 1: of Ricardo. Exchange value, he argued, is not the singular
1:01:48
Speaker 1: quality of the commodity in which it inheres. Exchange value
1:01:52
Speaker 1: is the quality which it possesses, alike with all other
1:01:55
Speaker 1: qualities for which it can be exchanged. Since human labour
1:01:59
Speaker 1: is the on the quality which all commodities possess in common,
1:02:03
Speaker 1: human labour must be the measure of exchange value. And
1:02:06
Speaker 1: be it noted by human labour is meant undifferentiated human labour.
1:02:12
Speaker 1: It is a quantitative and not a qualitative equation. It
1:02:15
Speaker 1: is a measure simply of effort in time, and not
1:02:18
Speaker 1: of effort in results or quality of results. Labour is
1:02:22
Speaker 1: paid differently simply in relation to the different amount of
1:02:25
Speaker 1: labour congealed in any given commodity produced. That which will
1:02:30
Speaker 1: suffice to produce the necessaries of life for the laborer
1:02:33
Speaker 1: is therefore the price of labour. Power wages, as it
1:02:37
Speaker 1: clearly follows, are the value of the workers necessaries of life.
1:02:40
Speaker 1: But the worker produces in a day more than suffices
1:02:43
Speaker 1: for his necessaries of life. If we assume that by
1:02:47
Speaker 1: working six hours each day, the worker can produce his
1:02:50
Speaker 1: necessaries while his working day is eight hours long, then
1:02:54
Speaker 1: the value of what he produces is as eight hours
1:02:56
Speaker 1: is to six, that is to say, one third greater.
1:03:01
Speaker 1: Marx termed this extra production surplus value, and he assumed
1:03:05
Speaker 1: that the capitalist taking his surplus as his profit, robbed
1:03:08
Speaker 1: the worker of it. For by buying labour power at
1:03:11
Speaker 1: its market price, the capitalist at once grows rich and
1:03:15
Speaker 1: exploits his workers. And in any capitalistic society, especially where
1:03:19
Speaker 1: there is free competition, this is bound to be the case,
1:03:23
Speaker 1: for which it of course follows that only by the
1:03:25
Speaker 1: abolition of capitalism can we stop the exploitation of labour.
1:03:31
Speaker 1: It is unnecessary to dwell at any length upon the
1:03:33
Speaker 1: fallacies implicit in this analysis. As a matter of logic,
1:03:38
Speaker 1: Marx had no right to assume that the quality of
1:03:40
Speaker 1: labour is other differences being subtracted the common basis of measurement.
1:03:46
Speaker 1: Nor did he mention that, in addition to labour, all
1:03:48
Speaker 1: commodities to have value must have this at least in common,
1:03:52
Speaker 1: that they satisfy some need. Utility, in other words, is
1:03:56
Speaker 1: a necessary factor in value. It would be impossible to
1:04:00
Speaker 1: produce aeroplanes except upon the assumption that some people wanted
1:04:03
Speaker 1: to fly in them. Nor can undifferentiated human labour be
1:04:08
Speaker 1: taken as a measure of value. It is an economic
1:04:11
Speaker 1: platitude that differences in wages are not merely due to
1:04:15
Speaker 1: differences in the effort in time of production. It costs
1:04:18
Speaker 1: no less to produce a bad carpenter than a good one.
1:04:21
Speaker 1: But the quality of a good carpenter's work has a
1:04:23
Speaker 1: value quite apart from cost as effort. It has the
1:04:27
Speaker 1: type of value which the economists call a quasi rent,
1:04:31
Speaker 1: and this quasi rent appears in the value in exchange
1:04:34
Speaker 1: of the product. Nor is this all Wherever there is
1:04:39
Speaker 1: a type of production the phenomena of which result in rent,
1:04:43
Speaker 1: the measurement of value is not the mean cost of production,
1:04:46
Speaker 1: but the marginal cost of production. Marks failed to note
1:04:50
Speaker 1: this limitation, with the result that he cannot understand the
1:04:53
Speaker 1: nature of rent and was led into obvious contradictions. And
1:04:58
Speaker 1: he fails also to take any account of the fluctuating
1:05:01
Speaker 1: character of demand. He seems to have regarded demand as
1:05:05
Speaker 1: purely static, and falls, as a consequence, into all the
1:05:08
Speaker 1: difficulties which Boon, Barbek and the Austrian school have emphasized.
1:05:13
Speaker 1: To say, moreover, with Marks, that the cost of a
1:05:16
Speaker 1: laborer is the socially necessary cost, the lowest cost, that
1:05:20
Speaker 1: is at which it can be produced, is immediately to
1:05:23
Speaker 1: bring within purview tests of his hypothesis, which he entirely
1:05:26
Speaker 1: failed to apply. For if wages represent the cost of necessaries,
1:05:31
Speaker 1: the existence of a proletariat whose wages are above the
1:05:34
Speaker 1: bare cost of necessaries clearly invalidates the whole process, and
1:05:39
Speaker 1: in fact, the question of a wages level is an
1:05:41
Speaker 1: historical problem in which logical considerations do not play the
1:05:45
Speaker 1: whole part. Social conscience, for example, as with the trade, boards,
1:05:50
Speaker 1: may insist upon a rate of wages historically above the
1:05:53
Speaker 1: socially necessary cost, and trade unions may, by the combined
1:05:58
Speaker 1: strength they represent, lead to the same result. If a state,
1:06:03
Speaker 1: even though it be a capitalistic state, chose to adopt
1:06:06
Speaker 1: a policy of a minimum basis of civilized life in
1:06:09
Speaker 1: which a wage standard was fixed, the iron law of wages,
1:06:12
Speaker 1: which Marks deduced from his theory of value, would immediately
1:06:16
Speaker 1: be obsolete. He must not be forgotten. Moreover, that in
1:06:21
Speaker 1: the Marxian analysis, whatever does not appear as wages is
1:06:25
Speaker 1: always regarded as unearned profit of rent and interest. This
1:06:29
Speaker 1: is perhaps no unfair account, but it is outside the
1:06:32
Speaker 1: evidence of facts to argue that the task of directing business,
1:06:37
Speaker 1: the work of the entrepreneur, is not to count as
1:06:39
Speaker 1: labour and does not create value. Even when a suspicion
1:06:43
Speaker 1: of this impossibility dawned upon Marks, he dismissed the earnings
1:06:47
Speaker 1: of direction simply as cunning, and argued that all profits
1:06:51
Speaker 1: contain an element of surplus value which differs from interest, wages,
1:06:55
Speaker 1: and payment to the entrepreneur. But if profits are not
1:06:58
Speaker 1: a payment for work, then it should surely follow that
1:07:01
Speaker 1: the capitalist must take it also, otherwise he is gifted
1:07:05
Speaker 1: with a quality of moderation with which marks does not
1:07:08
Speaker 1: normally endow him. In such a general background, the Marxian
1:07:14
Speaker 1: theory of value seems clearly untenable, not less on theoretic
1:07:18
Speaker 1: grounds than from an analysis of the facts of business.
1:07:21
Speaker 1: Yet it is equally undeniable that Marx's view has obtained
1:07:25
Speaker 1: the assent of a whole class of society to its truth,
1:07:28
Speaker 1: and it is therefore worth while for a moment to
1:07:31
Speaker 1: inquire exactly what magic it possesses from which its strengthening
1:07:35
Speaker 1: hold is derived. That, it may be suggested, is simple
1:07:39
Speaker 1: enough for the technical economist, the difference between profits and
1:07:43
Speaker 1: rent was fundamental. Men like Ricardo and Nassausenia saw a
1:07:48
Speaker 1: natural distinction in source of origin, which manufacturers like Bright
1:07:52
Speaker 1: embodied in the legitimate earnings of a hard working milowna
1:07:56
Speaker 1: whatever his wealth, and the illegitimate because on earned income
1:07:59
Speaker 1: of a land owning duke. They saw it the more
1:08:02
Speaker 1: clearly when, as in the period of Marx's own maturity,
1:08:06
Speaker 1: they were struggling to free his business from the environment
1:08:09
Speaker 1: of a hostile squirearchy. But to the laborer, as Marks
1:08:13
Speaker 1: clearly saw, such a distinction was for practical purposes irrelevant.
1:08:18
Speaker 1: The world was divided for him into those who lived
1:08:20
Speaker 1: by wages and those who did not. Those who lived
1:08:24
Speaker 1: by wages were poor, those who did not live by
1:08:27
Speaker 1: wages were rich. Assume, as Marks assumed, that the surplus
1:08:31
Speaker 1: theory of value is true, and the riches of those
1:08:34
Speaker 1: who do not live by wages adue to the poverty
1:08:37
Speaker 1: of those who do. The worker was able to see
1:08:40
Speaker 1: that he was poor. He saw also that he produced
1:08:43
Speaker 1: more than he could consume, and that his surplus production
1:08:46
Speaker 1: was divided among a relatively small class of rich and
1:08:49
Speaker 1: often idle men. A theory such as Marxes inevitably appealed
1:08:54
Speaker 1: to him as the natural explanation of his oppressed condition.
1:08:58
Speaker 1: He clung to it not by virtue of any logical
1:09:01
Speaker 1: estimation of its theoretic adequacy, but because it summarized the
1:09:05
Speaker 1: most poignant experience he knew. The Marxian law of wages. Moreover,
1:09:11
Speaker 1: will from its very nature win new adherents at every
1:09:14
Speaker 1: period of commercial depression. At any moment when there is
1:09:18
Speaker 1: a decline in the effective demand for commodities, or when
1:09:21
Speaker 1: the strength of trade union resistance is at a low ebb,
1:09:24
Speaker 1: the impact of capitalism upon the wage earner will closely
1:09:27
Speaker 1: resemble what Marks insisted is its normal relation. For few
1:09:31
Speaker 1: business men have imagination enough to realize that there are
1:09:35
Speaker 1: other ways to the rehabilitation of markets than the reduction
1:09:38
Speaker 1: of price by means of lower wages. Inevitably, therefore, the
1:09:43
Speaker 1: worker will move from the acceptance of surplus value to
1:09:46
Speaker 1: the philosophy which Marks constructed as its natural environment. The
1:09:52
Speaker 1: law of the concentration of capital stands upon firmer ground.
1:09:57
Speaker 1: The greater the degree of complexity involved in the production
1:10:00
Speaker 1: active process, argues Marks, the fewer will be the number
1:10:03
Speaker 1: of persons controlling its instruments. Everything contributes to the intensification
1:10:09
Speaker 1: of this process. New means of communication are established, the
1:10:13
Speaker 1: problems of which are beyond the solution of the small capitalist.
1:10:17
Speaker 1: Important mechanical inventions are beyond his financial means. Territorial consolidation
1:10:23
Speaker 1: destroys the local market in which he was once a
1:10:26
Speaker 1: privileged person. The process, indeed, is neither immediate nor direct.
1:10:32
Speaker 1: It took the bourgeoisie three centuries to expropriate the artisan
1:10:36
Speaker 1: and create the proletariat. But once the process had begun,
1:10:40
Speaker 1: the development was inexorable. Overproduction created a new army of
1:10:45
Speaker 1: reserve workers. The substitution of pasture for arable farming concentrated
1:10:50
Speaker 1: a large rural population in the towns. The economies of
1:10:54
Speaker 1: large scale production forced hitherto independent producers into the ranks
1:10:58
Speaker 1: of wage earners. The capitalistic system moves from a national
1:11:03
Speaker 1: to an international character. Its market becomes the world. Its
1:11:08
Speaker 1: nature involves increasing centralization until the control of the forces
1:11:12
Speaker 1: of production reaches a point where its further development in
1:11:16
Speaker 1: private hands is impossible. For alongside the development of accumulation
1:11:21
Speaker 1: is the increase of the proletariat. The workers cannot any
1:11:25
Speaker 1: longer endure the misery that is involved in the capitalist regime.
1:11:29
Speaker 1: They have learned discipline from the training that is necessitated
1:11:33
Speaker 1: by the mechanism of the process of which they are
1:11:35
Speaker 1: the victims. The knell of capitalist private property then sounds.
1:11:40
Speaker 1: The expropriators are expropriated to the great capitalist. There succeeds
1:11:45
Speaker 1: the state, which is captured by the workers for their
1:11:48
Speaker 1: own purpose. The result of capitalism is, in fact its
1:11:52
Speaker 1: own destruction. It produces, in Hegelian fashion, its own antithesis.
1:11:59
Speaker 1: The condition of its growth is that it should involve
1:12:02
Speaker 1: the laws which imply its inevitable ruin. We need not
1:12:07
Speaker 1: accept the conclusion of the arguments who insist on the
1:12:10
Speaker 1: important truth that it contains the wastage of competition in
1:12:15
Speaker 1: large scale enterprise is a commonplace of modern business, and
1:12:18
Speaker 1: the trust or cartel is the characteristic symptom of industrial development.
1:12:24
Speaker 1: There are, indeed, certain important limitations to the simplicity of
1:12:27
Speaker 1: the Marxian view. The growth of joint stock enterprise distributes
1:12:32
Speaker 1: over a wider circle the number of those interested in
1:12:35
Speaker 1: the receipt of profits, even while it limits those who
1:12:38
Speaker 1: actually control the industrial process itself. While there are many
1:12:42
Speaker 1: minor industries, of which photography and the repair of motor
1:12:45
Speaker 1: cars are examples, in which the tendency is to the
1:12:48
Speaker 1: increase of small firms rather than to the development of
1:12:51
Speaker 1: great ones. But parallel with this evolution has gone a
1:12:55
Speaker 1: very striking centralization of credit, which concentrates in continuously fewer
1:13:00
Speaker 1: hands the finances of the community. Agriculture. Indeed, despite the
1:13:06
Speaker 1: large scale farming of Western America and the development of
1:13:09
Speaker 1: agrarian cooperation, remains persistently individualist in temper. Yet on the
1:13:15
Speaker 1: balance of inquiry, it is impossible to deny the emergence
1:13:18
Speaker 1: of an increasingly collectivist spirit, and its reaction upon industry
1:13:22
Speaker 1: is the more important because it leads without question to
1:13:26
Speaker 1: the demand by the workers of certain nominal standards from
1:13:29
Speaker 1: the state, which are increasingly insisted upon as the condition
1:13:33
Speaker 1: of business enterprise. Nor is that all. It becomes obvious
1:13:37
Speaker 1: that certain industries are from their very nature too vital
1:13:41
Speaker 1: in their results to be left to the chaotic possibilities
1:13:44
Speaker 1: of private efforts. If the expropriators are not actually expropriated,
1:13:49
Speaker 1: there comes, as with mines and railways, a demand for
1:13:52
Speaker 1: some form of nationalization. And just as the investigations of
1:13:56
Speaker 1: the thirties and forties produced the factory acts, so it
1:13:59
Speaker 1: is to argue that the results of inquiries like the
1:14:03
Speaker 1: Coal Commission of nineteen nineteen and the Docker's Inquiry of
1:14:06
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty are likely to put a term to the
1:14:09
Speaker 1: continuance of private enterprise. Capitalism in fact prepares monopolies which
1:14:15
Speaker 1: immediately affect the community towards some form of state administration.
1:14:21
Speaker 1: So regarded, of course, this view does not involve the
1:14:25
Speaker 1: theory of revolution, which Marks regarded as the inevitable corollary
1:14:29
Speaker 1: of capitalistic concentration. It need not, indeed involve a transition
1:14:34
Speaker 1: towards a socialistic state at all. All that would seem
1:14:38
Speaker 1: to be implied would be the removal of industries essential
1:14:41
Speaker 1: to the welfare of the community from the danger of
1:14:44
Speaker 1: exploitation by private interests. The logic of a necessary conflict
1:14:49
Speaker 1: resultant upon the concentration of capital is derived by Marks
1:14:53
Speaker 1: from other sources. It is the corollary of his interpretation
1:14:57
Speaker 1: of history that, broadly speaking, may be summarized by saying
1:15:02
Speaker 1: that all the phenomena of history are the result of
1:15:04
Speaker 1: economic motives. To them are traceable legal and social institutions,
1:15:10
Speaker 1: not less than the religion and philosophy of each age.
1:15:14
Speaker 1: The system of production is the ultimate factor, in short,
1:15:17
Speaker 1: by which the mass of human relationships is determined. Protestantism,
1:15:22
Speaker 1: Engels wrote, is essentially a bourgeois religion, so too, in
1:15:27
Speaker 1: a feudal period we should expect the legislation to reflect
1:15:30
Speaker 1: not general ideas of right, but those ideas of right
1:15:33
Speaker 1: which are compatible with the maintenance of feudalism. But ideas change,
1:15:38
Speaker 1: and in Marx's view, the source of changes to be
1:15:41
Speaker 1: discovered in the transformation of one economic system into another.
1:15:46
Speaker 1: A new external world produces new internal ideas. Let women
1:15:51
Speaker 1: enter industry in the mass, and, as mister Bertrand Russell
1:15:54
Speaker 1: has pointed out, ideas which not even the logic of
1:15:58
Speaker 1: Plato and Stuart Mill could make obvious, become accepted without question.
1:16:03
Speaker 1: Two hundred years ago it was unthinkable that a peer
1:16:06
Speaker 1: should go into the city. Today, finances enmeshed political life
1:16:10
Speaker 1: within its fold, so that no company prospect us is
1:16:13
Speaker 1: complete until the peerage is represented there. No one can
1:16:19
Speaker 1: doubt the very large measure of truth in this outlook.
1:16:22
Speaker 1: No one can write the history of English Puritanism, of
1:16:25
Speaker 1: the Struggle for toleration, or of the American Revolution without
1:16:29
Speaker 1: making the defense of an economic incentive fundamental to their explanation.
1:16:34
Speaker 1: But it is equally clear that the insistence upon an
1:16:36
Speaker 1: economic background as the whole explanation is radically false. No
1:16:42
Speaker 1: economic motive can explain the suicidal nationalism of the Balkans.
1:16:47
Speaker 1: The War of nineteen fourteen may have been largely due
1:16:50
Speaker 1: to conflicting commercial imperialisms, but there was also a competition
1:16:54
Speaker 1: of national ideas which was at no point economic. Historically, too,
1:17:00
Speaker 1: the part played by religion in the determination of social
1:17:03
Speaker 1: outlook was, until at least the Peace of Westphalia, as
1:17:07
Speaker 1: important as that played by material conditions. Luther represents something
1:17:13
Speaker 1: more than a protest against the financial exactions of Rome.
1:17:17
Speaker 1: The impulses of men, in fact, are never referable to
1:17:20
Speaker 1: any single source. The love of power, heard, instinct, rivalry,
1:17:25
Speaker 1: the desire of display, all these are hardly less vital
1:17:29
Speaker 1: than the acquisitiveness which explains the strength of material environment.
1:17:34
Speaker 1: Engels indeed seems to have realized the narrowness of the
1:17:38
Speaker 1: Orthodox view, for in the later years of his life
1:17:40
Speaker 1: he insisted that the dominant part ascribed by Marks to
1:17:44
Speaker 1: the economic motive was due mainly to its neglect by
1:17:47
Speaker 1: his opponents, and there was not always time, place, and
1:17:50
Speaker 1: opportunity to do justice to the other considerations. But with Marx,
1:17:56
Speaker 1: the economic motive is not only final, it is fine
1:18:00
Speaker 1: in a particular way. The only durable source of faction,
1:18:04
Speaker 1: says Madison, is property. And for marks. The emergence of
1:18:08
Speaker 1: private property and history is the beginning of the class struggle.
1:18:12
Speaker 1: Immediately society can be divided into those who do and
1:18:15
Speaker 1: those who do not possess private property. A power is
1:18:18
Speaker 1: released which explains the changes of history. For the class
1:18:22
Speaker 1: which possesses property, molds the civilization of that society and
1:18:26
Speaker 1: the service of its own interests. It controls the government,
1:18:30
Speaker 1: it makes the laws, it bills the social institutions of
1:18:34
Speaker 1: the commonwealth in accordance with its own desires. Slave and
1:18:38
Speaker 1: free man, master and servant. These have been the eternal
1:18:42
Speaker 1: antitheses of history. With the advent of capitalism, the struggle
1:18:47
Speaker 1: is at once simplified and made more intense. Thenceforward the
1:18:52
Speaker 1: final stage of the class war, the struggle between bourgeoisie
1:18:55
Speaker 1: and proletariat emerges. And just as each social order of
1:18:59
Speaker 1: the past to secrete it within its womb the germ
1:19:02
Speaker 1: of its successor, as for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so
1:19:07
Speaker 1: does the latter contain within itself the germ of its
1:19:09
Speaker 1: communist's successor. Capitalism, said Marx, produces its own gravedigger. The conflict,
1:19:17
Speaker 1: in his view, was an inevitable and a bitter one,
1:19:19
Speaker 1: and it was bound to result in the victory of
1:19:21
Speaker 1: the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto,
1:19:27
Speaker 1: is incapable of continuing in power because it is incapable
1:19:31
Speaker 1: of securing a bare subsistence to its slaves, and the
1:19:34
Speaker 1: result is a growing sense of revolt in the worker, who, ultimately,
1:19:38
Speaker 1: by a revolutionary act, assumes the reigns of power. In
1:19:44
Speaker 1: a large sense, it is obvious that the substance of
1:19:46
Speaker 1: this interpretation is accurate. The fact of the class struggle,
1:19:51
Speaker 1: as Marx himself pointed out, is a commonplace of historians
1:19:54
Speaker 1: and economists, and it may be added that to deny
1:19:57
Speaker 1: its importance is to make history on intelli. Where Marx
1:20:02
Speaker 1: parted company with his predecessors was in the deductions he
1:20:05
Speaker 1: drew from his perception of its significance. For whereas with
1:20:09
Speaker 1: men like Madison and Guizeaux, the fact of conflict produced
1:20:12
Speaker 1: a sense of horror at its implications and a search
1:20:16
Speaker 1: for a technique that its dangers might be obviated, with Marx,
1:20:20
Speaker 1: the conflict was fundamental, and both its method and ultimate
1:20:23
Speaker 1: outcome were to hymn alike obvious. Whereas with Madison there
1:20:28
Speaker 1: is an ever present uncertainty whether a just victory may
1:20:31
Speaker 1: not suffer betrayal or a wrong object be pursued. With Marx,
1:20:36
Speaker 1: the process is predetermined, and save for a brief period
1:20:39
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy, no hesitation seems to have crossed his mind.
1:20:45
Speaker 1: The method by which the proletariat was to secure power
1:20:48
Speaker 1: lies at the very root of Marx's doctrine, and it
1:20:51
Speaker 1: has been in our own day perhaps the main source
1:20:54
Speaker 1: of his influence. The method was revolution, and a dictatorship
1:20:59
Speaker 1: of iron rigor would be consolidate the new system until
1:21:02
Speaker 1: the period of transition had been effectively bridged. Marx did
1:21:06
Speaker 1: not blind himself to what all this implied. The history
1:21:10
Speaker 1: of capitalism was the history of a relentless defense of
1:21:13
Speaker 1: each phase of the rights of property. They were maintained
1:21:16
Speaker 1: by methods at each point unconnected with ethical demands. If
1:21:22
Speaker 1: the conflict was extreme, as in the days of June
1:21:24
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight, or with the Commune of Paris, the
1:21:28
Speaker 1: last ounce of misery was wrung from its opponents that
1:21:31
Speaker 1: capitalism might be secure. A period of comparative quiescence may
1:21:36
Speaker 1: produce the concession of social reform. But this is merely deception.
1:21:41
Speaker 1: Once a really vital point is touched by the worker's demands,
1:21:45
Speaker 1: they are met by armed resistance. That means, of course,
1:21:48
Speaker 1: that only by conscious, violent intervention can communism be realized.
1:21:53
Speaker 1: The proletariat must seize a propitious moment for the revolution,
1:21:58
Speaker 1: but until it comes, they must do all in their
1:22:00
Speaker 1: power to disturb the existing regime, even if minor successes
1:22:05
Speaker 1: have been achieved by the aid of the liberal minded bourgeoisie.
1:22:08
Speaker 1: From the first hour of victory, the workers must level
1:22:11
Speaker 1: their distrust against their former allies. They must create a
1:22:15
Speaker 1: working class organization of their own workers committees, local workers
1:22:20
Speaker 1: councils to oppose proletarian institutions and their influence to those
1:22:25
Speaker 1: of the middle class state. The communists must arm the
1:22:29
Speaker 1: proletariat and do all they can to cut down the
1:22:32
Speaker 1: army of the state as the chief weapon of defense
1:22:34
Speaker 1: possessed by the bourgeoisie. Where the workers are in the militia,
1:22:39
Speaker 1: they must form within it a secret organization to obtain
1:22:42
Speaker 1: its control. They must form their own independent, if hidden,
1:22:46
Speaker 1: military force and acquire arms by every method. Influential democrats
1:22:52
Speaker 1: to whose word the working class seems to respond must
1:22:55
Speaker 1: be discredited. The old social order, in fact, must be
1:22:59
Speaker 1: attacked at every point. Communists have two functions, only to
1:23:04
Speaker 1: prepare for the revolution and to consolidate it successfully. When
1:23:07
Speaker 1: it has been prepared. They must think of themselves not
1:23:11
Speaker 1: as realizing an ideal, but only as setting free the
1:23:14
Speaker 1: elements of a new society concealed within the womb of
1:23:18
Speaker 1: the old. The period of consolidation, moreover, must be a
1:23:23
Speaker 1: period of high in dictatorship. Marx had no illusions about
1:23:27
Speaker 1: the possibility of a democratic governance in such an hour.
1:23:30
Speaker 1: The ideals of freedom were impossible to maintain until the
1:23:34
Speaker 1: ground so conquered had been made secure. Revolution provokes counter revolution,
1:23:40
Speaker 1: and a victorious proletariat must be on its guard against reaction. Revolution,
1:23:45
Speaker 1: in fact, demands of the revolutionary class that it secure
1:23:49
Speaker 1: its purpose by every method at its disposal. It has
1:23:53
Speaker 1: neither time nor opportunity for compassion or remorse. Its business
1:23:58
Speaker 1: is to terrorize its opponents into acquiescence. It must disarm
1:24:02
Speaker 1: antagonism by execution, imprisonment, forced labour, control of the press.
1:24:08
Speaker 1: For as it cannot allow any effort at the violent
1:24:11
Speaker 1: overthrow of what it has established, so must it stamp
1:24:14
Speaker 1: out such criticism as might be the prelude of further attack.
1:24:19
Speaker 1: Revolution is war, and war is founded upon terror. The
1:24:23
Speaker 1: methods of capitalism must be used for the extinction of capitalism.
1:24:27
Speaker 1: For as capitalism has made of life itself the cheapest
1:24:30
Speaker 1: of commodities, there need be no repining at its sacrifice.
1:24:34
Speaker 1: And the result in any case is worth the cost,
1:24:37
Speaker 1: since it destroys the possibility of future sale. It would
1:24:41
Speaker 1: have been a wanton betrayal of trust, said Marx of
1:24:44
Speaker 1: the Paris Commune, to observe the traditional forms of liberalism.
1:24:49
Speaker 1: The end, in fact, is too great to be nice
1:24:51
Speaker 1: about the means employed. Nor can we expect that a
1:24:55
Speaker 1: peaceful revolution is possible. While Marx had certain doubts of
1:24:59
Speaker 1: England on the whole, he was certain that a violent
1:25:02
Speaker 1: struggle was inevitable. The workers might capture Parliament at the poles,
1:25:07
Speaker 1: but political power of that kind is in any case
1:25:10
Speaker 1: a shadow, and were it used for an assault upon property,
1:25:13
Speaker 1: it would inevitably provoke an armed resistance. Marx indeed went
1:25:18
Speaker 1: further who was openly contemptuous of democracy. It was a
1:25:22
Speaker 1: bourgeois invention, unrelated to the real and used only to
1:25:26
Speaker 1: deceive the people again and again. The proletariat is betrayed,
1:25:31
Speaker 1: and throughout marks his writings there is the assumption that
1:25:34
Speaker 1: reliance must be placed upon a class conscious minority, for
1:25:39
Speaker 1: in his view, there is no place in history for
1:25:41
Speaker 1: the majority principle. The record of states is the clash
1:25:45
Speaker 1: between determined minorities contending for the seat of power. To
1:25:50
Speaker 1: introduce considerations of consent, To wait on in the belief
1:25:54
Speaker 1: that the obvious rightness of communist doctrine will ultimately persuade
1:25:58
Speaker 1: men to its acceptance is enter highly to ignore reality.
1:26:02
Speaker 1: The mass of men will always acquiesce in or be
1:26:05
Speaker 1: indifferent to, whatever solutions are afforded. Communists must proceed upon
1:26:10
Speaker 1: the assumption that nothing matters save the enforcement of their will.
1:26:15
Speaker 1: Upon the end, this revolutionist to serve the forms its
1:26:18
Speaker 1: purpose will adopt. Marx has written but little obviously with
1:26:23
Speaker 1: justice on his side, for speculation in distant historical futures
1:26:27
Speaker 1: is the worst form of gambling. It was with the
1:26:31
Speaker 1: destruction of capitalism and the period of transition therefrom that
1:26:35
Speaker 1: he was mainly concerned. A new productive system was bound
1:26:38
Speaker 1: to involve new institutions which no man could foresee. That
1:26:43
Speaker 1: the communist maxim from each according to his powers, to
1:26:46
Speaker 1: each according to his wants, would become operative. Was of
1:26:50
Speaker 1: course obvious to him. The performance would be measured in
1:26:54
Speaker 1: terms of labour time are possibly inconsistent hypothesis he took
1:26:58
Speaker 1: for granted, But he was always emphatic that the future
1:27:02
Speaker 1: must settle itself. He insisted that the measure of distribution
1:27:06
Speaker 1: would be necessarily unequal in the period of transition. Humay
1:27:10
Speaker 1: as he saw destroyed by catastrophe. But creation is not
1:27:14
Speaker 1: an immediate and spontaneous process, so that he nowhere set
1:27:18
Speaker 1: limits to the duration of this intermediate period. It was
1:27:22
Speaker 1: necessary to wait until the habits engendered by a new
1:27:24
Speaker 1: productive system created a psychology in which the dogma of
1:27:28
Speaker 1: equality superseded the bourgeois hypothesis of individual rights. The main
1:27:34
Speaker 1: thing was the destruction of a regime in which class
1:27:37
Speaker 1: distinction made possible the servitude of the many. It was
1:27:41
Speaker 1: possible to have confidence in an order in which the
1:27:44
Speaker 1: whole force of social efforts was deliberately placed at the
1:27:47
Speaker 1: disposal of the commonwealfare end of part five, Part six
1:28:04
Speaker 1: of Carl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski. This
1:28:09
Speaker 1: Libraryvox recording is in the public domain. Six A generation
1:28:15
Speaker 1: which has seen this doctrine, supported by machine guns and baynets,
1:28:19
Speaker 1: is unlikely to belittle its importance. Nor can it be
1:28:23
Speaker 1: denied that not a little of social evolution has taken
1:28:26
Speaker 1: the course marks predicted. Anyone who reads the history of
1:28:30
Speaker 1: the industrial struggle in Colorado or West Virginia will find
1:28:34
Speaker 1: it difficult to discover a limit of unreason which capitalism
1:28:38
Speaker 1: is not willing consistently to overpass. The treatment of communists
1:28:43
Speaker 1: in Hungary and Finland has exactly the characteristics he foretold.
1:28:47
Speaker 1: An isolated community like the miners of South Wales becomes
1:28:52
Speaker 1: naturally communist in the background of incompetence and ill treatment
1:28:55
Speaker 1: from their employers and representative government, at least in its
1:28:59
Speaker 1: classical form, seems unlikely to justify the high hopes of
1:29:02
Speaker 1: its Benthamite exponents. Every country in the world that has
1:29:07
Speaker 1: experimented with universal suffrage has experienced a sense of disillusion.
1:29:12
Speaker 1: It is even commonplace to argue that reason has little
1:29:15
Speaker 1: place in political struggle, and to pin faith to an
1:29:18
Speaker 1: irrational impulse which seeks no more than the satisfaction of
1:29:22
Speaker 1: individual desire. If there has been an improvement in the
1:29:26
Speaker 1: general standard of civilization, an increasing unwillingness for example, to
1:29:30
Speaker 1: inflict onnecessary pain. There are no signs of the mitigation
1:29:34
Speaker 1: of the class conflict. On the contrary, the events of
1:29:38
Speaker 1: the last decade point directly to its exacerbation, and we
1:29:41
Speaker 1: have obviously entered upon a period in which the rights
1:29:44
Speaker 1: of property are challenged at their foundation. Certainly, it is
1:29:48
Speaker 1: unquestionable that the purchase price of capitalist survival is the
1:29:52
Speaker 1: offer of concessions which a generation ago would have seemed
1:29:55
Speaker 1: not less unnecessary than unthinkable. Yet the approximation of the
1:30:01
Speaker 1: general atmosphere to the condition Marks had in view hardly
1:30:05
Speaker 1: justifies the principles on which he placed his reliance to
1:30:09
Speaker 1: begin with. The preparation for revolution is a qualitatively different
1:30:13
Speaker 1: problem from what it was in the days of the
1:30:15
Speaker 1: Paris Barricades. It is possible, in a mood of defeat
1:30:20
Speaker 1: for a civilian population to destroy a regime which the
1:30:23
Speaker 1: army and navy no longer uphold, and, as was demonstrated
1:30:27
Speaker 1: long ago by Cromwell, a military force which is dissatisfied
1:30:31
Speaker 1: with its civilian superiors can without difficulty become their master.
1:30:36
Speaker 1: But for a party of men in the position of
1:30:38
Speaker 1: communists in the modern state, the situation is very different.
1:30:43
Speaker 1: Unless they are the majority and consequently the government. The
1:30:47
Speaker 1: hostility of the army and navy is certain. Nor can
1:30:50
Speaker 1: they obtain on any large scale the necessary equipment for insurrection.
1:30:55
Speaker 1: They would have to obtain control of the national arsenals,
1:30:59
Speaker 1: and that would mean the dispersion of forces in any
1:31:02
Speaker 1: case small by hypothesis, they would have to meet in
1:31:05
Speaker 1: the people at large at least a mood of acquiescence.
1:31:09
Speaker 1: They would have to guarantee a supply of food, which
1:31:12
Speaker 1: in any but a dominantly agricultural society would be practically
1:31:16
Speaker 1: impossible if international credit were seriously impaired by the revolution.
1:31:21
Speaker 1: Even if we regard a general strike as tantamount in
1:31:24
Speaker 1: the conditions of modern industry to a revolution, the difficulties
1:31:28
Speaker 1: are overwhelming. A general strike might well succeed as a
1:31:32
Speaker 1: protest against war for its penumber, might in the future
1:31:36
Speaker 1: arouse emotions of determination that would be irresistible. But upon
1:31:41
Speaker 1: any less dramatic issue, it seems tolerably certain that once
1:31:44
Speaker 1: again the army and navy must be in the control
1:31:47
Speaker 1: of the strikers if success is to be assured. For
1:31:51
Speaker 1: a modern army can supply all services connected with transportation,
1:31:56
Speaker 1: it can secure the distribution of food, and the problem
1:31:58
Speaker 1: of fuel is becoming less less a matter of mining coal.
1:32:02
Speaker 1: The Marxian view of a secretly armed minority assuming power
1:32:06
Speaker 1: at a single stroke is unthinkable in the modern state.
1:32:10
Speaker 1: It would have to imply either the existence of a
1:32:13
Speaker 1: government so weak that it had practically ceased to be
1:32:16
Speaker 1: a government at all, or what is perhaps an equivalent,
1:32:19
Speaker 1: a population actively sympathetic to the revolutionary minority. The resources
1:32:25
Speaker 1: of publicity in modern civilization make impossible the private preparation
1:32:29
Speaker 1: of the gigantic effort assumed by the Marxian hypothesis. But
1:32:35
Speaker 1: this is only the beginning of the difficulty. Marks assumed
1:32:39
Speaker 1: throughout his analysis a system of compact states, the life
1:32:43
Speaker 1: of which was mainly determined by economic considerations, and each
1:32:47
Speaker 1: relatively independent of its neighbours. Each of these assumptions is
1:32:51
Speaker 1: only partially true of the modern world. A state like England,
1:32:55
Speaker 1: which is wholly dependent on foreign trade, could not undergo
1:32:59
Speaker 1: a successful reas except upon the assumption that her neighbours
1:33:03
Speaker 1: viewed its results with benevolence. Such an attitude on the part,
1:33:07
Speaker 1: for instance, of America, is very unlikely, and the rupture
1:33:10
Speaker 1: of Anglo American trade would be fatal to any revolution
1:33:14
Speaker 1: in this country. Nor is that all. It is quite
1:33:17
Speaker 1: clear that the division a revolution would imply must in
1:33:20
Speaker 1: its workings be very partially determined by economic considerations. In
1:33:26
Speaker 1: a country like America, for example, there would be at
1:33:29
Speaker 1: least three other factors of vital importance. An American communist
1:33:33
Speaker 1: revolution would have to cope with problems of distance, which
1:33:37
Speaker 1: would probably render it abortive at a very early stage.
1:33:41
Speaker 1: It would not, as in France, be a matter of
1:33:43
Speaker 1: the immense impact of the capital and the life of
1:33:46
Speaker 1: the nation. Washington is relatively insignificant in the perspective of America.
1:33:52
Speaker 1: To control the whole continent would involve controlling the most
1:33:56
Speaker 1: complicated railway system in the world, and even if that
1:33:59
Speaker 1: difficulty could be surmounted, a complex of nationalist differences would
1:34:03
Speaker 1: have to be assuaged. German, French, English, Irish, Polish. These
1:34:09
Speaker 1: have their special characteristics which the American capitalist has been
1:34:13
Speaker 1: able to exploit to their common disadvantage. It is difficult
1:34:17
Speaker 1: to see how an appeal to a communist minority of
1:34:20
Speaker 1: each would result in the transcendence of these differences. Even then,
1:34:25
Speaker 1: the religious problem remains, and the whold of the churches
1:34:28
Speaker 1: upon the mind, particularly of the Latin peoples, would not
1:34:32
Speaker 1: be easy to loosen. For Marx, insisting only upon the
1:34:36
Speaker 1: economic motive, it is easy to ignore these difficulties, but
1:34:39
Speaker 1: it is far too narrow an outlook not to realize
1:34:42
Speaker 1: that the outset that appeal can be made to other
1:34:45
Speaker 1: incentives every wit as strong. And even if it were
1:34:49
Speaker 1: argued that Marks could in our own time assume that
1:34:52
Speaker 1: the day of such prejudice as nationality and religion and
1:34:55
Speaker 1: gender is passing, which is doubtful, and that the barriers
1:34:58
Speaker 1: built by economic difference and now alone important, his conclusions
1:35:02
Speaker 1: would not follow. For in a period of universal suffrage,
1:35:07
Speaker 1: it ought then to be possible to capture the seat
1:35:09
Speaker 1: of power at the poles and throw upon the capitalist
1:35:12
Speaker 1: the onus of revolting against a socialist democracy. There are, however,
1:35:17
Speaker 1: other approaches to the problem which Marx did not adequately consider.
1:35:23
Speaker 1: There is, in the first place, the general result upon
1:35:26
Speaker 1: society of the practice of violence, particularly when the destructive
1:35:30
Speaker 1: nature of modern warfare is borne in mind, And in
1:35:34
Speaker 1: the second there is a special psychological result upon the
1:35:37
Speaker 1: agents of the opposing forces in such a regime. Marx
1:35:41
Speaker 1: did not consider these possibilities, in part because he judged that,
1:35:45
Speaker 1: in any case, the conflict was inevitable, and also because
1:35:49
Speaker 1: he was convinced that whatever sacrifices had to be made
1:35:52
Speaker 1: would be ultimately justified by the results. Such an attitude is,
1:35:57
Speaker 1: of course simply an instance of his general failure to
1:36:00
Speaker 1: weigh sufficiently the substance of a political psychology. In part
1:36:05
Speaker 1: also it is the corollary of a determinism which the
1:36:08
Speaker 1: facts in issue at no point justify. For it is
1:36:12
Speaker 1: obvious that if revolution, with its attendant violence, is justified
1:36:16
Speaker 1: for any cause in which you happen to believe profoundly,
1:36:19
Speaker 1: no modern state can hope for either security and order.
1:36:23
Speaker 1: The war has shown clearly that the impulses of savagery,
1:36:26
Speaker 1: which are checked by peace, are, when loosed, utterly destructive
1:36:31
Speaker 1: of the foundations of a decent existence. If life became
1:36:35
Speaker 1: an organized and continuous jacquery, civilization could quite easily be
1:36:40
Speaker 1: reduced to the state. Where As in mister Wells's imaginary
1:36:43
Speaker 1: but far from impossible picture, some aged survivor may tell
1:36:47
Speaker 1: of an organized Europe as a legend which his grandchildren
1:36:51
Speaker 1: cannot hope to understand. Violence on the grand scale. In fact,
1:36:56
Speaker 1: so far from proving an avenue to communism, would be
1:36:59
Speaker 1: the one kind of agg existence in which the impulses
1:37:01
Speaker 1: demanded by a communist state had no hope of emergence.
1:37:06
Speaker 1: For the condition of communism is the restraint of exactly
1:37:09
Speaker 1: those appetites which violence releases and marks. Has nowhere indicated
1:37:14
Speaker 1: how this difficulty could be met. Even beyond this issue,
1:37:19
Speaker 1: a further point must be raised. Marx has assumed the
1:37:22
Speaker 1: seizure of power and a period of rigorous control until
1:37:26
Speaker 1: the people are prepared for communism, But he has not
1:37:29
Speaker 1: shown what approximate length that period is to be, nor
1:37:32
Speaker 1: what certainty we have that those who act as controllers
1:37:35
Speaker 1: of the dictatorship will be willing to surrender their power
1:37:38
Speaker 1: at the proper time. It is a commonplace of history
1:37:42
Speaker 1: that power is poisonous to those who exercise it. There
1:37:46
Speaker 1: is no reason to assume that the Marxian dictator will
1:37:49
Speaker 1: in this respect be different from other men, and ex
1:37:52
Speaker 1: HYPOTHESI it will be more difficult to defeat his malevolence,
1:37:56
Speaker 1: since his regime will have excluded the possibility of opposition.
1:38:00
Speaker 1: No group of men who exercise the powers of a
1:38:03
Speaker 1: despot can ever retain the habit of democratic responsibility. That
1:38:08
Speaker 1: is obvious, for instance, in the case of men like
1:38:11
Speaker 1: Sir Henry Mayne and Fits James Stephen, who, having learned
1:38:15
Speaker 1: in India the habit of autocratic government, become impatient on
1:38:18
Speaker 1: their return to England of the slow process of persuasion
1:38:21
Speaker 1: which democracy implies. To sit continuously in the seat of
1:38:26
Speaker 1: office is inevitably to become separated from the mind and
1:38:30
Speaker 1: wants of those over whom you govern. For the governing
1:38:32
Speaker 1: class acquires an interest of its own, a desire for permanence,
1:38:37
Speaker 1: a wish perhaps to retain the dignity and importance which
1:38:40
Speaker 1: belong to their function, and they will make an effort
1:38:42
Speaker 1: to secure them. That, after all, is only to insist
1:38:47
Speaker 1: that every system of government breeds a system of habits,
1:38:50
Speaker 1: and to argue, as a corollary, therefrom that the Marxian
1:38:53
Speaker 1: dictatorship would breed habits fatal to the emergence of the
1:38:57
Speaker 1: regime marks had ultimately in view. The special vice of
1:39:01
Speaker 1: every historic system of government has been its inevitable tendency
1:39:05
Speaker 1: to identify its own private good with the public welfare.
1:39:09
Speaker 1: To suggest that communists might do the same is no
1:39:12
Speaker 1: more than to postulate their humanity. And it may be
1:39:16
Speaker 1: added that if they surrendered power at a reasonable time,
1:39:19
Speaker 1: the grounds for so doing, being obviously in their nature
1:39:22
Speaker 1: non economic, would thereby vitiate the truth of the materialistic
1:39:26
Speaker 1: interpretation of history. All this, it is worth noting, is
1:39:32
Speaker 1: to omit from consideration the ethical problems that are involved.
1:39:37
Speaker 1: It is obvious, for example, that it involves the complete
1:39:39
Speaker 1: erosion of the whole historic process. But the erosion of
1:39:43
Speaker 1: responsibility in the governing class is the destruction of personality
1:39:46
Speaker 1: in their subjects. In such a regime, notions of liberty
1:39:51
Speaker 1: and equality are out of place. Yet it is obvious that
1:39:54
Speaker 1: the two main defects of capitalism are its failure to
1:39:57
Speaker 1: produce liberty and equality for the mass of humble men
1:40:00
Speaker 1: and women. Marx, that is to say, contemplated a condition
1:40:05
Speaker 1: which reproduces exactly the chief vices of capitalism, without offering
1:40:09
Speaker 1: any solid proof of their ultimate extinction. For after all,
1:40:14
Speaker 1: the chief effort that is worth making is towards a
1:40:16
Speaker 1: civilization in which what mister Graham Wallace has termed the
1:40:20
Speaker 1: capacity of continuous initiative is implied in the fact of citizenship.
1:40:26
Speaker 1: It is clear enough that the possibility upon which the
1:40:28
Speaker 1: existence of that capacity, turns is a wide distribution of power.
1:40:33
Speaker 1: A man whose thoughts and acts are at the disposal
1:40:36
Speaker 1: of other men is deprived of his personality, and that
1:40:39
Speaker 1: deprivation is implied in the rigorous centralization to which Marx
1:40:43
Speaker 1: looked forward. Unquestionably, he was right in his insistence that
1:40:48
Speaker 1: the distribution of economic power in a capitalist state makes
1:40:51
Speaker 1: the enjoyment of such personality impossible to most. But it
1:40:56
Speaker 1: does not seem any more likely to emerge in the
1:40:58
Speaker 1: successor to it that he templated. We may go further
1:41:02
Speaker 1: and argue that it is impossible in any state where
1:41:05
Speaker 1: the main purpose of and motive to effort is the
1:41:08
Speaker 1: increase of material wealth. No society can realize itself in
1:41:13
Speaker 1: any full sense of the word until the mainspring of
1:41:15
Speaker 1: its existence is a capacity to value things of the
1:41:18
Speaker 1: mind as more precious than material commodities. That involves the
1:41:23
Speaker 1: sociology in which the economic motive which Marks emphasized is
1:41:27
Speaker 1: appraised at a low level. Obviously, to achieve the condition
1:41:31
Speaker 1: in which that appraisal is possible involves an educational system
1:41:35
Speaker 1: far different both in scope and purpose from what we
1:41:38
Speaker 1: now have. It involves a complete transformation of values, in
1:41:43
Speaker 1: which things like the wider appreciation of art, the study
1:41:46
Speaker 1: of science and philosophy, the release, in short of the
1:41:50
Speaker 1: creative energies of men from their present bondage, are regarded
1:41:53
Speaker 1: as the main and immediate effort of political organization. Yet,
1:41:59
Speaker 1: if historic expt experiences to count for anything, and Marx's
1:42:02
Speaker 1: philosophy is nothing if not the interpretation of historical experience,
1:42:08
Speaker 1: it is exactly this transformation of values which cannot take
1:42:11
Speaker 1: place in the development Marks had in view. The Barbarian
1:42:15
Speaker 1: invasions of Rome did not produce a great art and
1:42:18
Speaker 1: a great culture. They produced the Dark Ages. The Thirty
1:42:23
Speaker 1: Years War impeded constructive efforts in Germany until the threshold
1:42:28
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. Nor has our own experience been different.
1:42:33
Speaker 1: The idealism of nineteen fourteen has perished before the greater
1:42:37
Speaker 1: strength of the purely destructive forces released in the struggle.
1:42:41
Speaker 1: What we have realized is how tenuous and fragile are
1:42:44
Speaker 1: the bonds of civilization, how little likely they are to
1:42:47
Speaker 1: be reinforced by any efforts save that of peace. In
1:42:52
Speaker 1: such a background, the conflict that Marx envisaged looms before
1:42:55
Speaker 1: us as the harbinger of precisely those evils from which
1:42:58
Speaker 1: we are seeking release. It emphasizes in men the impulses
1:43:03
Speaker 1: against which civilization is a protest, that wrong can be
1:43:07
Speaker 1: wiped out with wrong, That we are to regard ourselves
1:43:10
Speaker 1: as the victims of blind and impersonal forces against which
1:43:14
Speaker 1: it is useless to strive, that the possessive impulses of
1:43:17
Speaker 1: men cannot be transcended by creative effort. These and things
1:43:22
Speaker 1: like these are a gospel of impossible despair in that aspect.
1:43:26
Speaker 1: Surely the older socialists were right who made the basis
1:43:30
Speaker 1: of their creed a doctrine of right and fraternity and justice.
1:43:34
Speaker 1: For right and fraternity and justice imply love as their foundation,
1:43:39
Speaker 1: they do not spring, even at the last vain striving
1:43:42
Speaker 1: from a doctrine founded upon hate. End of Part six,
1:43:54
Speaker 1: Part seven of Karl Marx, an essay by Harold J. Laski.
1:44:00
Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Seven. The
1:44:06
Speaker 1: real power and influence of Mars lie in a direction
1:44:09
Speaker 1: essentially different from what is generally assumed. He was the
1:44:13
Speaker 1: first thinker to expose, in all its hollowness, the moral
1:44:16
Speaker 1: inadequacy of a commercial civilization. He showed that in any
1:44:20
Speaker 1: society where the main effort is the attainment of wealth,
1:44:24
Speaker 1: the qualities that are basically noble cannot acquire their full vigor.
1:44:28
Speaker 1: He did, in fact, for the economic relationships of peoples
1:44:32
Speaker 1: what grociers did for their international relationships. He founded both
1:44:37
Speaker 1: a science and an ideal. For he made finally impossible
1:44:41
Speaker 1: any economic system which makes the volume of trade the
1:44:44
Speaker 1: test of national well being. Had he put in the
1:44:47
Speaker 1: forefront of social discussion the ultimate question of the condition
1:44:51
Speaker 1: of the people, had he performed the incalculable service to
1:44:54
Speaker 1: his generation of bringing to it a message of hope
1:44:57
Speaker 1: in an epoch where men seem to themselves to have
1:45:00
Speaker 1: become the hapless victims of a misery from which there
1:45:03
Speaker 1: was no release. In every country of the world where
1:45:07
Speaker 1: men have set themselves to the task of social improvement,
1:45:10
Speaker 1: Marx has been always the source of inspiration and prophecy.
1:45:16
Speaker 1: His weaknesses, of course, are obvious and important. He diagnoses
1:45:20
Speaker 1: a disease admirably, says mister Wells in an excellent phrase,
1:45:24
Speaker 1: and then suggests rather an incantation than a remedy. Yet
1:45:28
Speaker 1: the diagnosis is an essential part of the cure. No
1:45:32
Speaker 1: one can read or move the picture he drew of
1:45:34
Speaker 1: the results of the industrial Revolution. Massive in its outline,
1:45:38
Speaker 1: convincing in its detail. It was an indictment such as
1:45:41
Speaker 1: neither Carlyle nor Ruskin had power or strength to draw.
1:45:46
Speaker 1: It is relatively unimportant that his explanations of the phenomena
1:45:49
Speaker 1: he depicted have not stood the test of criticism. What
1:45:54
Speaker 1: is vital in the whole was his perception that a
1:45:56
Speaker 1: society dominated by business men and organized for them the
1:46:00
Speaker 1: prosperity of business men had become intolerable. Hardly less splendid
1:46:05
Speaker 1: was his insistence that no social order is adequate in
1:46:08
Speaker 1: which the collective energies of men are not devoted to
1:46:11
Speaker 1: their common life. It does not matter that such perception
1:46:15
Speaker 1: had been given to others, that such insistence was not new.
1:46:19
Speaker 1: No thinker of the nineteenth century drove home the lesson
1:46:22
Speaker 1: with force so irresistible, or with urgency so profound. Even
1:46:27
Speaker 1: his advocacy of catastrophic revolution has this much of truth
1:46:31
Speaker 1: in it. That a point is reached in the development
1:46:34
Speaker 1: of any social system where men will refuse to accept
1:46:38
Speaker 1: any longer a burden they find too great to bear,
1:46:41
Speaker 1: and in that moment, if they cannot mitigate, they will
1:46:44
Speaker 1: become determined to destroy. The condition, in fact, upon which
1:46:49
Speaker 1: a state may hope to endure is its capacity for
1:46:52
Speaker 1: making freedom in each generation more widespread and more intense.
1:46:57
Speaker 1: Where Marx was wrong was in his belief that the
1:46:59
Speaker 1: catastrophe was in itself worthy of attainment, and in his
1:47:03
Speaker 1: emphasis upon its ultimate benefit. But where he was also
1:47:08
Speaker 1: irresistibly right was in his prophecy that the civilization of
1:47:11
Speaker 1: his epoch was built upon sand. And even the faults
1:47:15
Speaker 1: of his prophecy may be pardoned to an agitator in exile,
1:47:18
Speaker 1: to whom the cause of the oppressed was dearer than
1:47:20
Speaker 1: his own welfare her bottom. The main passion by which
1:47:25
Speaker 1: he was moved was the passion for justice. He may
1:47:28
Speaker 1: have hated too strongly. He was jealous, and he was proud,
1:47:32
Speaker 1: But the mainspring of his life was the desire to
1:47:35
Speaker 1: take from the shoulders of the people the burden by
1:47:37
Speaker 1: which it was oppressed. He realized that what, in all
1:47:41
Speaker 1: varieties of time and place has caused the downfall of
1:47:44
Speaker 1: a governing class has never been some accidental or superficial event.
1:47:50
Speaker 1: The real cause of revolution is the unworthiness of those
1:47:53
Speaker 1: who controlled the destinies of a people. Indifference, to suffering, selfishness,
1:47:59
Speaker 1: lack of moral elevation. It was for those defects that
1:48:03
Speaker 1: he indicted the class from which he sprang. He transformed
1:48:07
Speaker 1: the fears of the workers into hopes. He translated their
1:48:10
Speaker 1: effort from interest in political mechanisms to interest in social foundations.
1:48:16
Speaker 1: He did not trust in the working of laws. He
1:48:18
Speaker 1: sought always for the spirit that lay behind the order
1:48:21
Speaker 1: of which they were the expression. He was often wrong,
1:48:25
Speaker 1: He was rarely generous, He was always bitter. Yet when
1:48:29
Speaker 1: the role of those to whom the emancipation of the
1:48:32
Speaker 1: people is due comes to be called, few will have
1:48:35
Speaker 1: a more honorable and non a more eminent place. End
1:48:40
Speaker 1: of Part seven, Part eight of Karl Marx, an essay
1:48:50
Speaker 1: by Harold J. Laski. This libriyvox recording is in the
1:48:54
Speaker 1: public domain by the same author, The Fabian Society and
1:48:59
Speaker 1: Fabian publications by the same author. The Problem of Sovereignty
1:49:07
Speaker 1: Authority in the Modern State, Selected letters of Edmund Burke,
1:49:12
Speaker 1: edited with an introduction. The above are published by the
1:49:16
Speaker 1: Oxford University Press. Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham,
1:49:22
Speaker 1: Williams and Norgate. The Foundations of Sovereignty and other essays
1:49:28
Speaker 1: Alan and Unwin. The Fabian Society, twenty five tot Hill Street, Westminster, London,
1:49:38
Speaker 1: s w one. Those willing to join the Labour Party
1:49:42
Speaker 1: or desirous of obtaining information about its program and principles
1:49:46
Speaker 1: are invited to communicate with the Secretary of the Fabian Society.
1:49:51
Speaker 1: The Fabian Society has been from the outset a constituent
1:49:54
Speaker 1: body of the Labour Party, and membership of the Society
1:49:57
Speaker 1: carries with it full membership of the Labour b Party,
1:50:00
Speaker 1: eligibility for nominations at all conferences and officers, and qualification
1:50:05
Speaker 1: for Labour Party candidatures for Parliament and local authorities, without
1:50:09
Speaker 1: obligation to belong to any other organization. The Society welcomes
1:50:15
Speaker 1: as members any persons, men or women wherever residents who
1:50:18
Speaker 1: subscribe to its basis set forth below, and who will
1:50:21
Speaker 1: cooperate in its work according to their opportunities. Basis of
1:50:27
Speaker 1: the Fabian Society to be signed by all members adopted
1:50:32
Speaker 1: May twenty third, nineteen nineteen. The Fabian Society consists of socialists.
1:50:39
Speaker 1: It therefore aims at the reorganization of society by the
1:50:42
Speaker 1: emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual ownership and
1:50:47
Speaker 1: the vesting of them in the community for the general benefits.
1:50:51
Speaker 1: In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages
1:50:54
Speaker 1: of the country be equitably shared by the whole people.
1:50:58
Speaker 1: The Society accordingly won works for the extinction of private
1:51:01
Speaker 1: property in land, with equitable consideration of established expectations and
1:51:06
Speaker 1: due provision as to the tenure of the home and
1:51:09
Speaker 1: the homestead. For the transfer to the community by constitutional
1:51:13
Speaker 1: methods of all such industries as can be conducted socially,
1:51:17
Speaker 1: and for the establishment as the governing consideration in the
1:51:20
Speaker 1: regulation of production, distribution and service of the common good
1:51:25
Speaker 1: instead of private profit. The Society is a constituent of
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