When the Russian delegates attended the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree it is related that they had a special box and the Red Flag was run up in their honour. When ministers of the British Government, past and present, visited Russia, the Union Jack was run up in their honour. These actions are symbolic of the hypocrisy bound up with capitalism. Behind this facade of friendship a bitter struggle is being waged between Russia and the Western Powers to secure a dominant position in industry and trade for their respective nationals; a struggle that is daily becoming more widely accepted as the prelude to another and more terrible war than the last. Evidence of this can be seen in the tremendous expenditure of energy and wealth on perfecting the atom bomb and other mighty means of destruction. But the struggle is represented to be something other than it really is; it is represented to be the clash between dictatorship and democracy, capitalism and workers control, much as the last trade conflict was represented to be a struggle between Fascism and Democracy. It is an old old story this covering of secular ambitions with heavenly halos; and though the real basis of the struggles are so often revealed when the dust of the conflict has subsided it does not prevent the construction of fresh halos every time a new war appears as a blot on the horizon.
Nowadays the halo process begins as a deliberate policy to bemuse the prospective cannon fodder, but long ago it was largely a result of self-delusion; man, in the shape of the ruling class, has learnt much since “dust hath closed Helen's eyes." Nowadays the reputable writers of history seek in the economic framework of societies for explanations of the causes of past wars, ignoring the proclaimed ideals that have embellished them. These writers have accepted as their guide the materialist conception of history in fact, though rarely in name. This not only applies to the causes of war but also to the writing of history in general.
What then is this materialist conception of history which is one of the fundamental tenets of the socialist outlook? According to this theory ideas are the product of conditions, and not the other way round. Men have not started cut with original ideas of absolute liberty. Justice and equality and then striven to make a world that would fit them; what they have done is striven to make alterations in the economic and political framework that would fulfil their needs and then sanctified their proposals with moral maxims. Their ideas have been shaped by the world around and were limited by the social development so far attained and the immediate future which that development foreshadowed.
The human race inherits ideas either through the medium of writing or the passed-on experience of the elders; no child is born with ideas planted in its brain. One example is sufficient to put the latter fact beyond dispute. We all learn, sometimes to our cost, that fire burns the fingers that touch it: humanity has had this burnt into it for hundreds of thousands of years; yet practically every child that is born reaches blithely for the flames, thousands of years of human experience have not raised a suspicion of danger in the mind of the child.
Let us now glance briefly at the way knowledge is acquired and the source of that knowledge.
Thinking is a function of the brain, just as grasping is a function of the hand, and walking a function of the feet; each function acquiring competence by training and experience. In order to think the brain must have something to think about; the material the brain thinks about is drawn from the world around through the medium of the senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling and smelling. The thought material thus acquired, compared and generalised upon determines the outlook of the individual, and the nature of this thought material is itself limited by the individual’s contact with the world, his own experience, which also limits his capacity to appreciate the experience of others. The most important contact a person has with the world is that concerned with the satisfaction of his fundamental needs—food, clothing, shelter and the reproduction of his kind—and therefore these are the contacts that dominate his life, bring him into social relations with his kind and shape his outlook. The grouping of man into societies is rooted in the methods devised for satisfying these needs and therefore the social outlook of a given society is dominated by the ideas that spring from the way in which the members of that society are organised together to obtain the means to sustain life. But societies are not a fixture, they evolve as new methods of production evolve from old ones. Thinking is done in a social world that is evolving and about a social world that is evolving; change is therefore one of the elements of thought, and the more rapidly the surrounding world changes the more thought becomes permeated with this element of change. That change is the nature of things was only accepted by a few outstanding thinkers of antiquity; to-day evolution is commonly accepted as a universal law—even the “unchanging church” and the “changeless” East have had to bow to it.
Social progress is the result of the mental activity of man exerting itself on the material provided by the external environment. The brain has the faculty of working up the material drawn, from the environment just as the digestive apparatus has the faculty of digesting the food that comes to it—and both can suffer from indigestion! Man’s social action is dependant upon the special character of the environment in which he lives. He can act upon and modify this environment, but only in accordance with elements already contained within it, as Marx so pithily put it; man makes his own history, but not out of the whole cloth, only out of that which is ready to his hand. Thus, narrowly speaking, a man’s social outlook is determined by his social position—but this must not be applied too sweepingly. A humorous commentary on this narrow outlook occurred in Poland in 1936. An amnesty had been declared for prisoners who were on the list for execution: the Polish executioner. who was paid £4 for each execution, was immediately up in arms, declaring that as his living depended upon executions he should be consulted before any amnesty was granted!
The way man thinks, what he thinks about, and the conclusions he comes to, depend upon the nature of his environment. This environment is made un of a number of factors—economic, geographic, intellectual political. religious and so forth, but the economic is the final determining influence because it is vital to him and engages most of his attention, though even this is itself somewhat affected by the other factors. However we have not space to go further into this. The economic conditions comprise the manner in which men in a given society produce their means of subsistence, and the ways in which they effect the distribution of these means of subsistence among themselves.
Mankind differs from animals in that whereas animals draw their subsistence direct from nature with the use of their physical organs unassisted by anything else, man makes contrivances that enlarge the power and scope of his organs and enable him to get more from nature with less effort than animals. In other words man builds an artificial barrier between himself and nature by his inventions and contrivances, and in the course of time this barrier, or artificial environment, has more and more influence on the way he thinks because of its social consequences. Thus it comes about that it is the inventions and not the intentions of man that have been the cause of progress, and that have given rise to ideas of liberty, of justice, and of equality. These concepts that are alleged to be absolute are in fact, like everything else, relative, depending upon changing social systems as well as upon social position. They differ in different historical periods and also in the same period with different people. To the Polish hangman it was unjust to take away his livelihood, to his victim it was unjust to take away his life.
Since the advent of private property, in the dim and distant past, moral, intellectual, political and religious ideas have been bound up with different forms of property ownership. These forms of property have split society into antagonistic classes which have engaged in bitter class struggles, each class striving to dominate society and serve its own interests As we look back through history we see that it is made up of these class conflicts and that it is they that are the vital thread from which progress has been woven— meaning by progress an ever wider adaptation to natural forces and the bringing nearer of the possibility of humanity, as a whole, achieving comfort, security and happiness.
Each new form of production has brought into being new social classes, a change in social relations, and a change in current ideas. The freeman and slave of antiquity looked upon the social world differently from the feudal lord and bondsman of the middle ages, and likewise capitalist and worker have different ideas from those of their mediaeval counterparts. To understand the ideas of a period it is necessary to examine the economic framework of the period from which the ideas are derived, because the economic framework is the dominating influence. Ideas carried over from old outworn systems are carried over into the new, in fact, as Marx puts it so well “the tradition of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brain of the living ” ; but these traditions are forced into the mould of the new system, though they may have some influence on the shape of the mould. The confused social outlook of a period, including the present, is the resultant of the mixture of ideas thrown up by the different classes that together make up society, but the prevailing, or the most insistent, ideas are those backed by the dominant class; and they remain so until another class becomes sufficiently conscious of its interests and strong enough to challenge the supremacy of the dominant class.
Looking at the international conferences from the point of view we have very briefly set forth we can see that the ruling powers to-day are each concerned with obtaining economic, privileges for the national groups they represent, and that the Atlantic Charter, liberty, democracy and all the other phrases that so liberally besmirch their utterances are only so many blankets to cover their economic designs. The last war, like the one before it, was waged for purely economic motives; the next one that is now in the making will ho waged for similar ends. While production and distribution is based upon the class ownership of the means of production it cannot be otherwise.
Each era in the history of mankind contains the voice of the past, the present and the future. The voice of the future is small and weak at first hut grows stronger as time passes until it eventually becomes the voice of the present; mankind only takes up problems that it can solve since the problem only arises as a problem because the solution is contained within it. It is the solution that has forced the problem to the front.
Gilmac.
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