From Prophecy to Prediction 271

From Prophecy
A serialised survey of the movement
to Prediction
of ideas, developments in predictive
fiction, and first attempts to forecast
the future scientifically.
3.1. Demystifjring the historical process : Karl Marx
John Sanderson
ONE need not subscribe to the disciples
view of Marx as an omniscient being
to recognise him as a social theorist of
overwhelming intellectual power, cap-
able of arousing much more interest and
controversy long after his death than
during his life. A considerable difficulty
in reconstructing and assessing the
ideas of the 19th century prophet of
class war is caused by the diverse
nature of the works which constitute
the Marxian cor$~s, ranging as they do
from topical contributions to daily
newspapers to the more famous and
more complicated texts on capital and
labour.
What can be said with a degree of
certainty about Marx is that he pro-
duced an analysis of the European past
and present, which forms the basis of his
confident prediction that each of the
nations of Western Europe would
experience a revolution of the working
class in the future. And the coming
revolution would be but a prelude to
the establishment of a classless com-
munistic society in which the exploita-
tion and coercion characteristic of
almost all previous societies would be
finished for ever.
Marxs analysis of past and present
Mr John Sanderson is Lecturer in Politics,
Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK; author of
An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and
Engels (Longmans, 1969), and of a forthcoming
essay on the Marxist interpretation of the
English Civil War. This is the first part of his
contribution on Karl Marx to this series,
edited by I. F. Clarke.
exemplified what his life-long colleague
Frederick Engels called the materialist
conception of history. Marx believed
that the way in which men go about the
task of transforming the natural en-
vironment so as to satisfy their material
needs is their crucial activity upon
which all other activities substantially
depend. In his Speech at the Graveside of
Karl Marx Engels compared Marx to
Darwin: Just as Darwin discovered the
law of development of organic nature,
so Marx discovered the law of develop-
ment of human history . . . that man-
kind must first of all eat, drink, have
shelter and clothing, before it can
pursue politics, science, art, religion,
etc; that therefore the production of the
immediate material means of subsis-
tence and consequently the degree of
economic development attained . . .
during a given epoch form the founda-
tion upon which the state institutions,
the legal conceptions, the ideas on art,
and even on religion, of the people
concerned, have been evolved . . .
The materialist conception of history
was developed by Marx against the
background of, and in opposition to,
various non-materialist theories popular
among German intellectuals in the
1830s and 1840s. In particular, the
maturing Marx found himself bound
to oppose the mystification of the
historical process which had been
wrought by Hegel and his disciples. In
Marxs view Hegel had correctly
indicated the constant factor of conflict
FUTURE8 J une 1974
272 From Prophecy to Prediction
in the historical process-the tension
between being and becoming-by the use
of the notion of the dialectic; but, as
Marx put it in a famous passage, only
the rational form of the dialectic (as
against the mystified Hegelian form)
could reveal the essence of that
process : My dialectic method is not
only different from the Hegelian, but is
its direct opposite. To Hegel . . . the
process of thinking, which, under the
name of the Idea, he even transforms
into an independent subject, is the
demiurgos of the real world, and the
real world is only the external, pheno-
menal form of the Idea. With me, on the
contrary, the ideal is nothing else than
the material world reflected by the
human mind, and translated into
forms of thought. In Marxs late 20s
therefore, we find him greatly con-
cerned to combat the supposed hege-
mony of intellect to which the latter-day
Hegelians were so attached; and much
of The German Ideology (1845) and The
Holy Family (1846) is directed to this
task (Let us revolt against the rule of
thoughts). Marx held that ideas were
of considerable significance but, as
indicated by Engels in the passage from
his Speech at the Graveside, their impor-
tance appeared only in the context
of a societys economic processes.
Marxs materialist method of analys-
ing history yielded the conclusion that
successive eras were characterised by
the predominance of different modes
of production; and it followed that
capitalist society had emerged from the
ruins of feudal society which had itself
risen upon the ruins of ancient (slave)
society. Moreover, the characteristic of
each of these eras was a conflict
between the major classes thrown up
by the particular mode of production
involved. Marx also observed that a
dominant economic class tended to have
at its disposal the societys coercive
organs through the use of which it
could oppress, as well as exploit, the
rest of society; and this fact would help
to guarantee the integrity of the
particular exploitative social system in
question. Political power, we read in
the Manifesto, properly so called, is
merely the organised power of one class
for oppressing another.
Since this was the essential nature of
political power, it was apparent to
Marx that the great revolutions of
European history occurred as the
necessarily violent response of a class
which had become predominant in
economic activity, but which found
itself impeded and oppressed by those
methods of social control that were
maintained by a once-dominant but
now obsolescent class. Thus in studying,
for example, the English Civil War,
Marxs theory of revolution enabled
him to reach a profounder understand-
ing than that achieved contemporane-
ously by the French historian Guizot.
Marx wrote that the latter had
explained the confrontation between
Charles I and Parliament in terms of a
struggle for purely political preroga-
tives : M. Guizot deems it superfluous
to mention that the subordination of
the kingship to Parliament was its
subordination to the rule of a class . . .
He has just as little to say about Charles
Is direct interference in free competi-
tion, which made Englands trade and
industry more and more impossible; or
upon his dependence upon Parliament
which . . . became the greater the more
he sought to defy Parliament.
Two hundred years later in Germany,
Marx believed he was witnessing in
1848 a similar contest between a rising
bourgeois class and the political insti-
tutions appropriate to a bygone age.
The Monarchy and the United Diet
represented, in Marxs view, a medi-
eval mode of production and inter-
course, and therefore the new
bourgeois society, which rests upon
entirely different foundations and on a
changed mode of production, had to
seize political power for itself; it had to
snatch this power from the hands of
those who represented the interests of
the foundering society, and whose
FUTURES J une 1974
London -centre of world capitalism-was an object lesson for Karl Marx and a visual image for
the French artist, Gustave Dor6. , *
. I . but both these men were also acutely aware of the London of poverty and destitution
From Prophecy to Prediction 275
political power, in its entire organisa-
tion, had proceeded from entirely
different material relations of society.
Hence the revolution.
Although economic exploitation and
class conflict had been, according to
Marx, salient features of European
history, he also saw that history is a
progressive process. Men had gained (at
first gradually, recently in a more
dramatic fashion) a mastery over
nature, so that with the development of
bourgeois society, men were within
sight of a materialistic plenitude. While
Marx anticipated with great pleasure
the demise of the bourgeoisie and
bourgeois society, he insisted upon the
recognition of the unparalleled achieve-
ments of that form of society wherein
men were set in motion, directly or
indirectly, by the desire to maximise
private profit. The Communist Manifesto
declares that the bourgeoisie during
its rule of scarce one hundred years,
has created more massive. . . productive
forces than have all preceding genera-
tions together. Subjection of natures
forces to man, machinery, application
of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalisation of rivers,
whole populations conjured out of the
ground-what earlier century had even
a presentiment that such productive
forces slumbered in the lap of social
labour ? And being possessed of this
unprecedented power, the bourgeoisie
of Europe and North America had been
able in effect to subject much of the
rest of the worlds population to its
needs, so that by the second half of the
19th century it had become possible to
speak for the first time of world
history, dominated by bourgeois im-
peratives.
The idea that history is in this sense
progressive appears strikingly in Marxs
discussion of the impact of the British
upon Indian society. Previous con-
querors of the Indian subcontinent had
invariably been Hindooised, but the
British with their railways and their
mechanised production, inundating
the very mother country of cotton with
cottons, had destroyed the traditional
society along with the debilitating
Oriental despotism which presided
over it. Although these changes caused
untold misery, they had the effect of
freeing India from the timeless rut in
which it had so long languished. Thus
Marx argued that while it had not
been the intention of the British either
to emancipate the Indian population or
to improve their material lot, the
unquestionable effect of their inter-
vention in India had been to lay down
the material premises for both. Has
the bourgeoisie ever done more ?
Marx asked. Has it ever effected a
progress without dragging individuals
and peoples through the blood and
through misery and degradation ?
It followed from Marxs idea of
progress that he was able to identify
both past and present movements,
tendencies and ideas as either progres-
sive or reactionary. For instance, it was
clear to him that the bourgeoisie, in
violently tearing itself loose in the
1640s and 1789 from the integument of
feudalism in England and France
respectively, had been progressive and
had carried with it the interests of the
great majority of the people within the
societies concerned, and indeed of
mankind as a whole. Consequently he
wrote in the .i%ue Rheinische zeitung in
December 1848 that the English Civil
War and the French Revolution had
both seen the victory of a new order of
society, the victory of bourgeois pro-
perty over feudal property, of national-
ity over provincialism, of competition
over the guild . . . of enlightenment
over superstition . . . of industry over
heroic laziness, of civil law over medi-
eval privilege . . . These revolutions
expressed still more the needs of the
world of that day than of the sections
of the world in which they occurred, of
England and France. In comparison
the German bourgeoisie was weak and
FUTURES June 1874
276 From Prophecy to Prediction
timorous, and by 1848 had still to
achieve for itself and for German
society what the French bourgeoisie
had achieved in 1789. The fumbling
cowardice of the German bourgeoisie
when confronted by what Marx re-
garded as its historical mission drew his
withering scorn : The Prussian
bourgeoisie [of 18481 was not, as the
French of 1789 had been, the class
which represented the whole of modern
society vi.+&is the representatives of the
old society, the monarch and the
nobility. The Prussian bourgeoisie was
thus inclined to compromise with the
superannuated society and lamentably
had to be prodded into action by the
lower classes.
Marx was able to make similar
judgements not only about the declared
opponents of socialism, but also about
the various groups that criticised capi-
talist society from a left standpoint. His
critique of True Socialismin Germany
is thus based upon his perception that
it was inappropriate and reactionary
for the German radicals to expound
Socialist ideas imported from Paris
before the German bourgeoisie had
succeeded in overthrowing feudalism
and in making capitalism the order of
the day in its own country. Thus,
instead of supporting the bourgeoisie,
the True Socialists were to be found
preposterously hurling the traditional
anathemas against liberalism, against
representative government, against
bourgeois competition, bourgeois free-
dom of the press, bourgeois legislation,
bourgeois liberty and equality . . .
preaching to the masses that they had
nothing to gain, and everything to lose,
by the bourgeois movement. German
Socialism forgot . . . that the French
criticism, whose silly echo it was,
presupposed the existence of modern
bourgeois society, with its correspond-
ing economic conditions of existence,
and the political constitution adapted
thereto, the very things whose attain-
ment was the object of the pending
struggle in Germany.
Equally significant in this context are
his remarks upon the contemporary
exponents of what he called Utopian
Socialism. The Utopians, followers of
Saint Simon, Owen and Fourier, vividly
contrasted contemporary society with
an ideal society (in which the lot of the
workers would be much improved) and
hoped by persuasion and example to
engender social action to realise it.
Marx granted that the originators of
Utopian Socialism, writing at a time
of the immaturity of the working class,
had reflected the first instinctive
yearnings of that class for a general
reconstruction of society; but their
successors he dismisses as mere re-
actionary sects who, in attempting to
stand above the class struggle and in
relying upon the self-evident merit of
their ideas, had neglected the develop-
ment and startling history-making
potential of the proletariat, which
appeared in their works as nothing more
than the suffering victim of an in-
human system. Historical action
[Marx wrote ironically of the Uto-
pians] is to yield to their personal
inventive action, historically created
conditions of emancipation to fantastic
ones, and the gradual, spontaneous
class-organisation of the proletariat to
an organisation of society specially
contrived by these inventors. Future
history resolves itself, in their eyes, into
the propaganda and the practical
carrying out of their social plans. In
rejecting all political, and especially all
revolutionary, action, they in effect
aligned themselves (Marx complained)
in opposition to the progressive his-
torical development of the proletariat.
Marx, then, had a method of
understanding the history of society
which enabled him, inter alia, to detect
the full significance of major revolutions
such as the Civil War in England and
1789 in France. Further, he was able,
on the basis of his examination of
contemporary history to predict a
revolution by comparison with which
even these events would seem trivial.
FUTURES J une 1974