364

p But perhaps there was a theory that said something about the destruction of “society” for internal reasons, under the shock of a most acute social struggle, but one that did not suggest the conclusion that capitalism was bound inevitably to give way to socialism? Such a theory was found. It was an expression of the old urge to produce a philosophy of history without a future, and to present the historical process as the emergence and downfall of individual “societies” or “civilisations”. It was the revived “theory of cycles" or of the eternal roundabout. There is development but it runs along a circle and exists only within the bounds of it. Society develops cyclically, passing through definite stages, but once it has reached its zenith it returns to its starting point. Many historians and sociologists claimed that the epochs of feudalism and capitalism had already been passed in the ancient world, and that after the downfall of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages society did not enter a new phase, but merely started out on the same path all over again.

365

p Many bourgeois historians today, while not setting out this kind of conception as a whole, still start from its assumption in their writings, spreading the “theory of the cyclic movement" in its various elements, seeking to habituate their readers to it.

p That is the attitude taken by some present-day historians, who insist that an “ancient aristocracy" and a “new bourgeoisie" existed in Ancient Egypt roughly in the third millennium B.C. Their method for comparing different historical epochs includes superficial analogies which do not penetrate to the substance of phenomena, and frequently even downright attempts to stretch various points. Such theories make wide use of the comparative method in order to declare that social development is a mere repetition of the past, so as to convince the reader that throughout its history mankind has never gone beyond the boundaries of feudalism and capitalism. These are “eternal categories" of social development: a rejection of capitalism will merely carry society to barbarism, which in turn will lead to feudalism.

p The cyclic theory was elaborated in greatest detail by the British Professor Arnold Toynbee,  [365•16  whose chief work in ten volumes is entitled A Study of History (1934-1955).

p He starts from the idea that every civilisation goes through growth and decline, seeking to present a scheme of the process of growth, which gives way to decline, a typical model which fits all societies. Marxism-Leninism has shown that the productive forces and the relations of production as a unity constitute the basis of social development. When the growing productive forces run into antagonistic contradiction with the old social relations it is time for social revolution, giving rise to a new formation and a new and higher level of social development. Toynbee would like to find a “substitute” for this scientific, dialectical conception of social development. He claims to have found it in the cyclic theory, according to which society goes through two main stages in each cycle. At the first stage, it consists of the following three parts: “creative minorities”, an “uncreative majority" and “surrounding primitive societies”. Toynbee says that for this or that society to be a success the growing and developing civilisation should attain perfectly idyllic relations between these three component parts, relations ruling out the working people’s class struggle and the struggle of the oppressed peoples. In the ideal case, the “creative minorities" work for the welfare of the people and do not clash with “uncreative mass”. Their relations with the surrounding “barbaric tribes" are just as idyllic.

366

p Crisis in developing civilisation, says Toynbee, is connected with the change in their ideal relations. First, the “creative minorities" leave the scene, giving way to a “dominant minority”, which pursues a policy of violence with respect to the mass. A split develops within the “uncreative mass" and this leads to the formation of an “internal proletariat”. Second, because of the different policy pursued by the “dominant minority" with respect to the surrounding uncivilised peoples, the latter become an “external proletariat”. As a result of conquest, this “external proletariat" frequently becomes an “internal proletariat”. There follows a fatal “rift of the social unity”, and this means its decline and breakdown.

p -Toynbee’s cycle conveys some outward features of the collapse of antique society, and hints at the present level in the development of capitalism. But the actual content of the historical process has been emasculated and the socio-economic basis of society’s development is completely ignored. This is the metaphysical theory of development stripped of its covers. The starting point is peace and harmony; the struggle of opposites is evil, and leads society to decline instead of progress.

p Present-day capitalism is the second stage in Toynbee’s historical cycle. Thus, he admits that in capitalist society a minority rules the majority. But his theory does not at all envisage any radical economic, social or political reconstruction of bourgeois society. He believes capitalism to be natural, so that any attempts by the proletariat to change it is a threat to civilisation.

p Toynbee has structured a period of “idyllic” relations between the oppressors and the oppressed, and insists that one can return to this idyll, which has never existed, by retaining the exploitative system. To achieve this aim he calls on religion and Christianity to help capitalism.

p Toynbee holds that if modern capitalism relies on Christianity it will be able to heal the “rift” in society and once again restore tranquillity and complete “integration”. He writes with amazing frankness that if Christianity was able to “create a unity" between the white slave-owner and the black slave in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is to be hoped that Christianity will be able to “heal” modern capitalism from its divisions and the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters. He assumes that in this way “Western civilisation"—as he calls the capitalist world, in contrast to the ancient civilisations—will be able to avoid destruction and eliminate the division of the social whole and the class struggle, despite the threatening symptoms of decline. The US Time magazine played up Toynbee’s “merits” in this sphere, and one of its issues carried Toynbee’s portrait with the jubilant inscription: “Our civilisation is not inexorably doomed.” The authors claimed that “A Study of History was the most provocative work of historical theory 367 written in England since Karl Marx’s Capital”.  [367•17  But Toynbee’s theory was so full of holes and rode so roughshod over the historical facts that, despite his good intentions, it evoked a flood of objections from bourgeois historians and won hardly any advocates. The author’s intentions are welcomed, but his theory is scarcely applied.

p One of Toynbee’s few followers is Professor Wright, who says that each civilisation starts with a “heroic age”, then follows a period of conflicts between various movements, arising in the “heroic age”. The period of sharpened conflict corresponds to Toynbee’s “disintegration of the social unity" and is called the “time of troubles”, a term borrowed by British and American historians from Russian history in the early 17th century, and is applied to Ancient Egypt and to various other periods of modern history. The “time of troubles" starts when internal conflicts are set in motion, civil strife begins and economic upheavals arise. This period gives way to a period of re-established equilibrium, consolidation of the state and its expansion, a stage Toynbee did not provide for. However, the period in which equilibrium is restored also has its negative side because it is marked by a suppression of individual freedom and a narrowing down of local autonomy, which ultimately leads to a decline of society. Among the upper classes this is expressed in a seclusion in art, and among the “internal and external proletariat" in the establishment of a new religion. The “new social ideal" is the harbinger of a new cycle, giving rise to a new civilisation and a new turn of the spiral of development. This conception reveals an attempt to compare early Christianity and communism. Nor is Wright alone in time to do this. A Labour theorist, Harold Laski, wrote about this at greater length. But for all the violence they may try to do history, such theorists will never succeed in reducing scientific communism to the level of the visions and dreams of slaves, which in effect heralded the decline of the slave-holding mode of production and its substitution by the serf system. These attempts merely reveal their political intentions and show up their theoretical helplessness.

p Wright’s scheme, like Toynbee’s, is an oversimplification of the process of decline and breakdown of the antique slave-holding formation and also of some aspects of modern capitalism. Because both Greek antiquity and the European Middle Ages had their own heroic epos which describes their early periods, a vague stage of “the heroic age" is constructed. The Middle Ages link up with the period of capitalism in a common “civilisation”, which began with a “heroic age" and is now in decline. The worldwide empires built up in the capitalist period suggest an analogy with the epoch of the Roman Empire. The overall conclusion 368 drawn from this scheme is that beyond the present “civilisation” there will once again follow “barbarism”.

p The Toynbee-Wright schemes are intolerable oversimplification of the historical process, and the problem of repetition becomes insoluble. Nor can they find refuge in references to the fact that there is no straight path in history and that the old schemes of rectilinear development have been upset by the facts.

p Marxists are well aware that there is no straight and narrow path in history and that the course of history is tortuous and contradictory. “History is moving in zigzags and by roundabout ways."   [368•18  But it is not right to draw any conclusion from this that there is no historical progress as such.

p Of course, various civilisations and societies did exist in history, definite processes ran their course, but each such process created some material and social prerequisites for the emergence of the following one, without which the latter would have been impossible. Once history is fragmented, once the historical process is broken up into separate and unconnected cycles, the very possibility of scientific cognition of history is undermined.

p History has never had any isolated cycles. Under the impact of the inexorable laws of development and as a result of the acute contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production antagonistic socio-economic formations went into decline and broke up. The following formation was a higher stage than the earlier one. The conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production, which is inherent in antagonistic society, developed on a new basis. At every stage of its development, society does not start from the beginning, the productive forces of the earlier formation do not disappear, nor do its cultural achievements pass without trace.

p Definite historical epochs, periods in which some states flourished and gave way to others, were concrete expressions in the development of antagonistic formations.

p Without an analysis of the regularities inherent in a given formation it is impossible to understand the concrete history of these states and countries. With our present level of knowledge, only a total ignoramus will claim that Cretan society, for instance, was destroyed without trace, without leaving anything for the antiquity of Greece that followed. After a definite interval of time, the incipient slave-holding despotism of the ancient oriental type gave way to slave-holding democracy. That was tremendous progress in the development of human society. Any retreats in history do not cancel out its advance.

p However, some bourgeois sociologists declare that the main danger of the theories of social development lies in the fact that they are based on a 369 recognition of inevitable successive stages of development. It is this idea of the succession of stages of development that the bourgeois theorists like least of all, because it ultimately suggests the conclusion that capitalist society is itself no more than a stage in the social process, which has to give way to a higher stage, a new form of society called communism.

p Why do bourgeois ideologists so willingly accept the “cyclic theory”?

p The peoples must move into the past, instead of the future, says the “cyclic theory”. That is why there are insistent attempts to revive it.

p Subjectivism knows no bounds in all its attempts, which are all based on a common and defective foundation. The British writer Aldous Huxley has produced the following scheme: “Periods of classicism alternate with periods of romanticism, periods of devotion with periods of unbelief, periods of pacifism and internationalism with periods of nationalism and militarism.”   [369•19  This kind of “theory” may merely serve to explain the “inevitable” triumph of clericalism, the preparation of another war, and activity by reactionaries and militarists, because mankind is doomed, according to Huxley, everlastingly to switch from “periods of pacifism" to “periods of militarism”, from “periods of unbelief" to “periods of devotion”.

p The neo-Malthusians have also produced their own version of the “cyclic theory" in the history of society. The population explosion, some of them say, proves that the rise and decline of civilisation depend on the genetic “quality” of the members of society, which they divided into two categories: the “problem solvers" and the “social burden”. These are even more oversimplified categories than Toynbee’s “creative minorities" and “uncreative mass”. At different stages in the development of each civilisation the leading part belongs to the problem solvers, while masses of men falling into the “social burden" category are “eliminated” in virtue of “natural” processes like starvation, high infant mortality, etc. The fiercer these curses strike at the working people the better, say the neo-Malthusians.

p The dangerous stage of “crisis” for society begins when living conditions improve, and when the death rate among those who belong to the “social burden" category is reduced and their share of the population increases. In consequence of this there is a sharp worsening of society’s “genetic quality”, which leads to “genetic erosion”, so that civilisation goes into decline and eventually breaks up. With the re-establishment of the operation of the laws of “natural selection”, with the sharp worsening of living conditions and aggravation of the “struggle for survival”, society gets rid of the “burden” and a new cycle opens in its 370 development. Here the cyclic theory is seasoned with biological terms and is approximated to the “social Darwinist" conception, which has long been supplying ideological weapons for the most reactionary and aggressive circles of imperialism.

p The “cyclic theory" has opened up the way for diverse speculations, for it presents the repetition in history as a mere return to the past, giving rise to various Ersatz theories of development based on eulogy for the movement in reverse. While the advocates of the “cyclic theory" seek to scare the people with the prospect of society’s movement in reverse and try to induce them not to temper with present-day capitalism, if society is not to be plunged once again into the darkened ways of the Middle Ages, other bourgeois theorists, who are aware of the crisis of the capitalist system, seek a way out precisely in a return to past stages of social development and present the movement in reverse as a boon.

p Thus, Wilhelm Röpke, who is very popular in West Germany, claims that all the ills of capitalism began with the 1789 French Revolution, and that is precisely the date in history from which society should be moving backward. He contrasts the French Revolution and revolutionary France on the one hand, and the English revolution and the Anglo-Saxon countries, which had allegedly sprung from “an earlier and more organic" democracy and liberalism.  [370•20  He believes the way out to lie in society’s repudiation of the “pernicious” spirit of the French revolution, and a return to the sweet vision of “an earlier and more organic" way of life and thought. He preaches an absurd and reactionary Utopia of “deproletarisation” of industry through a conversion of the proletarian into a petty bourgeois. That is, of course, a reactionary utopia but it shows the kind of notions present-day bourgeois theorists have of the historical process. Some of Ropke’s writings have been adopted by the West German advocates of “neoliberalism”, who declare that they have a miraculous means of returning capitalism to its premonopoly stage.

p However, it is the reactionary Utopian writings of Catholics that are of especial importance for imperialist demagogy. The French Catholic sociologist Bardet has issued a call for a return to the feudal order,  [370•21  to a “polyphonic organisation”, which he has invented and which implies a theocratic feudal society and state, the only environment in which man can escape absorption by the machines and can recapture the rhythm of the cosmos and of God—the countryside. This is designed to back up the need for a revival of the feudal order, a dismantling of modern industry and big cities (and the proletariat with them). While urging a return to the “golden age" of the Middle Ages, he preaches a clericalisation of social relations, without excluding the possibility of establishing fascist or semifascist systems in bourgeois countries.

371

p For all the differences between the views propounded by bourgeois theorists and for all their different versions of social development, what they have in common is a repudiation of the idea of progress. Some repudiate it by extolling the “cyclic theory”. Others claim that the historical process can move in reverse. Still others (and these are a majority) prefer to accept the typically new positivist conception of “social change”, while refusing to determine the lines along which it runs. But all of this is repudiation of the very conception of society’s advance. There is only one reason for the emergence of all these theories: the disappearance of faith in progress in the modern Western world is connected with the loss of faith in the future of the capitalist system. L. Bernard has said, for instance, that in contrast to the philosophy of the 18th century, social thought in the 20th century (meaning, of course, only bourgeois social thought) is based on the conviction that “evolution is not necessarily and inevitably progressive" and that “progress itself is not an inherent law of nature".  [371•22  The fact that progress as a problem has been disappearing from the writings of 20th century sociologists is explained as follows: “Several factors have contributed to this decline of interest in the subject, or at least to the abandonment of the attempt to treat it scientifically. Not a few sociologists believe that we lack a method of measuring progress and of discriminating between progress and retrogression. Others hold that progress is entirely relative to the goals we set up and hold that no absolute goals can be established. Others still are discouraged by the great complexity of the subject and prefer to work on different aspects of social change, at least until we can gain a surer social perspective. Even the term progress is offensive to some who believe that science must limit itself to description and avoid all value judgements.... Still other sociologists are profoundly discouraged by recent social events and believe that society is in a process of general decline. Therefore they avoid discussing the question of progress altogether."  [371•23 

p But what are the “recent social events" that have discouraged bourgeois sociologists? Which society is in a process of general decline? Is it not clear, after all, that the emancipation of the masses from exploitation, the abolition of private property in the means of production and the establishment of social property, mankind’s release from bloody wars of aggression, and abolition of the morality of greed and gain, that all of this helps man to advance? Is that not a “social perspective"? But that is precisely what bourgeois theorists refuse to discuss.

372

p That is why the term “progress” does not appear in some editions of the West German Dictionary of Sociology. That is why it has disappeared from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

But if a scientist has lost his bearings in the historical process, he is bound to lose his way in the labyrinth of historical facts and is at best confined to recording casual and single facts. That is, in effect, what the historian is impelled to do by the present-day bourgeois sociology and philosophy of history.