583

p Talking about being mistaken. Count Tolstoy, who frequently stated that he had nothing in common with the socialists, as far as I know never attempted to define precisely and clearly his attitude to Marx’s scientific socialism. This is understandable: he knew little about this socialism. However, the book Ripe Ears contains lines which, probably without Count Tolstoy realising it, reveal most clearly how diametrically opposed his teaching was to that of Marx. Tolstoy writes there:

p “People’s main mistake is that each separately thinks his life is guided by the desire for pleasure and the dislike of suffering. And alone, without guidance, man gives himself up to this guide: he seeks pleasure and avoids suffering, and assumes this to be the aim and meaning of life. But man can never live by pleasure and he cannot avoid suffering. Consequently, this is not the aim of life.—And if it were, how absurd that would be! The aim is pleasure, but there is not and cannot be any pleasure.—And even if there were, the end of life is death, which is always concomitant with suffering.—If sailors were to decide that their aim was to avoid the swell of the waves, where would they go?—The aim of life is outside pleasure."  [583•* 

p These lines show clearly the Christian ascetic character of Tolstoy’s teaching on morality. If I wanted to find a poetic illustration of this teaching, I would take the well-known spiritual poem On Christ’s Ascension. It describes how the poor bid fare- 584 well to Christ who is about to ascend lo Heaven and how John Chrysoslom, also present, says to Christ:

p Never give beggars a mountain of money,
A mountain of money, a mountain of gold:
So mighty a mountain—they’ll never surmount it.
So nwmj gold pieces-the// never will count them.
Never will portion them out in shores.
They’ll know that mountain, the princes and boyars,
They’ll know that mountain, the pastors and great ones.
They’ll know that mountain, will all the tradespeople,
They’ll take that mountain away from the people,
They’ll take that gold away from the people....
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But give to the poor and the needy
Thy holy name.
The poor shall go about the land
To magnify Thee, O Christ,
To glorify Thee every hour....

p Tolstoy would have liked to give people precisely what John Chrysostom asks Christ to give the poor. He needs nothing else. His teaching is pessimism with a religious lining, or,—if you prefer to put it this way,—religion based on an extremely pessimistic world outlook. In this aspect, as in all others, it is the direct opposite of Marx’s teaching.

p Like other materialists, Marx was very far indeed from the idea that "the aim of life is outside pleasure”. Already in the book Die heilige Familie he showed the connection of socialism (and communism) with materialism in general and in particular with the materialist teaching on the ethical "justification of enjoyment".^^177^^ But for him, as for most materialists, this teaching never had the egoistic form that it assumed for Tolstoy the idealist. On the contrary, for him it was an argument in favour of socialist demands.

p “If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must 585 be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, liis environment must be made human."  [585•* 

p This is the scientific basis of our teaching on morality. No one who consciously sympathises with it can fail to be deeply angered by those eclectics who are now inviting the proletariat to pay homage to the greatness of Tolstoy’s moral preaching. The revolutionary proletariat should strongly condemn this preaching.

p Tolstoy is diametrically opposed to Marx in his attitude to religion also. Marx called religion the opium with which the upper classes sought to lull popular consciousness and said that to abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people was to demand their real happiness.^^179^^ Engels wrote: "We have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas."^^180^^ But Tolstoy considers religion the prime condition of real human happiness. And in vain do our Sozialistische Alonatshefte say in the person of Mr. V. Bazarov  [585•**  that Tolstoy always fought "against belief in the superhuman element" and that he "was the first to objectify, i.e., create not only for himself, but also for others, the purely human religion of which Comte, Feuerbach and other representatives of modern culture could only dream subjectively".  [585•*** 

_p Whether it was logically possible for Count Tolstoy to fight "against belief in the superhuman element" is best seen from the following words by him: "What is important is to recognise God as master and to know what He demands of me, but what He is Himself and how He lives I shall never know because I am not His equal. I am the worker,—-He the master."  [585•**** 

p But is this not preaching "the superhuman element"?

p And, moreover, it is time even revisionists realised that all talk about a "purely human religion" is pure rubbish. "Religion,” Feuerbach says, "is man’s unconscious self-consciousness.” This unconsciousness conditions not only the existence of religion, but also "belief in the superhuman element”. When unconsciousness 586 disappears belief in this element also vanishes, and the possibility of the existence of religion also. If Feuerbach himself did not understand clearly the extent to which this was inevitable, this was his mistake, which was exposed so well by Engels.

The more religious the world outlook of Count L. Tolstoy was, the less compatible it was with the world outlook of the socialist proletariat.