Kh. MOMJAN
__TITLE__ THE DYNAMICPROGRESS PUBLISHERS Moscow
[1] Translated from the Russian
by Vic Schneierson
CONTENTS
Page
IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION
This Most Dynamic Century..........
5
Chapter One. THE PESSIMISTIC CONCEPTION
OF HISTORY............
10
The Gloomy View...........
10
Philosophical Substantiation of Pessimism . .
34
Running Round in Circles........
46
The Myth of Predestination.......
50
Chapter Two. THE VOLUNTARISTIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY.........
59
``Capitalism Is Only Beginning".....
59
The Cautious Optimists........
67
The Philosophy of Quasi-Optimism ....
75
The Search for Economic Arguments . . .
102
Social Mimicry...........
118
Chapter Three. THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE IN
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.......
133
The Dread of Freedom.........
133
The Champions of National Inequality . . .
152
Salvation Through War........
158
Chapter Four. SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
172
Devaluation of the Individual......
172
The Society That Has Lost Moral Trust . .
185
Chapter Five. THE CONCEPTION OF APPEASED
OPPOSITES.............
198
l*
[3]Chapter Six. THE MOTIVE FORCES OF MODERN
HISTORY..............224
Chapter Seven. THE CRITICS OF SOCIALISM
ABOUT SOCIALISM'S FUTURE......240
Chapter Eight. THE LAWS OF HISTORY ARE
IRREVOCABLE............265
[4] IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION
THIS MOST DYNAMIC CENTURY
The past decades of the 20th century were the most revolutionary in man's history. Radical changes have occurred in all social spheres. In many countries, social relations and institutions that seemed eternal and immutable have vanished from the scene. New forms of human relations, new political systems and new spiritual values have appeared.
If the velocity of historical motion is measured in terms of radical progressive social mutation, we may legitimately say that ours is the most dynamic of all centuries. In our time, social affairs are developing at rates no other phase of history has matched.
Fifty years ago the system of capitalist enterprise ruled undivided. Capitalism was dragging new countries into its orbit. Bourgeois theorists predicted that it would exist eternally and conceived progress solely within the framework of capitalist society. The risings of workers and peasants, and the insurrections of oppressed peoples, were suppressed out of hand, and this appeared to corroborate the notion that the capitalist order was natural and unshakeable.
5Socialism dwelled modestly between the covers of books and in the minds and dreams of people fighting the world of inequality and oppression. Nowhere had it yet crossed the border from theory to practice, from the possible to the real. Various economists, philosophers and sociologists were busy proving that Marxism was impracticable and unpopular, and said it would go the way of all unworkable ideas.
This was several decades ago. Yet today socialism has triumphed in a number of European and Asian countries, and in Cuba, too, a country of the American continent. The world socialist system embraces more than one-third of mankind.
Fifty years ago a few imperialist states held sway over the many millions of people in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Our generation has seen the colonial imperialist system break up under the revolutionary onslaught of socialism and the national liberation movement. More than 1,200 million people have won political independence and begun to overcome their economic and cultural backwardness. They have joined actively in the administration of their countries' affairs.
The past decades witnessed the rapid eradication of the survivals of feudalism in Europe, the overthrow of monarchies in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Turkey and many other countries.
The First World War raged in the world a mere fifty years ago. The nazis plunged mankind into the abyss of the Second before the nations had time to heal the wounds inflicted by the First. This second conflagration made the war of 1914-18 look like child's play 6 for destructive power, brutality and inhumanity. It looked as though world wars would never end and mankind would be sacrificed to Moloch. But the radical progressive changes wrought in the world have affected inter-state relations. There are forces today which, headed by the socialist community of nations, are able to avert a world war and bridle the forces of evil and destruction.
We have witnessed deep-going changes in man's intellectual life and culture. We are in the midst of a great scientific and technical revolution. The energy of the atom has been tapped. For the first time, humans have overpowered the earth's gravity and left the limits of their planet. This advent of the cosmic era is bound to repattern man's outlook.
The world is changing at an incredibly rapid pace. More millions of people are being drawn into the vortex of events. The distance between the present and the future, between the potential and its material embodiment, is shrinking spectacularly.
Even the most conservatively-minded people, the sticklers for routine and outworn tradition, will not deny the precipitous course of contemporary history, the swift change of the world's social pattern. Bourgeois politicians and theorists, who abhor the word ``revolution'', admit the revolutionary dynamism of our time and, what is more, have resigned themselves to the fact that the old world has no hope of even a short breathing space, a recession of the revolutionary tide.
Chester Bowles, the prominent U.S. politician and writer, says in his book, The Coming Political Breakthrough:
``Perhaps the most significant fact of our
times is that the revolution which shaped our own history is alive and on the march again in Asia, Africa, in the Middle East and in Latin America. It may wander into wayward paths or keep to a steadier course. It may be led by saints or by sinners. But ... it is carrying everything before it.''^^1^^
Scarcely anybody in the world today will deny that this is a time of stupendous flux. There is no argument about that. The argument centres on the attitude towards the current rapid social reconstruction, on the causes behind it, on its impact on man's present and on his foreseeable future.
Our contemporaries are speculating on the future of the world, the future relations of men and nations. This is always so in revolutionary times, when the old and historically outworn world approaches its collapse and the new social system embodying the interests and hopes of progressive forces is still only gaining its sea legs.
The present and the future dwells on the minds of entire nations, not only on those of politicians, economists and philosophers. They want to know their immediate and long-term goals, they want to picture their future. It is impossible to act confidently and firmly in our day, when time runs so much more quickly, without a clear idea of the future. It isn't too much to say that appraisal of the future has become the object of a keen ideological struggle.
What is the general trend of contemporary history? Is man drifting towards a thermonuclear disaster and biological extinction? Is
capitalism really still full of beans, of inexhaustible potentialities for further development? What is the true worth of the sociological conception predicting a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, a kind of half-breed combining the principle of private enterprise with economic planning? Or is the communist prediction that the peoples will inevitably, sooner or later, arrive at communism, a society of plenty, of equal and free people, more consistent with the truth of history?
It is the purpose of this book to examine some of the bourgeois conceptions on this score, to set out the diametrically opposite MarxistLeninist theory of social development, and to probe the true essence of the various conflicting views on man's future.
~^^1^^ Bowles, The Coming Political Breakthrough, New York, 1959, p. 17.
Chapter One
THE PESSIMISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
THE GLOOMY VIEW
The pessimistic conception of the world and of life as a chain of joyless, profoundly tragic events, a fatally preordained drift to extinction, prevails in many Western philosophical and sociological works. It is widespread enough to provoke our interest in its origin and substance, its distinctive features and its role in the current clash of ideas.
To be sure, even the most antique religious philosophies were rooted in pessimism. This should not surprise us, for every religion denies or minimises the value of earthly existence, which it describes as a vale of tears and a vanity of vanities; it defines death as deliverance from earthly suffering and seeks true being in the transcendental, supernatural, supra-sensory and imaginary hereafter.
History reveals that depression is widespread, as a rule, at times when a socio-economic formation, its mode of production and form of property and exploitation, is giving way to another, historically more consummate, organisation of society. The outgoing ruling class looks upon its own collapse as the collapse of all society, all civilisation. Its more exalted and mystically-minded ideologists conceive the
10downfall of the old social order as the end of the world, as a cosmic catastrophe. They are reluctant, and partly unable, to admit that the destruction of the habitual mode of life which showers them with all sorts of benefits is essential for the emergence of a new society with more forceful stimuli for labour and social production to improve the conditions of life. History shows that pessimistic views also arise among certain sections of the oppressed class, still unable to embark on active struggle for the abolition of the old order which presses down on them with redoubled fury during the time of its agony.
The downfall of the slave-owning system gave rise to deep pessimism in the dominant slavers' ideology. The slave-owning gentry thought the world had lost its colours and smells, its rational sense and right to further existence. "All mankind," Marcus Aurelius wrote, "is smoke; it is nothing." The neoPlatonic philosophy was the one that laid special emphasis on the idea of man's doom, the senselessness of earthly existence, the futility of man's hopes of a better life on earth, contempt of carnal enjoyments and appeals to mortify the flesh.
The collapse of slavery was mirrored in the early Christian dogmas and their unremitting denial of the worth of earthly existence. The profound disbelief in any but divine salvation, the damnation of the then existing human relations, and the presentiments of the "last judgement" and the "end of the world", which fill the early Christian writings, notably the Apocalypse, were prompted by the realities of the time when the slave-owning formation was crumbling. Slave labour was daily becoming
11less profitable. Slavery was quickly becoming an anachronism. A struggle, of extermination flared up between the antagonistic classes. Yet the brutal suppression of slave risings could no longer bolster and preserve the outdated social order for any length of time. The setbacks suffered by the masses in the fight for liberty generated pessimistic sentiment among them, it is true, but the sense of futility filling the ``victors'' was incomparably deeper.
A similar state of affairs marked the demise of feudal society. As feudalism approached its historical end, the ideologists of the ruling estates made sombre predictions about mankind's future. They described the earth as a short-lived habitat on the way to eternal bliss in the other world, and warned of the imminence of the Last Judgement. They pleaded the case of extreme asceticism and reviled sensual pleasures. However, this did not prevent the rulers from enjoying balls and masquerades and indulging themselves in the most carnal of pleasures. "After us, the deluge" was a byword then, epitomising the mood of, say, the French royal court shortly before the bourgeois revolution of 1789-94.
As the people's wrath mounted, the feudal rulers interpreted any attempt on the pillars of the absolutist feudal monarchy as an attempt on human civilisation. Eschatological ideas were propagated far and wide by the French royalist clergy. The philosophers Joseph-Marie de Maistre and Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald described the transition from feudal to bourgeois relations as a deadly peril to civilisation and to the further existence of mankind.
The ideologists of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, spoke ardently about man's
12ascendant development and predicted everlasting prosperity, for the capitalist system was then on the upgrade.
Jean-Antoine Condorcet, one of the earliest champions of historical progress, argued that the improvement of human society was just as boundless as the soaring flights of human reason. He wrote a treatise to prove there was no limit to man's creative genius. "Man's faculty for improvement," the French thinker wrote, "is truly boundless. The progress of this faculty is henceforth independent of any power that may wish to arrest it.''^^1^^
But as the intrinsic contradictions of the bourgeois system grew deeper and the revolutionary movement against the capitalist order gained strength, exalted optimism gave way gradually to doubt and vacillation, to a corrosive presentiment of disaster, and a sense of apprehension, alarm and fear has gripped bourgeois politicians, economists, philosophers and sociologists ever since.
The soldiers and policemen of the ruling class were still able to cope with the risings of workers, peasants and oppressed peoples. The Communards faced firing squads at Pere-- laChaise. The defenders of the last Paris barricades went to their death. Yet the red banner of the defeated Communards flew on proudly over the earth as a symbol of the hope of all the oppressed, a signal for a new, more effective assault on the social system that would not let people be people, would not let them enjoy the blessings created by their diligent hands,
~^^1^^ Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des proijres de Vesprit humain, t. 1, Paris, 1880, p. 19.
13their creative intellect, on terms of equality. No, such a system could be neither natural, nor eternal. It forfeited its right to exist, it squandered away its prestige. It was shot through with grave dangers for the present and future of mankind. It had to be replaced by a new, fair social system.
This idea, scientifically substantiated in the Marxist doctrine, won the minds and hearts of ever-increasing multitudes. They were still organisationally weak, it is true, and cruelly persecuted, but the future was theirs. The more farsighted members of the ruling class admitted that the development of capitalism was generating forces, above all the working class, which history destined to stamp out the last exploiting society.
Small wonder that pessimistic sentiment pervaded the ideology of the bourgeois system, its literature, art, philosophy and ethics. Ideas about the irrationality of being, the futility of life, the vanity of hope, coupled with hysterical attacks on the very idea of ascendant social development, spread far and wide.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche, who were exponents of stark misanthropic pessimism, became the idols of the decadent bourgeois intelligentsia.
In his book, The World as Will and Idea, and in other of his writings, Schopenhauer rejected all forms of rationalism and optimism and declared as delusive all hopes of better things. He endeavoured to substantiate the notion that it was right and necessary to destroy the "will of living''.
Hartmann picked up where Schopenhauer left off and objected to what he called the three
14myths, which he described as equivalent---the possibility of mundane happiness, social progress and happiness in the hereafter. The evolution of the subconscious in the basis of the world, Hartmann said, would culminate in the destruction of the world. He said the ultimate goal of world development was deliverance from suffering which was necessarily connected with being. He associated the desired surcease from suffering with non-being. His was a philosophy of death, designed to paralyse the will of the masses and arrest their efforts to liberate themselves from exploitation and oppression, set up the new social system shaped by the preceding development and establish new social relations.
Nietzsche gave an extremely aggressive, misanthropic twist to his deep-going social pessimism. Spurred by dread of the workingclass movement and socialism, by a foreboding of imminent catastrophe, Nietzsche's philosophy advocated brutal suppression of the revolutionary forces and exonerated savage violence against the masses. It was not surprising, therefore, that his phrenetic doctrine was one of the ideological cornerstones of bloodstained nazism, which set out to establish its "new order", to enslave the peoples, to crush the socialist system in the U.S.S.R, and to block the irrepressible advance of the peoples to the new social system, by means of high-explosive bombs and flame-throwers, gas chambers and cremation furnaces.
The emergence of the system of socialist states after the Second World War, their rapid development, coupled with the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system, its decay and the falling prestige of the bourgeois order,
15redoubled pessimistic sentiment among the governing exploiting class.
``At no other time," says the collection of answers to questions asked by the Bertelsmann Publishers of West Germany, "was man so hopelessly abandoned and confused. The two world wars and the political eventualities of the modern world have shaken the political pillars so strongly that most people have no clear political goal before them. The basic spiritual principles, too, have become so questionable that we no longer have anything dependable to lean upon. We feel ourselves hopelessly abandoned in an inimical and terrifying world, which hems us in on all sides.''^^1^^
Speaking at the 13th International Congress of Philosophy in Mexico (1963), Francisco Larroyo noted the mounting sense of fear inspired by the rapid course of history. "In the world of today," he said, "sudden and considerable changes occur in all spheres. Are they favourable? Or are they unfavourable? Pessimistic voices resound, and pessimism is a human mood that spawns alarm, sometimes even morbid fear. Indeed, never before in history have there been so many reasons for dismay.''^^2^^
The more eloquent exponents of social pessimism are inclined to liken mankind to a locomotive racing madly to the end of the railway track.
Sociologist Otto Veit produces the following picture: "The historical philosophy of our day," he writes, "is overshadowed by the idea of an
apocalyptic end. Collapse, catastrophe, downfall, dusk, end---all these words crop up in every investigation of the history of culture. They are associated with the old social order, the old economic system, the whole system of values or, more generally, with Western culture.''^^1^^
Hundreds, even thousands, of books and articles produce lurid portrayals of this "race towards death", deafening the world with their funeral knell. "There is a growing awareness of imminent ruin tantamount to a dread of the approaching end of all that makes life worth living," proclaims Karl Jaspers.^^2^^ "The twentyfifth hour ... It is not the last hour; it is one hour past the last hour. It is Western civilisation at this very moment. It is now," writes G. Virgil Gheorghiu.^^3^^ "We are entering upon a time comparable with the darkest periods of human history," says Germain Ba/in.^^4^^
In his Twentieth-Century Version of the Apocalypse, Franklin L. Baumer brings forth considerable evidence of the eschatological sentiment, the mood of the approaching end, reigning in modern Western literature. The author says he does not wish to exaggerate the sphere gripped by pessimism, yet commits an obvious exaggeration by saying that "the twentieth-century apocalyptic reflects the pain and suffering and blighted hopes of the peoples of
~^^1^^ Veit, Die Flucht vor der Freiheit, Frankfurt am Main, 1947, S. 3.
~^^2^^ Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, New York, 1933, p. 63.
~^^3^^ Gheorghiu, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, New York, 1950, p. 49.
~^^4^^ Bazin, The Devil in Art, in "Satan", New York, 1952, p. 366.
~^^1^^ Die Kraft zu leben. Bekenntnisse unserer Zeit. Giitersloh, 1963, S. 23.
~^^2^^ Memorias del XIII Congreso International de Filosofia, Mexico, 1963, Vol. 1, p. 177.
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17an entire continent and is confined to no single age-group or nation or class".^^1^^
It is quite true, indeed, that social pessimism has gripped the consciousness not only of the declining classes, but also the psychology of a certain section of the non-proletarian population. However, this should not prevent us from seeing its main bearers and its true causes. The source of pessimism is often sought in the sphere of ideas and emotions, and of collateral phenomena.
In reality, the presentiment of imminent disaster and sad reflections on the irrationality of being, on doom, "the pain of the spirit" and the sense of dread, are infused by the deepening general crisis of capitalism. It is the root of contemporary social pessimism, the root cause of the fear inspired by the rapid course of history.
Like a thousand years ago, fear of living prompts illusory notions of salvation in the other world. The purport of the candid religious pessimism is really simple: do not value your life on earth too highly, for it is no more than a short-lived ordeal on the way to eternal bliss.
The extreme pessimistic religious conceptions maintain that earthly life is not worth one's hopes; it is irrational, associated with suffering, lacking in substantive value, and woven of most acute and insoluble contradictions that turn man into a sacrificial lamb; it is insane to try and grasp these contradictions and still more insane to try and resolve them. Man's "sinful nature" robs him of all hope on earth; the best he can do is accept earthly life stoically and uncomplainingly with all its un-
conquerable trials, calamities and suffering; the best he can hope to accomplish is to alleviate, but never abolish, evil. This point of view prevails among many Western religious idealist trends, notably Christian existentialism. Gabriel Marcel, one of its prominent exponents, says in his book, Men Against Humanity, that he mourns the lot of man, who is constantly attacked by the forces of evil, and that his apprehensions are prompted by sincere compassion for "suffering humanity''.
``I am convinced," he writes, "that we are approaching the end of history. It is quite probable that many of us will witness the apocalyptic end.''^^1^^ He sees eye to eye on this score with Max Picard, author of L'Homme du Neant (The Man of Non-Being). A devout Christian Marcel seeks the ultimate solution to the problem of human being in the hereafter. But like many contemporary religious thinkers, he is eager to ``adjust'' mundane affairs. Yet he rejects organised mass struggle against war, against the way of life that spawns inequality and the enslavement and humiliation of people, the hostility and hatred among classes and nations. The measures he devises will really lead to nothing. He substitutes the activity of small groups, small communities, for genuinely collective struggle. He advocates purely spiritual activity, a kind of moral self-improvement of groups, a consolidation of Christian values among congregations. We may treat these values as we like---extol them or reject them out of hand. But we ought to remember that Christian consciousness and Christian activity
~^^1^^ See Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, t. 1, No. 3, Paris, p. 627.
~^^1^^ Marcel, Les hommes contre I'humain, Paris, 1951, p. 161.
2-
19
18failed to bridle evil down the centuries and did not prevent costly wars even between Christian states. Marcel is too incisive a philosopher to overlook this fact. So he turns to thoughts of imminent catastrophe.
The preacher of religious pessimistic ideas maintains that man is doubly unhappy in our age, because he overrated his powers and believed he could transform mundane existence and convert it from a vale of tears into a valley of happiness. Man concentrated his attentions on the earth and departed from his God. The philosopher takes this fldeistic stand to try and explain the tragedy of 20th-century man. The 20th-century man has learned much in the fields of science and technology. But this greater knowledge, the obscurantist claims, is giving rise to new difficulties that reason cannot resolve. Man has armed himself with superpowerful weapons and has thus become weaker, so much weaker in fact that he is likely to fall prey to his own inventions. In the circumstances, he must return to God's fold. "As the craving for the earthly takes the soul farther away from God," writes Claire Lucques, "it prevents people from becoming spiritually mature.''^^1^^
The evil existing on earth exists for man, but was not created by man. To mitigate it, it has to be taken for granted; man must adapt himself to it. "This means," writes George P. Grant, "that finally the individual has no choice but to accept the God-given order.''^^2^^ Yet this order given by God is a severe and joyless one for many, if not for all.
Religious pessimism swings out against the Promethean philosophy, the philosophy of man's active struggle for happiness. Scientifically, the Promethean stands for man's faith in his powers, for the notion that history is made by the people and that nothing can hem in their advance to perfection.
It is only fair to note, however, that the religious trend, which seeks to perpetuate and bless man's suffering on earth and associates ``optimism'' with the hereafter, has articulate opponents among the clergy itself, among its progressive sections. We are referring to people like the late Hewlett Johnson, who, though they cling to the metaphysical ideas of reward in the hereafter, are sufficiently sober-minded and humane to see the necessity and possibility of renewing life on earth along communist lines. In their own specific form, they express the incompatibility of the creative efforts of people, of their faith in man's better future, with cowardly, humiliating and corrosive pessimism.
Many Western philosophers, sociologists and politicians realise that the pessimistic view does not spring from the innermost recesses of human soul, nor from any transcendental causes, and that it is rooted in the facts of life and in social relations. "What happened in three decades of the twentieth century," writes Robert L. Heilbroner, a U.S. sociologist, "was a cataclysm of realities infinitely more powerful in changing men's attitudes than the mere erosion of ideas. From 1914 through 1945 Europe experienced a compression of horror without parallel in history: the carnage of the First World War, the exhaustion of the Depression, the agonising descent of Germany into its fascist nightmare, the suicide of Spain, the
21~^^1^^ Lucques, "Dynamique de notre Present", Memorias del XIII Congreso International de Filosofia, 1963, p. 202.
~^^2^^ Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, New York, 1960, p. 51.
20humiliation of Italy, the French decay, the English decline---and finally the culminating fury of World War II. Before the cumulative tragedy of these years all optimistic views failed.''^^1^^
Yet it was not all optimistic views that failed. The optimism sustained by faith in bourgeois legality, bourgeois civilisation, was indeed shaken. The disastrous events of the early half of the 20th century listed by Heilbroner dashed faith in ascendant development without wars, without the fascist nightmare and without the all-pervading oppression of machine over man. But these very same calamities bred the idea that mankind must look for other social trails to achieve a radical, revolutionary reconstruction of society and emerge from its blind alley.
Pessimism is inspired by the social relations of the capitalist type. This has occurred even to people worlds removed from Marxism. It has occurred to many bourgeois philosophers and sociologists. Take Arnold Toynbee. He is clearly aware that the source of pessimism, of loss of faith in the future, lies in the crisis of bourgeois civilisation and the capitalist mode of life. "The future of the Western middle class," he writes, "is in question now in all Western countries; but the outcome is not simply the concern of the small fraction of mankind directly affected; for this Western middle class ---this tiny minority---is the leaven that in recent times has leavened the lump and has thereby created the modern world. Could the creature survive its creator? If the Western middle class broke down, would it bring
humanity's house down with it in its fall? Whatever the answer to this fateful question may be, it is clear that what is a crisis for this key minority is inevitably also a crisis for the rest of the world.''^^1^^
Toynbee attributes supernatural qualities to the Western bourgeoisie. He makes the ridiculous conjecture that a breakdown of the bourgeoisie may bring down humanity's house. But what concerns us here is something else: Toynbee admits that the fatal ills of the bourgeois system are the source of the contemporary pessimism and of the dread experienced by the defenders of the old society. It is a valuable admission, because most other writers look for the causes of the "universal confusion" and the eschatological fear wherever they possibly can, save the lap of bourgeois society and its social structure, which contradicts the vital interests of all the peoples.
Modern social pessimism is mostly said to derive from the ``inevitability'' of a nuclear war. But we shall deal later in greater detail with the prospects of war and peace. At this point, let us examine the attempts to spread the notion of the fatal inevitability of man's selfextermination .
Numerous books in nearly all the capitalist countries are bursting with forecasts and descriptions that "mankind gone insane" will wreak in a total, all-embracing and all-- destroying war.
It is farthest from the minds of the authors of these books to seek the source of wars of
~^^1^^ Heilbroner, The Future as History, New York, 1959, p. 46.
~^^1^^ Toynbee, "Civilization on Trial" in Toynbee's Civilization on Trial and The World and the West, Cleveland and New York, 1963, p. 30.
23 22conquest in the contradictions of the exploiter society. All their efforts are centred on exonerating capitalism and putting the blame for militarist mood on "human nature", the motive power of man's- self-extermination. They harp on man's simpleness, on his innate belligerence, on the tragic differences between his mental and moral development, etc., to avoid naming the true force, the Pandora's box, the source of antagonistic contradictions.
The more bellicose and impertinent spokesmen of the imperialist bourgeoisie depict a nuclear disaster as fatal, i.e., inevitable, and lay the blame for it on socialism. Decades have passed, socialism has clearly demonstrated its profound concern for peace, and acts as an ardent and powerful champion of world peace, but the sordid inventions about "red imperialism" are still extant in the ideological armoury of the warmongers.
All the same, it is harder each day to make the claim that world war is fatally inevitable sound credible. Millions of people have come to realise that it is necessary and, moreover, possible to prevent a war. Millions of people have come to realise that it depends on the consciousness, will and activity of the people, on their ability to repulse the aggressive forces and block the road to power to political parties wishing war and the arms drive, and inimical to the idea of peaceful coexistence.
The realisation that war is not fatally inevitable has also spread to certain sections of the bourgeoisie. They admit that the danger of war is close at hand and very real, but do not think it inevitable. Mankind, writes Edouard le Ghait, a Belgian politician and author of the book La lutte pour la paix (Struggle for Peace), will
24not be necessarily annihilated. At present it is on the road to disaster, but it is quite likely that its direction will change under the impact of new circumstances before the disaster occurs.... The foremost of all the problems, he goes on to say, is to prevail on the biggest possible number of people, on the one hand, that the danger is grave and inescapable, and, on the other, that every man can contribute usefully to the prevention of this danger. The book exposes the "brink of war" policy and advocates the policy of peaceful coexistence and universal disarmament.
Powerful forces headed by the socialist states stand guard over the peace. They are strong enough to thwart militarist schemes and rule out war as a means of settling inter-state contradictions and conflicts. The determination of the peoples to consolidate peace and their earnest warnings backed by actions, act as a strong sedative. A world-wide nuclear war is not inevitable. Only a few stand to gain from it. Millions upon millions of people in all countries stand for peace. Someone may retort that the peoples have always stood for peace, though this did not prevent wars from breaking out. Yet the times have changed. The peoples want peace, and, what is much more, it is within their power to safeguard it.
The preachers of social pessimism back up their sad presentiments with other conjectures. There is talk of an alleged fatal limit to the adaptability of the human body to the sharply changing outer medium.
The reference is to the excessively mounting rhythm of life, stern technical conditions of production, nervous strain, radioactive pollution of air, soil and water, the greatly altered diet,
25the increasing number of harmful ersatz foods, and the like.
It is only too true that all these things have a pernicious effect on the life of millions of people, impair their health and reduce the expectation of life. Here is a fact that commands attention: the highest percentage of mental cases is registered in the United States, which has a relatively high standard of living. As far back as 1955, the number of mental cases there amounted to 48 per cent of the total sick undergoing clinical treatment. The biggest number of suicides is said to occur in the Scandinavian countries, which also have a sufficiently high standard of living. The gravity of the situation is accentuated by the fact that the number of mentally ill and the number of suicides in the above countries is mounting. In the one decade of 1945-55 the number of mental patients in the United States increased by more than a quarter of a million.
Intensification of labour, physical and nervous exhaustion, unsatisfactory living conditions, uncertainty and constant dread of unemployment are fast becoming causes of various diseases, including cancer and heart ailments. Nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in the water and in outer space have imperilled the health and lives of a vast number of people. "Out of a total population of two and a half billion people," writes Clement A. Tavares, author of Cancer and the Atomic Age, "approximately 600,000,000 people are doomed to develop cancer sometime in their lives and 466,000,000 of them will die of cancer.''^^1^^ It is only fair to
note here that this estimate was made at the height of nuclear testing, but to all intents and purposes cancer is still a major peril.
There are many other sombre facts likely to induce fear and mistrust of the future. Take the machine, the product of man's ingenuity. One is liable to think at times that it has turned against its creator and become a monstrous destructive force striving to ravage man's mind and heart and reduce him to an obedient appendage. "Robot era", "man under robots", "robots hem in men and all humanity", "mutiny of mechanical robots", "robots may be the beasts of the Apocalypse"---these and other similar formulas in the works of many Western sociologists, theologians and writers express a distinct dread of the machine age. The machine is being identified with the demon who broke into the 20th century to crush man physically and spiritually. Emil Brunner, the Swiss theologian, describes the machine age as follows:
``Uncounted millions of men massed together in soulless giant cities; a proletariat without connection with nature, without a native hearth or neighbourhood; it means asphalt---culture, uniformity and standardisation. It means men whom the machine has relieved from thinking and willing, who in their turn have to 'serve the machine' at a prescribed tempo and in a stereotyped manner. It means unbearable noise and rush, unemployment and insecurity of life, the concentration of productive power, wealth and prestige in a few hands or their monopolisation by state bureaucracy.''^^1^^
These references to "technical fetishism", to
~^^1^^ Tavares, Cancer and the Atomic Age, New York, 1958. p. 12.
~^^1^^ Brunner, Christianity and Civilisation, II, New York, 1949, p. 10.
27 26``machine tyranny", lead some sociologists to believe that the biological extinction of the human race, deprived of its "natural environment", is inevitable. Charles Baudouin, among others, says that "by his technologies, man creates for himself a new artificial milieu, to which he will never be able to adapt himself.''^^1^^
Yet all these attempts to interpret such isolated, though truly negative, phenomena as being absolute and universal, to describe them as fatally insuperable, are unquestionably fallacious.
Take the radioactive pollution of the air, soil and water, which jeopardised people's health. Was it fatally inevitable? Was it not the will of the people that compelled the Western powers to act on the Soviet proposal and ban nuclear tests in the three spheres? The perseverance of the socialist countries, coupled with the mounting efforts of the peoples and with world public opinion, is capable of achieving the great humanitarian goal of general and complete disarmament.
Relaxation of international tension, a sharp reduction of military expenditure and a total ban on the manufacture and testing of thermonuclear weapons are likely to improve man's lot and create relatively better living conditions.
In the chase for profit the all-powerful monopolies ignore the interests of the overwhelming majority in the capitalist countries and scorn humanity, kindness, truth and justice. To their mind, virtue is that which enables them to multiply their fortunes.
``Capital eschews no profit, or very small
profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum," wrote Karl Marx over a hundred years ago. "With adequate profit,- capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.''^^1^^
A lot has changed since then, but the capitalist itch for high profit and lack of scruple in achieving it are the same.
Even when private property relations rule supreme, organised struggle by the working class, the peasants, the intelligentsia, the petty and middle-class bourgeoisie, is able within certain limits to slow up the dehumanisation of society.
Social reform gained by organised struggle against the monopolies can impel social progress despite all pessimistic forecasts. And when socialism replaces the world capitalist system of social inequality and exploitation, broad vistas will open for the humanisation of labour. Mankind will then put an end once and for all to the alienation of labour. Planned economy based on public ownership of the tools and means of labour will do away with unemployment. The machine will no longer drive men out into the streets. It will be their greatest helper in conquering the forces of nature for the benefit of all society. All the negative effects of automation, surely deriving from the capitalist system and not from the machines, will
~^^1^^ Baudouin, Automation. Positions et Propositions, Fribourg, 1957, p. 147.
28~^^1^^ Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1965, p. 760. 29
disappear. A developed system of machine production, mechanisation and automation will deliver man from arduous toil. The machine, a product of the human intellect, will further the spiritual enrichment of the individual and his harmonious all-round development. Rapid growth of the productive forces, of science and culture, coupled with material abundance and fair distribution, will be a dependable basis for the physical, as well as spiritual, improvement of man.
The thesis of the fatal effects of human reproduction holds a special place in the ideological armoury of social pessimism. It revolves on sophistical speculation a la Mai thus and the neo-Malthusians concerning the ``disastrous'' effects of the rapid population increase. This is said to be the root cause of poverty, of acute zoological individualism, of the "struggle of all against all''.
The old and new admirers of Malthus wish to ascribe "social cataclysms", revolutions, national liberation struggles and inter-state wars to the relative overpopulation of the world.
``The unrestricted multiplication," writes Karl Jaspers, "approved everywhere as a natural phenomenon blessed by church and state is in itself potentially an act of aggression leading to military conflicts.''^^1^^
It does not occur to Jaspers to seek a solution through social reconstruction, the abolition of private enterprise and the transfer of the means and tools of production into the hands of the people.
He pins his hope of salvation on legislative
restrictions. "To safeguard peace," he writes, "to avoid the extinction of all, it is essential to meet the political and moral demand and restrict the birthrate.''^^1^^
To hear the bourgeois sociologists speak, the peril of overpopulation is the greatest today. Aldous Huxley, the British novelist, considers the "accelerating increase of human numbers" the most terrifying problem of our time.2 Alexander Stuart writes unabashed in his book, Overpopulation: Twentieth Century Nemesis, that the bomb of overpopulation imperils the world much more than the atom bomb.
William Vogt, the American neo-Malthusian, construes in his books, Road to Survival and People! Challenge to Survival, that there is "an insoluble" contradiction between the mounting population and the relatively low growth of the production of consumer goods. Vogt is one of those who seeks salvation in retarding the rapidly mounting birthrate. He leads up to the idea that avalanche-like multiplication will bring about a fatal catastrophe. This, he says, is more dangerous and more real than the hydrogen bomb.^^3^^ He makes the outrageous inference that it is more criminal today to give life than to take it.^^4^^
The more moderate neo-Malthusians contend that the growing world population is sure to check the standard of living, or even reduce it. If mankind strives to populate the earth with teeming masses of people, their standard of
~^^1^^ Ibid. S. 241.
~^^2^^ Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, London, 1958, p. 22.
~^^3^^ Vogt, People! Challenge to Survival, New York, 1960, p. 224.
~^^4^^ Ibid., p. 152.
31~^^1^^ Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, Munchen, 1962, S. 141.
30living will keep dropping, says U.S. demographer W! Taylor.^^1^^
Seeing that population density on our planet rises more rapidly than the standard of living, bourgeois demographers, who are blind to the cardinal means of resolving this contradiction, mourn the fate of humanity and predict spiritual and physical degeneration. Some of them reject the possibility of preventing wars, combating diseases, reducing mortality, and the like, and all in the name of "delivering mankind". These quasi-humanists believe that wars, diseases and a high deathrate will help balance the " productive potential" with the increasing number of ``consumers''.
Did it ever occur to them that there are more sensible and humane ways of achieving this ``balance''? Because there are such ways, suggested by the course of social development.
The problem of overpopulation is indeed a most important problem in many countries, notably the economically undeveloped.
The difficulties created by increasing human numbers may, indeed, be partially solved by the abolition of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and of their pernicious effects. The former colonial and dependent countries must get disinterested assistance in developing their economy. They have every legitimate reason to expect the imperialist countries to give them back part of the incalculable wealth of which they were robbed in the long years of colonial rule. It is one of the most important and honourable tasks of the United Nations to secure such aid for them.
Normal economic, social, spiritual and cultural development of previously oppressed peoples, coupled with sensible measures of regulating population growth, will yield welcome results and prove the partiality and fallacy of the fatalistic and pessimistic talk about the doom of mankind through overpopulation.
As for a conclusive solution of this problem, there are effective and radical measures to achieve it, such as the socialisation of the means of production, the establishment of a planned world economy and the activation of a powerful production machine that will make the most of the boundless opportunities offered by intraatomic energy, physics, chemistry, biology and other fields of modern science and technology.
It should be borne in mind that vast tracts of territory are still undeveloped due to unfavourable natural conditions. Experts estimate that in the near future the area of cultivated land (now amounting to 1,000 million hectares) may be increased ten times over. Agricultural production per head of population may be boosted annually by 1.5 or two per cent through effective use of agrotechnics.
At present, an average of about 0.1 kilowatt of power is generated per man in the world. In reference to this figure, Soviet Academician N. N. Semyonov writes:
``It is safe to say that at the end of this or the beginning of the next century electric power output in the world may be increased, say, a hundred times over, that is, to the powerto-man ratio of 10 kilowatt. This will enable us to mechanise all industrial production, farming and housekeeping. Then, after the production of electric power is increased another, say, ten times over, it will be possible to regulate
~^^1^^ Taylor, Natural Resources (lectures delivered at Berkeley University), New York, 1959, p. 242.
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33the climate, because annual power production will amount to some five per cent of the solar energy absorbed per year by our planet.''^^1^^
The development of outer space and the breakthrough of human civilisation outside the limits of the earth offers further boundless prospects of prosperity. True, these prospects are still a matter of the relatively distant future. But even in its own cradle, on earth, communist society can create abundance and secure fair distribution through a planned organisation of the world economy.
To sum up, all talk about a fatal conflict between man and his environment, an inevitable deterioration of the living standard due to overpopulation, biological degeneration of the human species, its self-exhaustion, etc., is groundless. It is really a hypertrophy of prevailing conflicts.
that consciousness is no more than a reflection of material reality. Herbert Spencer and many others interpreted progress as a peaceful evolutionary process that ruled out revolutionary leaps and kept within the limits of bourgeois civilisation.
Then came a time when, having fulfilled its positive mission in social development, capitalism turned into a sluggish reactionary force retarding the course of history. It became clearer than ever that social progress implied progress towards socialism. This was enough for the champions of the capitalist order to question the very idea of social progress. Paul Lafargue described this about-face of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists, as follows:
``The idea of progress and evolution was in vogue in the early 19th century, when the bourgeoisie was still intoxicated with its political victory and the amazing growth of its economic wealth. Philosophers, historians, moralists, politicians, novelists and poets served up their writings and speeches with a garnish of progressive development.... But by the mid-19th century they were compelled to moderate their unbounded enthusiasm. The emergence of the proletariat on the political scene in Britain and France engendered doubts among the bourgeoisie about the immortality of its social domination. Progress lost its charm.''^^1^^
Today, bourgeois philosophers have mounted a ferocious attack on the idea of ascendant development, on the logic of history and the possibility of historical cognition.
Dread of ascendant historical development,
PHILOSOPHICAL SUBSTANTIATION OF PESSIMISM
The pessimist conception of history springs from a denial of social progress. To take a pessimistic view of the present and future of mankind is merely to deny society's ascent from the lower to the higher and to assume that society is marking time or drifting downward to extinction.
Throughout the past century progress was a word that predominated in sociological treatises. True, it was conceived idealistically, with all the attendant bourgeois limitations. Writers sought the source of upgrade development mostly in men's consciousness, overlooking the fact
~^^1^^ See Historical Materialism and the Social Philosophy of the Modern Bourgeoisie, p. 219 (in Russian).
34~^^1^^ Lafargue, Le determinisnte economique de Karl Marx, Paris, 1909, pp. 16-17.
3- 35
which erodes the very pillars of the capitalist system, has impelled bitter hatred among its ideologists of the very thought of progress. They think that by repugning the idea of progress they will arrest it in reality. Obviously, they are overrating the power of words and ideas. By following up this logic, the rooster could rightly ascribe the dawn to the power of his vocal chords.
Edward Hallett Carr, an English historian, ridicules the reactionary attacks on the theory of progress. "Nicholas I of Russia is said to have issued an order banning the word `progress'," he writes. "Nowadays the philosophers and historians of Western Europe, and even the United States, have come belatedly to agree with him.''^^1^^
Robert Bailey compiled a comparative table in his book, Sociology Faces Pessimism, showing what tangible changes have occurred in the 20th century in the assessment of the course of history. Here is how Bailey presents the shift of the "European Zeitgeist":
Bailey's picture is a lurid one, though essentially felicitous. Fear of history and of its laws, thoughts of the future, of new, more perfect forms of human relations, are making bourgeois sociologists rail at the very notion of social progress. "No laws of social development," argues Morris Ginsberg, "and consequently of progress, have as yet been discovered.''^^1^^ The concept of progress, he urges, should be replaced by the concept of social change.
The preference Ginsberg and other sociologists show for the term social change is probably encouraged by the fact that it does not necessarily connote ascendant development. Social change may be either upgrade or downgrade. It does not express the specific trend and does not require an unequivocal assessment and an objective criterion.
In our dynamic century, when the objective criteria of progress and regress come out in particularly bold relief, certain people are frightened not only of the word progress, but also of such words as development and evolution. Leopold von Wiese claimed at the Third World Congress of Sociology in Amsterdam (1956) that the term ``change'' has almost entirely superceded the terms ``evolution'' and ``development''.^^2^^ Wiese and his like approve of this, because ``change'' is vaguer and more neutral. Yet the craving to substitute the abstract notion of change for the conception of progress has no scientific basis and is prompted by purely pragmatic reasons. We are not inclined to think that dynamism connotes
100 years ago
1. There is progress
1.
2. Social evolution is
2. linear
3. Western civilisation is
3. moving continually towards greater heights
in cultural and social development....
11.
11. Sociology is the study of progress.
Today
There is no progress Social evolution is cyclical
Western civilisation is in a period of disintegration and decline. ...
Sociology is the study of social disintegration.^^2^^
~^^1^^ Carr, What Is History?, London, 1961, p. 106.
~^^2^^ Bailey, Sociology Faces Pessimism, The Hague, 1958, pp. 116-17.
~^^1^^ Ginsberg, The Idea of Progress. A Revaluation, London, 1953, p. 48.
~^^2^^ Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology, Vol. 1, Amsterdam, 1956, p. 2.
36 37that "all reality is a play of power or dynamics".1 The conception of dynamism is not a conception of mere motion and change. The world is undergoing much more than change. Change is taking place at a much higher rate, and, besides, it is guided change. Man's vital interests are compelling him to fling overboard outdated social systems, but to preserve everything in the material and spiritual sphere that still retains value and is subject to further development and enrichment.
It is a paradox that books are written and speeches are made to refute the very possibility of social progress in this time of staggering social progress, of transition to new, more perfect economic, political and ideological systems which offer boundless prospects of development, the time of the birth of communist civilisation.
Bourgeois philosophers argue that progress is not a scientific conception, that it is a mere ethical evaluation of the facts marked by the subjectivism typical of all ethical evaluations. To make this more credible, they usually refer to the absence of unequivocal, universally recognised progress. What one side considers as progress, they claim, is rejected by the other as regress. "The various political regimes may be viewed as different solutions of one and the same problem," -writes sociologist Raymond Aron. "The transition from one regime to another is not a transition from evil to good, from lower to higher, but a transition from one solution to another solution, each of which possesses certain merits and certain failings.''^^2^^
Each solution, he leads us to think, has its advantages and its inconveniences. According to Aron, the transition from, say, a People's Democracy to a fascist state, and vice versa, is not a transition from good to evil and from evil to good. Such talk is based on relativistic sophisms, whereby everything can be justified and everything can be condemned, and not on such criteria as the satisfaction of the basic material and spiritual interests of the people, and provision of real guarantees for the freedom of the individual.
The men who deny social progress have undertaken a thankless task. It is not easy to make credible the notion that advance from the primitive herd to modern human society, from cannibalism to communism, is not progress, not improvement of the productive forces, of social relations, political government, culture, morality, and the like. The more cautious opponents of social progress, who know these claims to be highly dubious, make certain reservations. They set out to show that progress is possible in a particular sphere, but that the ascendant development of social life as a whole is ruled out.
Aron has devised a criterion of his own for progress. He says it is proliferation, a notion that can be expressed in quantitative terms. He does not deny progress in science, nor in the sphere of the productive forces, because, he says, economic development implies greater numbers of created material values. Yet he denies progress in the economic sphere conceived as a unity of production and distribution. The most powerful economy, according to Aron, is not necessarily the most just economy. "It has not been proved," he writes, "that man's working conditions improve in step with increasing production per head of population. Neither has it
39~^^1^^ Philosophisches Worterbuch, Begrundet von Heinrich Schmidt, Stuttgart, 1957, S. 120.
~^^2^^ Aron, Dix-huit legons sur la societe industrielle, Paris, 1962, p. 86.
38been proved that distribution of available blessings among men necessarily becomes more just as social wealth increases.''^^1^^
It is quite true that the more developed economy is not necessarily the more justly organised. The capitalist economy of the United States, for example, so far surpasses the socialist economy of the U.S.S.R. in productive capacity, but it is certainly inferior to it in social structure and much less fair in distributing the created goods. From this point of view, the U.S. economy is also inferior to the economy of even the least developed socialist country, where appropriation by one class of the results of the labour of another has been abolished and the goods produced are distributed among the working people according to the quantity and quality of their labour.
It will be doubly clear how fatuous Aron's notions are if we add that in due course the socialist economy will make the most of its advantages and surpass the productive capacity of the capitalist economy.
Aron only repeated the ideas of those bourgeois philosophers and sociologists who had exercised themselves in abusing social progress long before him. Take Karl Jaspers. Referring to technical progress, Jaspers wrote that history in this particular sphere could indeed be viewed as upgrade. "Mankind as such, man's morality, kindness and sagacity," he hastens to add, "do not progress. Everyone can understand what art and poetry are, but not everyone can participate in them, because they belong to a people and a time which engendered them and enabled them to attain unexampled heights. Hence we have
scientific, technical progress, which continuously extends our possibilities, but we have no progress of the human essence.''^^1^^
It stands to reason that Jaspers is unable to back his extravagant conclusion with any in the least serious arguments. His reference to the fact that higher cultures were conquered by lower cultures, or simply wiped out by barbarians, is not really an argument. Neither can we take seriously his reference to higher individuals being always suppressed by the bleak mass on the principle that "everything that is great is overthrown, and everything mediocre is lasting".^^2^^
Jaspers takes as an absolute the accidental nature of the zigzags and retreats in man's history and culture, for he says that these " accidents and failures are the dominant features of history".^^3^^
He points out that history is full of regressive movement, that there are ascendant as well as downgrade processes in social development, and, like many other bourgeois philosophers and sociologists, attempts to repugn the notion of progress and to depict history as a succession of accidental phenomena. According to Professor Mayo, "there is surely no evidence" that progress "has been uniform.... We can see decline as well as growth, retrogression as well as progress in history.''^^4^^
Certainly, historical development is not free of zigzags and retreats. There are many instances
~^^1^^ Jaspers, Origine et sens de I'histoire, Paris, 1954, p. 317.
~^^2^^ Ibid.
~^^3^^ Ibid.
~^^4^^ H. B. Mayo, Democracy and Marxism, New York, 1955, p. 166.
41~^^1^^ Aron, op. cit., p. 83.
40when tribes of a relatively lower order of social development destroyed social organisms that were historically more developed. Take fascism, for one thing, which attempted to turn back the clock by many centuries. There are still forces in our world that want to wipe out all new things, all progressive things, and that succeed in doing so here and there, turning the national independence won by peoples into a pure formality, saddling them with reactionary regimes, etc. But all these actions cannot arrest the mounting struggle against imperialism, against colonialism and neo-colonialism, racism and militarism---against the forces bent on preventing mankind from climbing one more rung in its historical development.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism did not follow a straight line either. The revolutions and counter-revolutions in France, the establishment of the bourgeois republic, its downfall, the temporary triumph of the Bourbons, the Restoration, the overthrow of the monarchy and the subsequent development of the bourgeois revolution, etc.---all this is evidence of how hard and tortuous the path was along which the then more progressive bourgeois society consolidated itself in history. Yet, despite all accidents and retreats, the line of progress conquered. "It is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong to regard the course of world history as smooth and always in the forward direction, without occasional gigantic leaps back," wrote Lenin.^^1^^
While arguing the case of historical progress, Marxism takes cognisance of zigzags and retreats
in the general process of development along an ascendant line. What is more, it notes the uneven development of the various spheres of social being and cognition. Marxism maintains that at certain stages of social development, taken as a whole, there may also be regressive phenomena.
The above is corroborated by the history of the exploiting societies. All progress there is relative retrogression. Marx and Engels stress this fact and note that "the well-being and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.''^^1^^
The contradictory and uneven nature of progress in class society is illustrated by the mutually exclusive trends of scientific and technical development, on the one hand, and the intellectual and moral make-up of the individual, on the other. Bourgeois theorists are inclined to view this contradiction as an absolute and to extend the limits in which it manifests itself to infinity. In fact, however, it is not a universal contradiction, but a specific state typical of capitalist society and of the individual who embodies its distinctive features. There is no reason to assume that science and technology must necessarily infinitely outstrip the spiritual and moral progress of the individual outside bourgeois society and, what is more, predetermine its crisis and decline. As a matter of fact, the contradiction does not even apply to all the people in the bourgeois world. There is Edward Teller, it is true, but there is also Robert Oppenheimer, to say nothing of the many outstanding humanists among the bourgeois scientists, in-
~^^1^^ Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 310. 42
~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1962, p. 225.
43ventors, writers, composers, artists and journalists of our time. The moral make-up of these people cannot be squeezed into the ethical pattern of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Ever since class society originated, man's history has been the history of the struggle waged by the progressive class forces against the forces of retrogression. In this struggle, the foremost forces always defeated reaction sooner or later. This is backed up by the indisputable facts of general history.
The zigzags and retreats of historical development do not rule out social progress as a general trend in history. This is evidenced by the sequence of socio-economic formations from the primitive community to the slave society, from the slave society to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to communist society, each being a step forward in the spiritual sphere, as well as in production and consumption. "All successive historical systems", Marx and Engels pointed out, "are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher."1 Here is another argument often employed to deny progress. Progress, it says, is the handiwork of outstanding people, while in our time the masses have depressed the chance of brilliant personalities appearing on the scene. The authors of this sophism ignore the fact that at all stages of history the masses were invariably the motive force of social progress in all the spheres of human endeavour, most of all in production, the decisive sphere. All great discoveries may be traced back to the practice of the people. The way to discovery was paved directly or in-
~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 362. 44
directly by their creative activity. Let us only add that any outstanding personality that impels society's advance is connected with the masses in one way or another, expressing their sentiments, thoughts, and needs. The portrayal of the masses and the outstanding personalities as antipodes is spurious and false. No other age can compare with ours for the number of brilliant men active in the various spheres of human endeavour.
Some adversaries of social progress go so far as to say that there is no concept of ``forward'', ``backward'', ``progressive'', ``retrogressive'', etc., in outer space. Worlds emerge and collapse there, they say, and the development of matter follows a ``downgrade'', as well as ``upgrade'' line, while the structural complication of matter is attended by the reverse process of entropy.
Yet the notion of progress applied to social life cannot be applied unreservedly to the Universe. It is therefore unreasonable to identify the character and trend of social development with the character and trend of the development of the Universe.
In conclusion, we may say that all attempts to repugn the notion of social progress are groundless. The continuity of the process of improvement in all social affairs is much too obvious. The resistance of the reactionary forces, in the past as well as in the present, cannot arrest the process in which mankind is mastering more powerful means of material production, more equitable forms of social organisation, a loftier spiritual culture and a higher morality. The process of history, like time in general, has only one dimension. Both are irreversible. This is borne out clearly by the failure of all attempts to safeguard decayed socio-economic and politi-
45cal regimes by deceit and violence, to drag the peoples back to past historical stages, to revive slavery and serfdom in new forms, and to extirpate democracy, subjecting the peoples to a system of unrestrained despotism.
return to the "equality^' of the early Christian community. This would evidently "bear out" that everything repeats itself, that everything returns and there is nothing new under the sun. These views of the modern exponents of recurring social cycles are built on superficial and formal analogies with a strong element of subjectivism. As we shall see, they are prompted by reactionary political goals and the reluctance, often the incapacity, to accept the fact that history is not only a continuous succession of social structures and institutions, but succession oriented on improving all the aspects of social life.
ft is probably reasonable to speak of a spiral pointed forward, with but seeming flashbacks to the starting position. While denying all the outworn and reactionary, every new historical stage retains and develops the achievements of the preceding generations in production, technology, science and culture. This rules out not only a return to the old, but also stagnation.
The idea of cyclical development, marked by continuous backsliding to past stages, was deduced by religious thought, rather than the real process of history. The only way to make it plausible is to exploit arbitrary historical analogies. Its purpose is to perpetuate past social stages and to rob the people of faith in a better
future.
The theory of restricted and isolated civilisations which originate, develop and collapse leaving little or nothing to subsequent generations is another theory aimed against historical progress.
Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, one of the precursors of the fascist ideology, are particularly zealous exponents of this conception.
Despite the substantial difference in their
47RUNNING ROUND IN CIRCLES
The idea of recurring social cycles, the notion that mankind returns to the starting line after passing certain phases in order to repeat what it has already passed, sprang from immature sociological thinking hamstrung by religious and mythological prejudice. It is only fair to say, however, that the doctrine of recurring cycles contained certain rational ideas for its day. The philosophy of history expounded by Giovanni Vico (1668-1744), for example, combined the unscientific notion of recurring social cycles with the hypothesis that the laws governing history were objective. Certainly, Vice's discourse about the imminent phase of social development which he called the human phase expressed hopes of a system free from privilege and inequality. In effect, he referred to the then progressive bourgeois order. These ideas and aspirations in Vico's historical conception are surely praiseworthy.
But to preach these theories in our time is quite a different thing, because science and historical experience have totally refuted the notion of recurring social cycles.
To be sure, if the facts are arbitrarily interpreted, the primitive community may be identified with the future communist society and traces of ``capitalism'' may be found in the antique world, while socialist equality may be portrayed as a
46 1interpretations of socio-political and sociological | problems, Toynbee and Spengler agree that the ' various human civilisations have very little in '• common, that they develop independently, that they do not enrich each other and that their paths never cross. None of them, they say, acts • as a historical precondition for any other, and none of them has any generic ties.
The conception of isolated, restricted civilisations creates an untrue impression of man's f history, cutting up the single historical process in order to oppose each of its phases to all the. ' others, ruling out the existence of universal historical laws, thereby denying the upgrade development of mankind.
If every culture is viewed as unique, selfgenerative and isolated from all other cultures, all ascendant development is naturally excluded. j On reaching its peak, each civilisation drifts to • destruction, leaving no legacy for later genera- • tions to develop.
'
``Instead of the monotonous picture of linear ? world history," Spengler wrote, "I see a welter 'l of powerful cultures. ... Each of these has its own idea, its owrn passions, its own life, will and feeling, and its own death.. .. Each culture has its own possibilities and expression which originate, mature, fade and are never again repeated. ... In world history I see a picture of eternal inception and change, miraculous origination and death of organic forms, while the inveterate historian regards it as something of a tapeworm who tirelessly adds epoch to epoch.''^^1^^
This pompous pronouncement against the
unity of the historical process and social progress was prompted by the view that the peculiarities of various civilisations are absolute; it ignored the elements that united and linked them. To deny the interconnection and mutual enrichment of various cultures and civilisations is to falsify history. Did not the ancient Chinese and Indian philosophies, arts, religions, etc., serve as one of the ideological sources of antique Greek culture? Did not the Roman culture, for all its specific features, inherit many of the spiritual values created by the Greeks? And what about the syncretic nature of Christian religion, its generic connections with the Greco-Roman world, with the Messianic idea and the mythology of Judea, Persia, Egypt and Phoenicia? All this knocks the theory of local civilisations into a cocked hat.
Wherever peoples of different races entered into communication, they exchanged not only goods, but also ideas. Given the appropriate conditions, more advanced and effective ideas of foreign origin were gradually assimilated by other nations.
This applies first and foremost to scientific ideas. The history of Marxism, its origin and development, confirms this fact completely. Conceived in Western Europe, in Germany, Marxism spread to all countries and continents and became the spiritual weapon of peoples of different civilisations.
History shows beyond any question that the establishment of one and the same mode of production in Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australia engendered similar politico-juridical ideas and institutions, similar phenomena in the sphere of morality, in art and literature, in the entire structure of social life.
~^^1^^ Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Miinchen, 1923, B. 1, S. 27-28.
484-3241
49The repetition of historical phenomena, with which we are now concerned, was conditioned not by any mystical and irrational movement in circles, but by the emergence of similar socioeconomic formations. The victory of capitalist relations in Japan, for example, generated material and spiritual phenomena resembling those that had earlier appeared in Europe.
History is not wasteful. Nothing in the rational experience of mankind is allowed to go by the board. Achievements in any sphere of being and cognition, irrespective of their geographical and ethnic origin, gradually spread to all the men on earth. This helps to improve man's life, to extend the limits of his well-being, to elevate culture and insure freedom. New generations multiply these achievements.
Such is the real state of affairs, the real trend in man's development.
fates of people---were preordained by divine power.
The fatalistic conception infiltrated many philosophical and sociological doctrines. From the fatalist's point of view, history is a faceless elemental process spurred by inexorable fatal laws. These laws rule out the active and purposive activity of men, whose volition and consciousness has no more meaning in the vortex of social events than the ``volition'' and `` consciousness'' of a grain of sand borne by the hurricane.
Gustave Le Bon, a bourgeois sociologist, described the demoralising purport of the fatalistic concept of history in the following candid manner:
``All man's bustle is futile. He is governed by such external forces as the law of inevitability, the environment, the influence of the past, which the ancients called fate. This fate may be cursed, but it cannot be escaped.''
According to the fatalists, neither the historic personality nor the "blind and unreasoning" masses can affect the fatal course of history. Human ideas and the corresponding institutions can do no more than adapt themselves to the fatal process of history, for they are impotent to influence it.
All past history had had to be what it was, and the future course of social life is preordained just as inevitably as sunrise and sundown and the succession of seasons.
This specious conception, saturated with theological mysticism, is employed to deceive the masses, to blunt their activity in the struggle for social progress.
As a rule, fatalism endeavours to reconcile man with the existing evil and to portray evil as
~^^4^^*
51
THE MYTH OF PREDESTINATION
Not all the exponents of social pessimism are fatalists. Not all of them hold a mystical belief in the predestination of mankind. But to grasp the fallacy of modern pessimism we have to know its logic, which is akin to the fatalistic view.
The idea of predestination is a religious idea which has come down to us from the hoary past. According to ancient Greek mythology, the Moirai, the goddesses of fate, wove the thread of human life and pulled it through all the labyrinths, then cut it short.
The providentialist doctrine was widespread in Christian religion, particularly in the Middle Ages. According to this doctrine all historical events---the migration of peoples, wars, uprisings, natural calamities and the personal
50part and parcel of man's essence and life. The fatalists maintain that the best way to combat evil is to recognise its right to exist, and to accept it. After all, they say, people resign themselves to the thought of dying, which, they add, enables them to gain spiritual stability, the capacity of living.
But biological and spiritual degeneration, the extermination of millions of people in world wars, cannot be compared with the inevitability of man's natural death. The two phenomena are incomparable. Should one drift passively to nuclear disaster? The fatalists show little interest in such vital matters and in the truth in general.
They confuse truth and invention and claim that man is doomed to suffer for his "original sin". Even the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, they say, has not delivered man from the inevitability of eternal suffering. The philosophy of pessimism has promoted this religious idea of the fatal consequences of the "original sin" to the rank of an absolute philosophical truth. Ordeals and calamities, and fears of the present and future, it says, fills all of man's substance. Even consciousness was bestowed upon man solely for him to perceive that he is doomed to solitude and suffering. According to this doctrine, to be means to be wretched.
This sort of talk, which turns man's ills into something natural and insuperable, suits those who build their well-being on the suffering of others.
Revolutionary thought has always rejected predestination and the fatal inevitability of suffering. Even in their early writings, Marx and Engels proved the fallacy of identifying the conceptions of man and suffering. They looked for,
and found, scientifically grounded ways of eliminating all forms of social depression and enslavement. Man is born to be happy. The calamities and the anguish that have for centuries plagued the masses, are historically transient, like the social conditions which engender them. The potential possibility of happiness is materialising as social progress advances and as the oppressed masses wage their organised struggle for the humanisation of their living conditions, for a system of freedom and universal well-being, peace and friendship among men.
Lenin embodied in his ideas and actions the irreconcilable contempt of the working class, the foremost class of our epoch, for those who endeavour to console the sufferers with their tale of the fatality of suffering. In his recollection of Lenin, Maxim Gorky wrote:
``The greatest thing about Lenin as far as I am concerned is this sense of irreconcilable and unfading hostility towards the ills of mankind, his striking faith that unhappiness is not an irremovable basis of being, that it is filth which man can and must sweep out of his way.''
This hostility to suffering, this faith in man's ability to sweep it out of his way, became the programme task of the Party founded by Lenin.
But let us go back to our examination of the philosophical foundations of fatalism. Its exponents attempt to sell possibility for reality, for historical necessity, for fate, for destiny that governs man's will. They identify the regularities of nature with the regularities of society where, as distinct from nature, people endowed with reason and volition operate, instead of blind elemental forces.
52 53The subjective idealist sociology rejects regularity in social development and defines consciousness and man's will as free entities in the making of the historical process. The fatalist conception goes to the other extreme and rules out all freedom of action, all purpose in man's activity, proclaiming the primacy of predestination.
Yet history is made by people. To be sure, they do not make it at will and have to abide by the objectively existing level of development, by what they can do in this or that period of history. Nothing on earth could impede the advance of capitalism when it was on the upgrade and still progressive. This could only be done later, at a time when capitalism had built up the material preconditions and the social forces, primarily the revolutionary working class, whose determined action is spurring the transition to socialism, a new, more progressive social system. It is in these circumstances that the role of conscious and organised struggle by the foremost social forces, the advanced classes, parties and outstanding personalities, increases immeasurably. They are able to reduce the term of existence of the social system that obstructs man's advance to new summits.
The higher man climbed along the stairway of history, the more conscious his historical creative endeavours became, and the deeper he probed the secrets of social development, cognising its laws one by one. Cognition of the historical necessity is essential in widening the limits of human freedom, enhancing the role of advanced ideas and of man's purposive activity in the revolutionary reconstruction of social relations.
Socialist society, which, compliant with the objective laws of development, comes to succeed capitalism, does not arise spontaneously through self-motion. It is built consciously and deliberately by men who have cognised the objective laws governing social life.
As we see, despite persistent contentions to the contrary, Marxism does not ignore or belittle the role of consciousness and man's volition in social development. Marxist philosophy has probed and established the true relation of the objective to the subjective factors in society. It has discovered the source of strength of advanced ideas and theories, and has learned the art of determining the conditions in which the conscious and purposive activity of people, of classes and parties, is crowned with success.
``Marxism," wrote Lenin, "differs from all other socialist theories in the remarkable way it combines complete scientific sobriety in the analysis of the objective state of affairs and the objective course of evolution with the most emphatic recognition of the importance of the revolutionary energy, revolutionary creative genius, and revolutionary initiative of the masses---and also, of course, of individuals, groups, organisations, and parties that are able to discover and achieve contact with one or another class.''^^1^^
The fatalist view of history, denial of active and purposive influence on the process of social development, the empirical approach and worship of elemental spontaneity are deeply foreign to the outlook and spirit of Marxist philosophy, the philosophy of the most revolutionary forces of our time.
~^^1^^ Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 36.
54The lessons of history prove that many real and concrete possibilities go by the board, unless they are assisted by man's conscious, purposive and persevering efforts.
If all the progressive forces had not rallied to crush fascism, the latter could have, for a considerable time, interrupted historical progress and revived the basest and most brutal forms of enslavement.
Now that objective possibilities exist for the transition to socialism, directly or via a series of intermediate stages, the consciousness and organisation of all working people in the country concerned play a decisive role in resolving the tasks of history and putting that country on the road to socialism.
The question of war and peace, too, is not fatally preordained. It depends on how closely united the people come out against imperialism, against the arms drive, against militarism, and on whether or not the forces interested in war will be able to start one and thereby imperil the very existence of human civilisation.
Brandishing its fatalistic arguments, social pessimism draws attention to both spurious and real perils, but issues no call to action, to resistance, to searching for ways of averting or extirpating the evil. It sets out to intimidate people, to reconcile them with the idea of their frailty and doom; it teaches them to take life as it comes, for, they say, it cannot be anything but severe and joyless, drifting inexorably towards death and destruction.
This death philosophy has its followers among people who dread life, its interminable renewal and enrichment, the new forms and institutions that replace old and useless ones.
Yet Maxim Gorky wrote that "mankind cannot
56perish just because an insignificant minority is creatively senile and rots on account of its dread of living and of its incurable pathological thirst for profit. Overthrowing this minority is an act of supreme justice, one that history commands the proletariat to accomplish.''
The working class, the rest of the working people, all sensible people, repugn fatalism, the sermon of death and destruction. They have unshakable faith in the happy future of mankind.
The doleful predictions of the modern eschatologists have a definite purpose. Social pessimism does not incline the doomed social classes to passive resignation in face of the inevitable future. It does not cultivate quietism. They do not accept its formula "to strive for nothing, to reject nothing". On the contrary, they are always intent on achieving their basic interests and turn down the pretentions of the inimical classes.
In a way, social pessimism is an appeal for self-preservation, for resistance.
The ideologists who have thrown in their lot with imperialism want to "bridle history", to arrest unfavourable social processes and perpetuate the social system that has lived out its time. Karl Jaspers, for one, wanted the old world to hang on at any price, and suggested in 1958 a nuclear war if the peoples choose communism.
He philosophises on the essence of fear and its mission in settling the major socio-political issues of our time. He distinguishes between ``blind'' and ``creative'' fear. The first triggers panic, impotence and a lapse of physical and spiritual potentials, engendering a spirit of sur-
57render. According to Jaspers, "blind fear" inspires ideas such as ending the arms race and banning nuclear weapons. For his part, the philosopher is bent on inspiring fear of "blind fear". What he welcomes is fear of another order and purpose---fear of the forces that imperil the capitalist civilisation. Jaspers extols this variety of fear. "Man's fear can become a creative thing and will then play the role of a catalyser stimulating freedom,"^^1^^ he says, and adds: "Fear has to be enlightened to produce enlightened reason instead of blind panic. Panic plunges one into insensibility, while enlightened fear leads to liberation with the aid of reason. We should have the courage to know and to tremble if we want to remain people.''^^2^^ To "remain people", we gather from Jaspers, is to go on living under capitalism.
The pessimistic conception of history is thus fashioned into an ideological weapon by those who want to turn back the clock. It is the social function of intimidation and sombre presentiments to ``galvanise'' the moribund classes, to draw their attention to the impending end, to call them to action, to resisting progress and the will of the peoples seeking a new life. Their other purpose is to misguide, discourage and rob the ascendant classes of their faith in the possibility and necessity of a new, sensible and fair social order.
Chapter Two
THE VOLUNTARISTIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
"CAPITALISM IS ONLY BEGINNING"
The sweeping changes in the world's sociopolitical geography are creating difficulties for the propagandists of capitalism. Their predecessors of the time when socialism was just a "spectre haunting Europe" had much fewer difficulties. Young and powerful, socialism is winning the minds and hearts of an increasing number of people. The forces working for a radical reconstruction of society are gaining strength in the capitalist countries. It is hard now to defend capitalism, to prove its vitality and its right to continued existence. Today, the captains of the bourgeois ship look more like barge-towers who sweat and strain to drag their insecure vessel against the tide of history. Some of them, as we have seen, buckle under their burden and preach pessimism. They mourn and lament, and predict inevitable atomic death, the collapse of all civilisation. But there are other voices, too, who burst into speciously optimistic assurances that private enterprise is eternal, that prosperity is round the corner, that everybody will have stocks and shares, vacuum cleaners and washing machines.
The main effort of the imperialist ideologists is centred, as before, on portraying capitalism
59~^^1^^ K. Jaspers, Die Atoaibnmbe und die Zukunft des Slenschen, p. 474. ~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 475,
as a changing, but never moribund, system. The more the sphere of capitalist rule shrinks and the more distinctly the forces that, merging in one torrent, are undermining and washing away its groundwork, gain ascendancy, the louder are the shouts about the everlasting nature of private property and social inequality. Capitalism is said to have lost nothing of its viability because it conforms to the immutable egoistic "human nature''.
An immense propaganda machine generously financed by the monopolies is endeavouring to inculcate in men's minds the notion of capitalism's growing and gaining strength, controlling technical progress, creating abundance, distributing all blessings fairly, building up military power and certain to regain lost positions in countries that form the world socialist system. As concerns the loss of colonies, the ``optimists'' expect that the newly independent countries will be brought to heel and follow a course desired by the ex-colonialists, thus bolstering up the world capitalist system.
The world is on the threshold of a golden future, says a profound declaration of the U.S. National Association of Manufacturers. It calls on the worker to look forward to it with hope rather than alarm. The magic carpet of a free capitalist economy controlled by electric devices, equipped with atomic energy and operated automatically, it says, is speeding forward to distant horizons no one had ever dreamed of before. This journey, the declaration adds, will be the most amazing occurrence in history.^^1^^
~^^1^^ National Association of Manufacturers: Calling All Jobs. An Introduction to the Automatic Machine Age, New York, 1954, p. 21.
Some of these super-optimists say that capitalism is only beginning and that man's future is tied up with the development of the capitalist system. In their book, The Capitalist Manifesto, Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler produce a semblance of scientific ground work for these contentions. In our day, when the possessions of the capitalist world are shrinking continuously and the last exploiting society is on the decline, these two men plead with their readers that mankind is advancing towards, of all things, a capitalist revolution. We are told, a few hundred years too late, that this revolution is at last determined to bestow material blessings upon the entire population of the globe and "secure liberty as well as equality for all men".^^1^^
Not all modern bourgeois ideologists venture to call capitalism by its name. Discredited capitalism prefers to call itself the "free world", a "welfare society", and the like. It is a curious thing that people who will tolerate no other order than the capitalist, are eager to erase the word ``capitalism''. It is a great misfortune, writes Jacques Maritain, that there are people "for whom capitalism has kept its classical meaning, who loathe the very word, and who are not ready to die for it---nobody is ready to die for capitalism in Asia, Africa, or Europe".2 Averell W. Harriman agrees with Maritain. "We should not permit ... to write us down as the standard-bearer of capitalism," he says. "Our economic system has little resemblance to the century-old Marxist concept of capitalism, and
~^^1^^ Kelso and Adler, The Capitalist Manifesto, New York, 1958, Preface, p. XVII.
~^^2^^ Maritain, Reflections on America, New York, 1958, p. 116.
60 61we should abandon the word."* Even Franco, the Spanish dictator, the henchman of monopoly capitalism, is all for abandoning the word ``capitalism''. To defend Western civilisation, he says, is not the same as to defend capitalism. On the contrary, he adds, capitalism is a burden on the Western world.
Maritain, Harriman and their like assume that the negative emotions called forth by the word ``capitalism'' are engendered by the old, 19 thcentury capitalism. One would think that the present generations of Indians, Vietnamese, Arabs and Africans cling to memories of the past centuries.
But back to Kelso and Adler. There has been no real capitalism so far, they maintain. "That nineteenth-century capitalism was unjust," they write, "no one can question. But there is a question as to whether nineteenth-century capitalism conforms to the idea or ideal of capitalism; and with this goes the question whether the historic injustices committed by the capitalism of the nineteenth century are historic accidents or are intrinsic to the very idea of capitalism itself.''^^2^^
The authors disown 19th-century capitalism, expecting at so cheap a price to absolve modern state-monopoly capitalism of all blame, to hush up its exploiting substance, the enslavement of the masses, the crying social injustices and all the other defects of the capitalist formation. Like many other bourgeois ideologists, they think that renunciation of 19th-century capitalism will neutralise Marxist criticism of capitalism and render harmless Marxist scientific predic-
~^^1^^ New York Times, Oct. 5, 1959.
~^^2^^ Kelso and Adler, op. cit.v p. XII.
tions concerning the inevitable downfall of the system of hired slavery.
The method of detaching 19th-century capitalism from that of the 20th century in order to extol the ``new'' capitalism, is a favourite dodge of the modern bourgeois theorists. Rene Norguet uses the example of France to show that the old "liberal capitalism is dead, while the new capitalism is thriving".^^1^^
By juggling statistics and perverting facts bourgeois statesmen attempt to prove that free enterprise will triumph in the historic competition of the two systems. This is a basic dodge in their ideological struggle against the new world. "It is my thesis," writes Peter Wiles, one of the authors of a collection entitled The Future of Communist Society, "that capitalism will in fact autonomously grow over into something rather more desirable than Full Communism, without any intervening nonsense of `Socialism', 'Proletarian Revolution', etc., if only it is left alone in peace.''^^2^^ Wiles is more restrained and cautious than some of his coauthors, who declare blandly that capitalism is assured a bright future.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard history professor and adviser to the late President Kennedy, takes solace in the thought that Marx's forecasts concerning the destiny of capitalism have not come true. Surprisingly, he says this at a time when one-third of mankind has ranged itself under the socialist banner in corroboration of the scientific Marxist predictions.
~^^1^^ Norguet, Le progres social en France, Paris, 1961, p. 141.
~^^2^^ The Future of Communist Society, ed. by Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz, New York, 1962. p. 44.
63 62What is all this quasi-optimism based on? Schlesinger will have us believe that the bourgeois state has changed its spots and turned from a political instrument safeguarding the vital interests of the capitalist class, its property, its ``right'' to appropriating the unpaid labour of the proletarians, into a spokesman for the whole society. "The capitalist state in developed societies, far from being the helpless instrument of the possessing class", writes Schlesinger, "has become the means by which other groups in society have redressed the balance of social power against those whom Hamilton called the 'rich and well-born'.''^^1^^ The concessions the monopolies were compelled to make to the oppressed classes in historical circumstances unfavourable to capitalism, and the economic interventions of the bourgeois state to mitigate the more perilous economic crises, are portrayed by Schlesinger as the deliverance of the capitalist system from the internal contradictions that spell its doom. "What the democratic parties of the developed nations have done," he goes on to say, "has been to use this state to force capitalism to do what both the classical capitalists and the classical Marxists declared was impossible: to control the business cycle and to reapportion incomes.''^^2^^
To see it Schlesinger's way, the new capitalism is stable and can henceforth solemnly proclaim that its rule will be endless. This new capitalism, to use Schlesinger's phrase, has "drowned the revolution in a torrent of consumer goods". As a result, "capitalism can
~^^1^^ Schlesinger, "The Failure of World Communism", Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1962.
~^^2^^ Ibid.
no longer be relied upon to dig its own grave".1 In an outburst of enthusiasm, Schlesinger puts the lid on the communist problem and describes communism as a ``disease'' of some of the economically backward states in the process of their industrialisation, rather than "the wave of the future". According to Schlesinger, communism is a temporary and anomalous step these states take from age-long stagnation to normal development. Schlesinger's pronouncements may appear hopeful and inspiring to some, but this does not make them true. They are standard anti-communist propaganda seeking a desired effect, not the truth.
Walt W. Rostow is another typical exponent of the quasi-optimistic view. Bourgeois propaganda has made much of his book, The Stages of Economic Growth. Some reviews said Rostow had accepted the rational element of the Marxist conception, while he cast overboard the "false and sterile", refraining from "ideologism and partisanship", from partial interpretations of the facts and from pipedreams.
Rostow endeavoured to answer the most vital questions of our time and see which way the economy is heading. "Is it taking us to Communism; or to the affluent suburbs, nicely rounded out with social overhead capital; to destruction; to the moon; or where?" he askes.^^2^^
It is safe to say that Rostow had all his answers put long before he examined his questions. Mankind, he claims, travelled its long road from what he calls the traditional society (a confusing jumble of such highly distinct socio-
~^^1^^ Ibid.
~^^2^^ Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. A NonCommunist Manifesto, Cambridge, 1960, p. 2.
645-3241
65economic formations as the classless primitive community, slave society and feudalism) in order to attain "industrial society", embodied in capitalism, and will now go no farther. He describes communism as a "disease of the transition time", the lowest form of industrial society. Up to a point, he says, communism may take root in economically underdeveloped countries during their passage from traditional to industrial society. The desired objective, he believes, is for the peoples to enter developed industrial society without "the Communist technique for mobilising power and resources".^^1^^
Rostow is bursting with virtuous ideas about the present and future of capitalism. He identifies the relatively high living standard of a part of U.S. society with the standard of living under modernised capitalism as a whole, and considers the latter to be stable and unshakeable. He compares the outlook for the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A., and arrives at the following conclusion: "Neither in scale, nor in allocation, nor in momentum do Russian dispositions present a menace beyond American and Western resources to deal with; nor, peering farther ahead, are there reasons to believe the Russian experience will transcend familiar limits.''^^2^^
To make this emphatic statement, Rostow had had to overlook the deep-going internal contradictions of the capitalist system, the mounting class struggle, the anti-imperialist movement all over the world, and the increasing influence of socialism.
Bourgeois quasi-optimism wants to assure people that the rapid rate of world development,
far from undermining the pillars of capitalism, is really consolidating and elevating the old system. We shall deal with the true purport of these contentions in a later chapter. At this point, let us just say that not all the defenders of the old world are as optimistic as Norguet, Wiles, Schlesinger and Rostow. Neither are they all inclined to gloss over the alarming ailments of capitalism.
THE CAUTIOUS OPTIMISTS
Many bourgeois politicians, sociologists and journalists shy away from farces like The Capitalist Manifesto of Kelso and Adler. They admit the ``failings'' and ``ills'' of capitalism, but consider them curable. U.S. journalist Cyrus Leo Sulzberger refers in his book, What's Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy^^1^^?, to the gout allegedly troubling U.S. imperialism, and suggests diverse treatments.^^1^^
He is one of what we might call the "cautious optimists". They are constrained to mention the deep-going contradictions in the capitalist camp, yet are unable, by virtue of their class limitations, to draw the right conclusions. They admit that capitalism, whatever attractive names it may be given, does not, mildly speaking, enjoy trust among the peoples. The "free world" is being strongly attacked by all the revolutionary forces of our time.
Deeply troubled over the future of capitalism, Suzanne Labin, the notorious anti-communist, wrote that "in 15 years of passivity, democracy has lost half the free world. In another 15 years
~^^1^^ Rostow, op. cit., p. 164.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 104.
~^^1^^ Sulzberger, What's Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy?, New York, 1959, p. 15.
s* 67
66the free world will cease to exist if events follow the same course".^^1^^
Similar fears, couched in somewhat more cautious and reserved terms, are voiced by many prominent statesmen of the imperialist world. The late President Kennedy said in one of his speeches in reference to the future of the old world that "our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country, without the firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border".^^2^^
Speaking of America's "national purpose", the late Adlai Stevenson said in 1960: "An air of disengagement and disinterest hangs over the most powerful and affluent society the world has ever known. Neither the turbulence of the world abroad nor the fatness and flatness of the world at home is moving us to more vital effort. We seem becalmed in a season of storms, drifting through a century of mighty dreams and great achievements.''^^3^^
Stevenson knew perfectly well that U.S. imperialism was neither passive, nor docile. What he said evidently expressed the sentiment engendered by the insoluble contradictions and failures of U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Perhaps the source of all the trouble lies outside the United States? Perhaps it is rooted in the ``intrigues'' of the socialist countries, as U.S. propaganda keeps saying day in and day out? Here is what Archibald MacLeish, the U.S. poet and playwright, says on this score. He is conscious of the fact that something is wrong with America, for all its technical progress. But what?
``The trouble seems to be that we don't feel right with ourselves or with the country," he writes. "It isn't the Russians. Or it isn't only the Russians. We have outgrown the adolescent time when everything that was wrong with America was the fault of the Russians.... It isn't just the Russians now: it is ourselves. It's the way we feel about ourselves as Americans. And what do we feel about ourselves? That we've lost our way in the woods. That we don't know where we are going---if anywhere.''^^1^^
Certainly, MacLeish does not get to the bottom of things. He looks for the answer in the wrong place---not in the antagonistic contradictions of the wasted social system but in the side-effects. He speaks of economic obesity and spiritual torpor, about a loss of determination to fight for the freedom of the individual, and the like.
It is a striking fact that many bourgeois leaders are conscious of the growing confusion in the capitalist world and ascribe the situation mostly to spiritual, chiefly moral, causes. They have no inkling that these causes are generated by profound economic and political factors. Walter Lippmann attributes the weakness of modern U.S. society to the absence of big, inspiring goals. Others, too, write about the " ideological vacuum" in the capitalist countries, the frightening moral decline, the lack of lofty political and moral ideas, and so on.
The contrast between the grand constructive plans of the socialist world and its inspiring ideas, on the one hand, and the ideological paucity of the imperialist bourgeoisie, on the other, is much too obvious not to create alarm.
For years, bourgeois leaders have pleaded for
~^^1^^ Vie ou mart du monde libre, 50 t^moignages recuellis par Suzanne Labin, Paris, 1961, p. 4.
~^^2^^ New York Times, Apr. 21, 1961.
^^3^^ Life (International), Aug. 1, 1960.
68~^^1^^ Ibid.
69promises and declarations to offset the communist ideals and create the impression that the "free world" has a programme capable of inspiring one and all. They refer to a "Freedom Manifesto", whereby the racists, the overt and covert colonialists, the architects of the interventions in Cuba and Vietnam and other freedomloving countries could persuade the world of their innate love and affection for the principles of freedom and self-determination. Moral factors, some U.S. papers keep saying, are as strong as army divisions. They call on the "free world" to produce these factors.
The movement known as Moral Rearmament is particularly active in this sense. Here is a passage from its appeal: "Guns, dollars and diplomacy alone are no match for an enemy who has all these but advances because of the superarm of an ideology. America needs an ideology.''^^1^^
To listen to these statements, all the troubles of the "free world" stem from its lack of st workable ideology, garnished with enticing promises. The exponents of this view are really belittling their own efforts. The fine and solemn promises they have made are legion! Take the invention of the term "free world"! Then there are the falsehoods about the "welfare state", "total democracy", etc. No, there has been no lack of tempting ideas and promises. But the imperialist world has the only ideology it can afford to have---the ideology of exploitation, of enslaving the peoples, of militarism.
All the efforts of the champions of bourgeois society to dress up this imperialist ideology, to do so by subtle deceit, are running into mount-
ing resistance. The 20th century is a century of growing mass revolutionary activity, a century of "mass reason". It is very hard today to deceive the peoples, to disguise the abyss between the words and deeds of the imperialists. This is the true reason for the crisis of the bourgeois ideology. It is the true reason behind the dismay over the "ideological vacuum", the need for a new ideology, for urgent "moral rearmament". But people cannot help noticing the simple fact that despite its vast production potential the capitalist system is unable to end the poverty, insecurity and spiritual indigence of a vast section of people, because the lion's share of the national income is appropriated by a small monopoly elite. People cannot help noticing the simple fact that the imperialist system embodies not only class, but also national and racial inequality and oppression, that it backs colonialism and neo-colonialism and presents a dreadful nuclear war hazard. The police functions arrogated by some of the imperialist powers, primarily the United States; the craving of a select few controlling large fortunes to interfere in the affairs of peoples on various continents, to saddle these peoples with their will, to plunder and humiliate them; the dirty wars and military provocations in the Congo, South Vietnam, Cyprus, Cuba and many other countries---all this, singly and cumulatively, rouses, and cannot but rouse, the anger and indignation of all men.
It is not surprising that some bourgeois theorists and politicians admit that the nose-diving prestige of the capitalist system, of its ideology, is due to some specific aspects of the foreign and domestic policies of the imperialist powers.
Cyrus Sulzberger, whom we have quoted
71~^^1^^ Washington Post and Times Herald, Jan. 6, 1961. 70
earlier, is a convinced champion of the capitalist system. But he is sufficiently keen-eyed to realise how hard it is to conceal its defects.
Sulzberger calls on the U.S. rulers to consider some of the aspects of the U.S. scene, long a source of apprehension. He refers to "inadequate education, racial discrimination, religious bigotry, political and economic smugness, juvenile delinquency, antiquated public health, outdated prisons and mental institutions, a shortage of doctors and medical facilities, insufficient funds for scientific research".^^1^^
But his list is not complete by far. In his subsequent discussion Sulzberger reveals many more shortcomings: the poverty of a large section of Americans, police surveillance of political loyalty, U.S. government efforts to rule other peoples, attempts to deceive public opinion and parade tyrannical reactionary regimes as democratic ones so long as they do Washington's bidding, etc.
``How much do we deceive ourselves when we assume, by the very labels we apply, that we speak truly for a free world?" Sulzberger asks. "What we mean by this expression is, of course, the area beyond the Iron Curtain. This area includes seventy-two countries. But fortynine of them are governed either by dictatorships or oligarchies, by no means all benevolent. Several operate under systems of economic feudalism.''^^2^^
Could the description of the ``free'' world have been more true to life?
The more far-sighted ideologists of capitalism have learned a great deal, but what is beyond
~^^1^^ Sulzberger, What's Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy?, pp. 22-23.
their grasp are the causes that engender these ``negative'' phenomena. They think they can refurbish capitalism and make it acceptable to all despite its irreconcilable antagonisms. They think a little more reason would do the trick. But what has happened to this divine gift? Why is it in such short supply at this hour, when the Western world is in such dire straits? Sulzberger does not venture to reply to these ``metaphysical'' questions. All he says is that in his country reason is unpopular today. "At this critical epoch," he writes, "we seem to have developed an odd contempt for the human brain just at a moment when that organ should be most hallowed.''^^1^^
Sulzberger overlooks the fact that reason can solve but solvable problems, and that it cannot find an effective way out of the blind alley for a society that belongs to the past and no longer meets the requirements of the new times, the basic interests of mankind.
James P. Warburg, the prominent U.S. banker and publicist, admits in his book, The West in Crisis (the very title of which reveals the author's frame of mind), the grave condition of the capitalist economy. "Broadly speaking," he writes, "the Western economy as a whole suffers from chronic, creeping inflation paradoxically accompanied by an apparent inability to achieve stable prosperity without a continual expansion of production in excess of effective consumer demand.''^^2^^ Warburg goes on to say that the economy of the imperialist powers relies heavily on the production of means of destruction, working for war and paving the
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 21.
~^^2^^ Warburg, The West in Crisis, New York, 1959, p. 47.
73~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 22.
72way for it. However, Warburg notes, "in a world in which a major war means extinction, the Western economy is still geared to the preparation for precisely such a war. It has not yet adjusted itself to the assumptions of peace upon which all hope of survival must be predicated."1 By saying so the author unconsciously condemns the social system he is so eager to `` improve'' and salvage.
The above quotations from Warburg's book explode all the falsely optimistic assurances of a whole legion of imperialist champions.
Warburg emphasises that the crisis of capitalism is generated by "the inner defects in the Western economic structure and the defects of Western policy".^^2^^
At the risk of stripping the "free world" of its peacock feathers, Warburg declares on the evidence provided by Professor Andrew Hacker that the growth of monopoly capital is undermining the pillars of democratic government and putting politics under the control of the economic moguls.
Warburg exploits the term "Western Man". Whom he means by it is the man who embodies the capitalist civilisation. If we keep this in mind, we are sure to see through the following passage in Warburg's book:
``Where Western Man might have gained the respect and admiration of the masses of mankind through emphatic understanding and cooperation, he has undermined his own influence by his selfishness, his callous inhumanity, and his failure to live up to the moral standards of the religious beliefs which he so militantly pro-
selytised. Thus Western Man missed his great opportunity to establish what might have been a world leadership based upon consent rather than conquest.''^^1^^
All these confessions do not prevent Warburg from hoping, however, that the "fallen world" will rise out of the mud, clean house and regain the trust of mankind.
The critical overtones in Warburg's book are as strong as his talk about the chances of revivifying capitalism are helpless, Utopian and unscientific. The author accepts the bourgeois outlook as a "symbol of faith", according to which the world of private enterprise can gain, and already is gaining, its second wind despite all trials and tribulations.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF QUASI-OPTIMISM
The more the foundations of capitalism, are weakened the more its champions are inclined to accept a philosophy repugning the objective regularity of the historical process and depicting history as a "free creativeness" of the human spirit. This is the essence of subjective idealism in relation to social affairs.
Subjective sociology has a history of many centuries. It was first epitomised in the following aphorism of the ancient Greek Sophist, Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." British philosopher George Berkeley (1684-1753) developed a whole subjective idealist system, which conceived the world as the sum total of the sensations of the cognising subject. Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, the German philosopher (1796-1879), went a step farther. He
~^^1^^ Warburg, op. cit., p
. 47.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 60.
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 18.
74 75endowed the human ego with an extra-active nature spurning all obstacles in the effectuation of its goal. To this all-determining will power, Fichte subordinated even the subject's consciousness; thereby he formulated the conception of voluntarism in its most consummate form. While ignoring, even totally denying, objective laws and the role and importance of the masses, modern bourgeois philosophers glorified the spirit and its distinguished bearers. Max Stirner, for example, endeavoured to prove that the interests of the people, the interests of society, were a fiction and that the individual, ``man'', was the only real thing under the sun. Marx had good reason to say about Stirner that "he constantly foists `man' on history as the sole dramatis personae and believes that `man' has made history".^^1^^
Historian Thomas Carlyle championed the cult of great personalities, the chosen, the executors of the will of the world spirit; his was a subjectivist and voluntarist approach. "As I take it," he wrote, "universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.... All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these."2 The subjective idealist conception of history
is also the dominant conception in the bourgeois philosophy of our time.
Subjective sociology attributes important historical events to causes in the sphere of thought, the subjective sphere, and ascribes them to accidental circumstances. It is thus a philosophical weapon in defending the capitalist system. This deliberate denial of the objective law-governed development of history is no more convincing than blaming the gardener for the wilting flowers of autumn. But the purpose is simple. By portraying the natural and inexorable senility of the capitalist system as the upshot of accidents, bourgeois ideology infers that these accidents may be avoided, in which case things will get better, revivified capitalism will regain dominance, and communism will vanish as a spectre vanishes.
The exponents of this utopia portray history as a plural choice of actions with equal chances of success and failure. The indeterminative consciousness and the will of strong far-sighted personalities capable of advancing credible arguments and convincing ideas, of saddling their decisions on people, are said to be decisive. Briefly, history is alleged to be a stream of situations and actions that cannot be properly registered and scientifically generalised. In history, things can be thus and not thus, they can be and not be.
The conception of the world as an "absolute disorder" free of casual connections, necessary relations, law-governed development, continuity and logic, is typical of many modern sociological doctrines. The exponents of this ``philosophy'' of chaos fling overboard everything that could serve as the basis of a real social science.
H.A.L. Fisher is an advocate of this view. "I
~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, 1964, pp. 252-53.
~^^2^^ Carlyle, Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, New York, A. L. Burt Publisher, pp. 1-2.
76 77can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave," he writes, "only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalisations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognise in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.''^^1^^
The theoretical cognitive raison d'etre of subjectivist sociology is that laws of history are hard to perceive, that accidental processes operate alongside necessary ones. Law-governed history, we know, follows a course of deviations, zigzags, reverses, and the like. Subjectivist sociologists are baffled by the absence of stringently consistent repetition in history such as they observe in nature. They find no ``pure'' laws operating in society without delays and departures, such as govern the motion of heavenly bodies, and draw the conclusion that history is not subject to any laws whatsoever.
This negation of social laws stems often from the notion that natural laws and laws governing society should be identical since nature and society represent a unity. But unity is not identity. Society is a specific form of existence of the material world. Social laws, therefore, have points of distinction---specific features that distinguish them from laws of nature. Unlike nature, society is an aggregate of living beings, endowed with consciousness and volition, beings with conflicting interests and aspirations. The process of history is itself composed of the interaction and collision of differing interests and aims, and of often unforeseen actions. In history,
necessity hacks its way through a maze of accidents that cannot always be accounted for.
To many exponents of the idealist view of history negation of objective laws seems selfevident, considering that historical phenomena never repeat themselves with any degree of precision. Here is how they reason: one can generalise only events of a similar pattern; if man had not seen the constant succession of day and night, the seasons of the year, the same effects of the same causes, he would never have perceived law; wherever plural consistent repetition does not occur, the notion of law is entirely ruled out; therefore since such repetition is not to be seen in history, the latter is not subject to law.
U.S. sociologist Pitirim Sorokin is inclined to believe that repetitions in history, though they occur, are very rare, isolated, accidental and, therefore, cannot be generalised. "Most of the complex psychosocial phenomena," he writes, "like war and peace, revolution and stable order, prosperity and depression; the creative growth and decline of nations ... sciences, fine arts; the emergence, organisation ... of social groups; fluctuations of monarchical and republican governments ... these and thousands of other sociocultural phenomena have recurred only a limited number of times in known human history, and of these recurrences a still smaller number have actually been observed and recorded.''^^1^^
Sorokin arrives at the conclusion that it is hard to calculate the probability of historical repetitions, to prove that they are governed by
~^^1^^ H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe, London, 1937, p. V. 78
~^^1^^ Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences, Chicago, 1956, p. 257.
79law and to make grounded predictions on the strength of such law.
But how right is one to make these deductions and sociological conclusions ?
It is quite true that historical phenomena are never identical in either content or form. The Bastille was never captured twice. There could never have been two October Revolutions, two world wars identical in content and form, etc. We shall see no repetition in history until we detach ourselves from the phenomenon and go into its essence. In form and content there are only few points of similarity between such processes as the revolutions in the Netherlands and in 17th-century Britain, and that in France at the close of the 18th century. Yet all three spelled the end of feudalism and transition to bourgeois relationships.
In society laws operate mostly as trends of development, as concrete possibilities whose tempo and form depends on a variety of conditions. This it is that makes it difficult to discover objective social laws and to study their operation. In certain circumstances, what with the sociologists' own political and class orientation, this is liable to produce perverted notions about the essence of the process of history, to prompt negation of objective social laws.
Lenin demonstrated with pinpoint accuracy the reasons why some people repudiate the existence of social law.
``Despair of ever being able to give a scientific analysis of the present," he wrote, "a denial of science, tendency to despise all generalisations, to hide from all the `laws' of historical development, and make the trees screen the wood---such is the class idea underlying the fashionable bourgeois scepticism, the dead and deadening
80scholasticism,"^^1^^ typical of bourgeois sociology in the imperialist epoch.
Having given up the effort to comprehend the intricate structure of social life, incapable of grasping the specific ways in which law operates in social affairs, most exponents of idealist sociology are glad to define history as a "lawless sphere''.
Here is how one of them, J. Lerois, an exponent of indeterminism and of alogical perceptions, extols "universal anarchy":
``The most substantial thing in my ideological convictions boils down to the fact that the notion of the world as a unity is nonsense. I imagine that the universe is diversity without unity, without continuity, without connection and order.''^^2^^
The same idea is put forward in somewhat different terms by Georges Matisse: "The social disorder, the absurdity of the game of nations, the historical convulsions of peoples and the contradictions, the folly and the inconsistency in the behaviour of individuals should neither astonish nor anger us, and should be treated as the course common to all things.''^^3^^
Everybody knows, writes Charles Beard, another exponent of the "philosophy of chaos", that thousands of events are taking place at certain times and that numerous people are taking part in them, but nobody can find the chain of causes and effects.
The theorists of Right socialism are of like mind with bourgeois sociologists. They, too,
~^^1^^ Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 199.
~^^2^^ Lerois, Science, Faith and Scepticism, London, 1959, pp. 34-35.
~^^3^^ Matisse, L'incoherence universelle, Vol. II, Paris, 1956, p. 40.
6-3241
81deny the idea of objective laws of history. They make short work of historical necessity, harangue for freedom, for free making of history in conformance with abstract moral ideals---the favourite tool of modern reformism. Willi Eichler, who is one of them, thinks "history does not follow any hard and fast laws. One cannot but view history's process either pessimistically or, depending on one's taste, even optimistically. The democratic Socialist views history as the work of responsible people---for good or for evil.''^^1^^
Walter Theimer is just as forthright. He believes that the socialist movement would gain from divorcing itself from the Hegelian idea of historical necessity and regularity. What he thinks preferable is Fichte and his ideas. "Fichte's philosophy," he says, "was idealist and voluntaristic. It set a higher price on ethical values than on the mechanism of the historical process, and it believed in the will-power and in the responsibility of the individual.''^^2^^
Again we see volition, free choice and the abstract ethics of isolated individuals given precedence over objective sociological regularity.
To give a semblance of reality to the subjectivist conception of history, idealist sociologists rise up in arms against the Marxist teaching of socio-economic formations. Small wonder, for the very concept of socio-economic formations establishes a necessary and regular relationship between the degree of development of the productive forces and the type of production rela-
tions---the necessary and law-governed relationship between the economic basis and its superstructure. Not only does the teaching on socioeconomic formations register continuous changes in society; it also pinpoints the oriented nature of this flux, this upward, law-governed passage from one socio-economic formation to the next. Marxist philosophy has enabled us to define the fact that social development is a natural historical process governed by laws that transcend man's will.
To cast doubt on the Marxist teaching of socio-economic formations, the subjectivists and voluntarists of various schools draw a line through man's history, denying the existence of primitive, slave, feudal and capitalist society and averring that development did not proceed from less developed socio-economic formations to more developed ones. But that is something they cannot do on scientific grounds, and therefore subj activist sociology is nothing but an outright denial of the scientific approach to history. By supplanting scientific analysis with arbitrary appraisals and descriptions of historic fact, the subjectivist conception of history repudiates succession of socio-economic formations, the passage from one formation to the next, denying the very existence of these formations. One can maintain almost anything and deny almost anything, too, by claiming this approach.
The bourgeois sociology of our time is leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to deny the objective historical regularity. It needs to do so, above all, to deny the idea of the law-governed succession of capitalism by socialism. Despite its modern garb, it is the same outdated subjective sociology which takes volition to be absolute
v
83
~^^1^^ Protokoll der Verhandlungen des Parteitages der sozial-demokratischen Partei Deutschlands vom 18.-23. Mai in Stuttgart, S. 368.
~^^2^^ Theimer, Von Bebel zu Ollenhauer, Berne, 1957, S. 17-18.
and assumes that the future of society depends on what the leaders and politicians of the ruling class want it to be.
The notion that history is made by outstanding personalities has long since spread from subjective idealist treatises to the programme principles of the men to whom the imperialist bourgeoisie has entrusted the helm of state. If the world cannot be taken back to the good old days when no socialist state existed, the bourgeois ideologists reason, why not at least establish an immutable line of demarcation between capitalism and socialism, why not prevent socialism from winning the affection of the peoples, why not prevent more countries from abandoning the capitalist system ?
The U.S. ruling classes, writes Massimo Salvador!, "have accepted voluntarism as a principle and have practised it".^^1^^ This is absolutely true. Salvador! quotes various U.S. statesmen, including ex-President Harry Truman, who scoffs at the idea of objective laws governing the course of history. Truman, by the way, is seconded by another prominent politician, Chester Bowles. "Contrary to Karl Marx," Bowles says, "there are no inevitable laws of history. The essential test of success or failure depends upon the will-power of individual human beings.''^^2^^
Harvard professor Henry A. Kissinger, who is troubled by the fate of capitalism and is searching for ways of buttressing NATO, thinks the solution hangs on the far-sightedness and willpower of the "free world`s'' leaders. He will not
suffer the idea that far-sightedness, however lucid, and will-power, however strong, cannot save a social organism from its doom if it is in decline and approaching its end by virtue of immanent, objective laws. Kissinger attacks the idea of historical necessity from traditionally voluntarist positions. "Free from the shackles of a doctrine of historical inevitability," he says, "the nations of the West can render a great service by demonstrating that whatever meaning history has is derived from the convictions and purpose of the generation which shapes it.''^^1^^
Legend has it that the mythical Jesus Navius stopped the sun in its course by means of magic incantations. The imperialists are still better off---they have Polaris missiles, marines, and other means of "enforcing their will", so why should they not stop the motion of world history? The late President Kennedy said in one of his speeches that "as the President of the United States I am determined upon our system's survival and success, regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril".^^2^^
To be or not to be, is a question the voluntarists tie up with the will, energy and determination of the leaders of the capitalist world. The greater the difficulties of the capitalist system are, the more deeply enmeshed it is in its own contradictions, the more hope its apologists pin on violence.
Let us see what the writers of A Forward Strategy for America have to say on this score. They maintain that "within less than a genera-
~^^1^^ Salvador!, The Economics of Freedom, London, 1959, p. 151.
~^^2^^ The Department of State Bulletin, April 3, 1961, p.485.
84~^^1^^ Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership, N.Y.L., Toronto, 1965, p. 251.
~^^2^^ New York Times, Apr. 21, 1961.
85tion ... the prestige and influence of the United States have been progressively so weakened that the West-at-bay is no longer a figure of speech but a precise statement of a real condition". This fact, which they describe as "overarching and staggering", is shaping all modern history. The writers do not delude themselves with hopes of greater differences on this or that issue between the various countries of the socialist camp. They say the capitalist world is no match for the "communist bloc" as regards `` solidarityin-action''. "The communist states," they say, "still act within a framework of a common ideology, they share a common purpose---and benefit from the flagrant disunity of the West." Neither are the writers blind to the future of communism. They feel sure that communism will continue to grow as rapidly as it has been growing since the Second World War ended. They attribute this to many reasons, including such factors favourable to communism as "a vast continental base, increasing production power, expanding knowledge, tight organisation and general ideological consistency''.
``Thus far," the book says, "the tide has been coming in stronger after every period of ebbflow. The operational advantage in the contest, which is literally a contest for the future of man upon this earth, is shifting to the side of communism. This slippage of power opens a period of mounting concern for America and her associates and a time for great decisions.''^^1^^
What way out, what "great decisions" do they suggest for America and her associates? Perhaps the objective should be to demonstrate their
~^^1^^ Strausz-Hupe, Kintner and Possony, A Forward Strategy for America, New York, 1961, pp. 396-99.
86superiority in creating material and cultural blessings for all citizens of the capitalist system and thereby to outshine communism? Nothing of the sort. Evidently, the authors do not believe this can be done. They suggest violence. What they want is to intimidate the communist world and make it surrender. They are eager to show that it is not too late yet to beat the communist formation by violent means.
The one fact of the continuous expansion of the socialist world since 1917 and the no less continuous retreat of imperialism should make the leaders of the imperialist world sit up and take notice. They should ask themselves whether, perhaps, the ceaseless growth of socialism is bearing out the existence of objective historical laws. Yet history deprives those it wants to destroy of reason and foresight. Gripped by a paralysing fear of socialism, they are willingto ascribe socialism's successes to accidents, political errors, lack of information, and the like, rather than to objective reasons. They hammer away against the idea of law-governed historical development and describe it as unscientific, illusory, propagandist^:, theological, etc. They show ill-concealed annoyance at the existence of necessary, irremovable laws of history independent of man's will. In one of his speeches, Britain's ex-Prime Minister Alex Douglas-Home went out of his way to ridicule the existence of objective regularity.
``The claim made by the Communists," quoth he, "is nothing less than the discovery of a set of scientific rules which govern political behaviour and predetermine man's political evolution. These rules have, we are told, equal validity with the laws discovered by Copernicus, Galileo
87and Newton governing our physical environment.''^^1^^
Mr. Home probably thought that fate would treat the ``disprover'' of the laws of history (with whom he evidently ranges himself) with greater kindness than it treated the ``disprovers'' of the heliocentric system of Copernicus and the laws of Galileo and Newton.
Yet the objective development of social affairs, the succession of social formations, is repudiating the voluntarist subjective interpretation of history. Certainly, the feudal aristocracy wanted to see the world as it liked best. A lot of gunpowder and metal was wasted to wipe out the "paradise of parvenues", which was how the feudal despots depicted bourgeois society. On the face of it, the governing feudal class held all the trumps---the army, the police, the jailers and executioners, and the clergy---to maintain their ``god-given'' and ``natural'' privileges, their property, their right to oppress the people. Yes, everything was on their side, save History. Feudalism restrained the further development of the peoples, rapid growth of production, the productivity of labour and effective labour incentives. No weapons could suppress the craving of the peoples for better living conditions and greater freedom. Guns, mortars and rifles could not arrest the march of time. The clock of history ticked on, working against the champions of the bankrupt social system.
Here is an example from the relatively recent past. The henchmen of finance capital, Hitler and Mussolini, showed truly demoniac energy to create a "new order" and root out communism
by fire and sword. But what were the results of their will and energy? Did they succeed in arresting the march of history and the growth of the world communist movement?
More than one-third of mankind has embarked on socialism since their time. Such is the logic of historical development. The way for this shift was paved by the preceding social development, and was therefore inevitable. The objective laws of history are inexorable and have to be respected.
Books and articles are written by voluntarists to elucidate historic events that make up the necessary links of social progress, and to ascribe them to accidental errors, the inactivity and faulty judgement of those who championed the ``traditional'' order.
Subjective sociology accentuates the secondary factors and side-effects, and overlooks the rock-bottom causes of the October Revolution. The revolutionary explosion in Russia was generated by the profound contradictions of the capitalist system in its imperialist stage. The socialist revolution broke out in a country which was the ganglion of the more acute contradictions of world imperialism and its weakest and most vulnerable link. Russia was pregnant with revolution. The oppressive, humiliating pressure of capitalist and feudal relations, poverty, disfranchisement, police rule, costly wars and national oppression, which made Russia a prison of peoples, led up inexorably to a social upheaval. The class war was acute to the extreme, because, the February 1917 Revolution had not lived up to the people's expectations due to the counter-revolutionary attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie and the outright betrayal of the people's cause by the Menshevik and
89~^^1^^ Contemporary Communism, Conservative Political Centre, London, November 1963, p. 15.
Socialist-Revolutionary leaders. This, among other things, determined the rapidity with which the bourgeois-democratic February revolution grew over into a socialist revolution. The other factor that paved the way to victory was the existence in Russia of a revolutionary proletariat, of its faithful ally the working peasants, and the battle-steeled Bolshevik Party, which was equipped with a potent revolutionary doctrine. By denying that the first socialist revolution was objectively inevitable, bourgeois ideologists attempt to deny the idea that all mankind will, by virtue of the objective laws of history, go from capitalism to socialism.
The talk about the accidental nature of the socialist victory in Russia did not cease even after socialism took root in a number of European and Asian countries. Western writers say socialism would never have gone beyond the limits of the Soviet Union and would never have become a world system if the imperialist states had not erred in their foreign policy, while the imperialist colonial system would never have crumbled if the metropolitan countries had made certain concessions to the exploited peoples.
Accidents and the mistakes of top statesmen do, indeed, affect the course of history, and sometimes quite extensively. Accidents and the mistakes of, say, the champions of the capitalist system are quite likely to speed its downfall. But it is puerile to think that the senile capitalist organism would be immortal if no such errors occurred.
Social progress curtails the accidental sphere, the likeliness of regress and of zigzags. The subjective factor has grown very greatly in social affairs and the knowledge the masses have gained of the necessary historical processes,
90which spurs them to purposeful activity, tends to preclude accidental departures from the general line of historical development. Scientific prognostication and the mounting political awareness and organisation of the people, the makers of history, are another effective means of averting such accidental departures. The sphere of accident in social relations is shrinking. We can see it shrink. The growing edge socialism is gaining over capitalism is manifest in the fact that countries are dropping away one by one from the capitalist system under the impact of objective processes and that the imperialist powers cannot stop them from doing it. Nearly five decades ago the imperialists were able to crush socialist revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria and other countries with relative ease. Today, they have to suffer socialist Cuba a mere 90 miles from the United States, the main citadel of the capitalist system. The futility of the imperialist efforts to retain their grip on their remaining colonial possessions, to retrieve lost positions, and to replace colonialism with neo-colonialism, is added evidence that the accidental sphere has shrunk. In the past, imperialism was able to "iron out" conflicts in Africa, Asia and Latin America with a few battalions and two or three warships, reestablishing "peace and order" in their colonies and the dependent countries. These "good old days" are gone never to return. Today, police action rouses indignation all over the world and determined resistance by the peoples, and creates complications the colonialists can barely cope with. The dirty war against the people of Vietnam, for example, is causing the U.S. aggressors no end of trouble. Resort to force in maintaining a social system
91hateful to the masses is sure to fail. All violence has limits. It cannot stop the peoples from advancing themselves, especially in our time when there is the world socialist system. Outdated regimes always fall back on force to survive, but, in the final count, none of them achieved salvation. Violence may frustrate the revolutionary forces up to a point. Inevitably, it engenders fresh discontent. New groups of fighters appear, and sooner or later, a new upsurge of revolution sweeps out the old order. The social system that has to rely on violence against the majority is sure to be overthrown by violence. This is corrobarated by the collapse of various despotic regimes in the remote and more recent past, and in the present as well. Let us recall the fate of the despotic regimes in East and West, of Russian tsarism and German fascism, and of the puppets sponsored by the United States, Britain and other imperialist countries. Dictators who cling to power by means of wholesale carnage, gallows and napalm are sure to perish, as did Nuri Said, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Tshombe, and others. Violence against the people is an evidence of economic, political and moral insolvency.
Those who deny the existence of objective laws and assume that social development is modelled by outstanding personalities naturally show a keen interest in the characters of these "makers of history". Courage, resourcefulness, the capacity to make quick decisions, adroitness, perseverance and other individual attributes are fallaciously regarded as the determinants in major historical events.
In his book, Profiles in Courage, President John F. Kennedy admires the conduct of John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston,
George Norris and others in difficult political exigencies. He attributes the decisive role in resolving the crises to their handling of the situation. Kennedy attempts to find the keys to contemporary problems in past history. He appeals to the personalities of a gone era. He believes that a revival of courage among the present-day U.S. Congressmen would improve the political climate and help the country cope with its difficulties, providing new tempo and scope to U.S. society. "The stories of past courage," Kennedy writes, "can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration.''^^1^^
But the courage of a political leader, the nature of his efforts, hinge on the causes inspiring him, on how noble, how historically progressive are the tasks he confronts. Lofty courage is scarcely to be expected from leaders of the reactionary classes and parties battling for unjust, predacious goals.
Kennedy quotes a prominent U.S. politician's opinion of the men sitting in U.S. Senate. "While I am reluctant to believe in the total depravity of the Senate," the politician says, "I place but little dependence on the honesty and truthfulness of a large portion of the Senators. A majority of them are small lights, mentally weak, and wholly unfit to be Senators. Some are vulgar demagogues ... some are men of wealth who have purchased their position... (some are) men of narrow intellect, limited comprehension, and low partisan prejudice.''^^2^^
This character sketch leads us to the inference that low spiritual and moral qualifications of
~^^1^^ Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, New York and Evanston, 1964, p. 216.
^^2^^ Ibid., p. 2.
93 92people making a country's policy are not fortuitous. Transposing Hegel's aphorism, we might say that political parties and states have the kind of leaders they deserve.
Undeniably, there may be strong and courageous men among the "men of narrow intellect, limited comprehension, and low partisan prejudice", but are they, these men of courage, capable of withstanding the march of time, of rejuvenating a senile social organism, of restoring its lost powers? Surely, they are not. The consciousness, the will and the constructive features of a historic personality cannot be forceful and significant enough to influence the course of history, unless that personality expresses the urgent needs of social development, the interests, sentiments and thoughts of the foremost class, of the people.
We have here attempted to probe the essence of the philosophical conception of history as a realm of arbitrary, accidental occurrences lacking order, logic, objective laws and necessary connections between the past, present and future. It negates social science and infers the futility of anticipating social development. Sociological agnosticism has, indeed, always negated causality, necessary historical connections, recurrence, succession and regularity.
Neo-Kantians have done a lot in their time to deny scientific generalisations in social relations. They maintained that all historical phenomena were individual and, consequently, non-- recurrent. The so-called identity method, they said, was the only possible method of social cognition. All the sociologist had to do was to describe the individual historical acts and situations, and to establish their purport from the standpoint of the higher reason.
94Max Weber picked up the neo-Kantian tradition. He said in his Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Die romische Agrargeschichte and other books that laws were invented, not discovered. He defined historical knowledge, like knowledge in general, as the construction of the object of cognition. The latter appears when categories of reason are injected into the chaos of empirical facts, when they are organised, by means of a priori sociological constructions. The object of historical cognition, Weber averred, was no more than an element of a logically connected notion, which may suffer endless correction and finalisation but may never be confused with empirical reality itself.
Weber did not deny that such historical cognition was subjectivist. He wrote that the historian's incursions into history were unavoidable, but that the historian could act in the spirit of the Kantian subject, meaning that historical cognition rested on definite logical rules, which retained inter-subjective value when reproducing the past. Weber went out of his way to emphasise that no historical conception could be built, unless the builder was conscious of its embracing a part, rather than the whole, and that the real transcended cognition, that is, could not be cognised objectively in the scientific sense.
The idea that the essence of historical processes is unknowable is widespread today in idealist sociology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, author of Les aventures de la dialectique, lays bare the substance of sociological agnosticism. The categories employed by the historian or sociologist, Merleau-Ponty suggests, enable him to offer his own conception of history. A historian studies
95empirical historical facts and connects them in accordance with his own sentiments, thoughts and considerations. It is easily deduced therefrom that there are as many histories and conceptions of history as there are historians and sociologists.
Merleau-Ponty proceeds from his sociological agnosticism to draw appropriate political conclusions. He claims that it is inconceivable to base policy on a recognition of the regularity of social life and the possibility of its scientific cognition. He betrays the pragmatic purpose of his sociological constructions by saying that Marxist policy, like any other policy, can be neither integral nor logical. Realistic policy, Merleau-Ponty adduces, makes no effort to consider non-existent objective regularities. It does not endeavour "to embrace all history, and takes man as he is, as the creature in an obscure world resolving his problems one by one and seeking to impart a bit of moral worth into things".^^1^^
A real politician, says Merleau-Ponty, discovers what he has to do each day when he tackles his daily problems. He gropes along without a compass and takes his bearings from the tangible present. His knowledge of past and present history does not help him to select the right path. "Each political act," he writes, "influences history as a whole, but this totality does not furnish us with any rule we could depend on, because it is never more than an opinion.''^^2^^
Merleau-Ponty advocates a theory whereby he could floor every scientific theory and obliterate
its practical bearing on cognition and the reorganisation of social relations.
This is a trend followed by the bulk of the present-day bourgeois philosophers. In the gnosiological context, they are prompted by the absolute accent they lay on accident in social affairs, on zigzags and departures from the lawgoverned course of history, on specific features and on the difficulty of cognising history.
Those are the theoretico-cognitive sources of the philosophy of history expounded, among others, by Henri-Irenee Marrou in his De la connaissance historique. Not only, does Marrou reject the Marxist ideas of objective laws of history, but also the Hegelian notion of historical necessity. Quite candidly, he gravitates towards the subjectivist conception of historical cognition, though he refuses to identify himself with extreme subjectivism. Every historian, he says, expresses the point of view of the social group to which he belongs. "The historian," he writes, "is attached by every fibre of his being with the human milieu to which he belongs, be it social, political, national or cultural. ... He is not alone as he has his rendezvous with the past: he deals with past history as a member of his group.''^^1^^ From this Marrou infers that objective, adequate and universally true knowledge of history is impossible. Though he is not inclined to aver that there are as many interpretations of history as there are historians, he as much as says that there are as many such interpretations as there are social, political, national and other groups. It is this group subjectivism, he believes, that governs the writing of contradic-
~^^1^^ Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris, 1955, p. 8.
^^2^^ Ibid., p. 11.
~^^1^^ Marrou, De la connaissance historique, Paris, 1959, pp. 277-78.
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97tory, mutually exclusive histories. Marrou is careful to sidestep the fact that ideologists of the foremost classes---to say nothing of workingclass ideologists---could within certain limits reproduce the objective truth of history and that knowledge in this sphere advanced from relatively objective truths to absolute ones.
By transplanting the principles of subjective idealism to the social sphere, Marrou denies objective universal cognition not only of past, but also of modern and future history.
The gravitation towards agnosticism that bourgeois sociologists do not seem able to overcome stems, ultimately, from the specific features of capitalist reality, its anarchy of production, its lack of planning, the predominance of accident in life and in human relations. Paul Lafargue observed wittily on this score that "the modem economic development tends more and more to transform capitalist society into a vast international gambling den where the bourgeois win and lose their capital by grace of events they had either ignored or that escaped their vision and appear to them to be due to chance or hazard. The unknowable reigns in bourgeois society as in a gambling den".^^1^^
It is safe to say that negation of scientific knowledge, struggle against the "optimism of cognition" and categorical pronouncements that "prognostication in history is impossible", are aimed, first and foremost, against Marxist theory.
For decades, bourgeois philosophers rejected Marxist forecasts and the very possibility of scientific prognostication, which they labelled
as ``dogmatism'' and ``scheming''. Their denial of the law-governed course of history and the possibility of cognising it became more strident still, the more the Marxist predictions came true, such as the inevitable deepening of capitalist contradictions, the growth of the revolutionary movement, the collapse of capitalism and establishment of socialism in many countries, the downfall of the colonial system, and the like.
The anti-Marxist orientation of the head-on attacks on scientific prognostication are most evident in the works of Raymond Aron. He repudiates the materialist conception of history and denies the existence of objective laws of history and, naturally, the idea that prognostication of history is possible. Here is how he puts it: "It seems to me futile to try and predict the future. In all respects, the future of economic and political regimes depends on so many factors that it is impossible to know what type of regime will take root.''^^1^^
However, this does not prevent Aron and others who deny in principle the idea of scientific prognostication to predict what they would like to see in the future. For one thing, they anticipate a fusion of the two types of industrial society: the capitalist and the socialist, or, more precisely, predict the absorption of socialist society by capitalism. To substantiate this contention they are even willing to refer to the objective laws of history, the existence of which they elsewhere so vehemently deny.
Pitirim Sorokin, too, goes out of his way to repudiate the possibility of scientific cognition of the future. He claims that the indeterminist
~^^1^^ Lafargue, Le determinisme economique de Karl Marx p. 306.
~^^1^^ Aron, Democratic et totalitarisme, Paris, 1965, p. 369. 99