Freedom as non-domination (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The historical influence of republicanism upon socialist thinking has been somewhat obscured, though recent works such as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx have done much to help bring this relation back into the light. What is distinctive about the republican tradition is its conception of freedom, which differs from the one most commonly used today. Republican ideas about freedom were picked up and adapted by early socialists.

Freedom from and freedom to

Introductions to political or social freedom often start with Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty. This article will follow the convention and begin here, not because there is anything uniquely faultless about Berlin’s essay, but because it has become the paradigmatic statement of the modern view of liberty. Berlin distinguishes between two ways of thinking about freedom, which he labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. In secondary texts this distinction is sometimes explained as being the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, but this does not really capture two distinct concepts just two different ways of talking about the same thing – for example, the ‘freedom to’ enjoy a quiet space is also at the same time the ‘freedom from’ the interference of noisy neighbours.

While freedom in the negative sense can straightforwardly be understood as an absence of constraint or interference, Berlin’s positive freedom is a little harder to pin down. If we think of positive freedom as being about self-mastery of our internal life, we still have something that can be collapsed into negative freedom. The mastery of physiological compulsion can still be thought of as the overcoming of interference or constraints, and so a type of negative freedom. Instead of being about self-mastery we can think of positive freedom as being about self-realisation and self-perfection. Positive freedom can be understood as overcoming the constraints or barriers that obstruct us from the realisation of our own full potential. Only by living the most fulfilling version of ourselves do we become truly free. On this account, freedom is not an absence but an end-state or achievement. As summarised by Quentin Skinner in A Third Concept of Liberty:

‘… what underlies these theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realising that essence in our lives. This enables us to see that there will be as many different interpretations of positive liberty as there are different views about the moral character of humankind. Suppose you accept the Christian view that the essence of our nature is religious, and thus that we attain our highest ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God “is perfect freedom”. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, “freedom . . . and politics coincide” and that “this freedom is primarily experienced in action”.’

Berlin, who was writing during the Cold War and in opposition to Stalinism, highlights how this positive conception of freedom could be open to abuse. It leaves itself open to paternalistic and authoritarian interpretations. If freedom amounts to the achievement of our true potential or real interests, the question arises as to what these ‘real’ interests really are. If real interests do not have to be something that an agent is conscious of then the coercive interference from a higher social power could be a way of forcing people to be free. Says Berlin:

‘… George Orwell is excellent on this. People say “I express your real wishes. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your “real” needs.’

This is not to say, as is sometimes claimed, that Berlin thought that every use of the concept of positive freedom was a concealed attempt at manipulation and that we should therefore only use the negative conception. His claim was that historically the positive conception had been misused more often and with more devastating results. The negative conception of freedom was also open to misuse:

‘…Negative liberty is twisted when I am told that liberty must be equal for the tigers and for the sheep and that this cannot be avoided even if it enables the former to eat the latter if coercion by the state is not to be used. Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed. Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.’

Ancient Rome

Having a grasp of these two common ways of thinking about freedom we can now introduce a third conception, which is commonly referred to as ‘republican’ or ‘neo-roman’ freedom. This way of thinking about freedom has been bought back into the public consciousness largely thanks to the work of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner and the political philosopher Philip Pettit. It can be thought of as ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘freedom as independence’. This republican concept of freedom can be directly tracked back to the Digest of Roman law. Here it is stated that ‘the fundamental division within the law of persons is that all men and women are either free or are slaves’ and that ‘Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. From this we can get a definition of what it means to be a free person within a society. A free person is someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else and can act on their own accord. As Livy, the Roman historian who served as an inspiration for Machiavelli and other 16th century Florentine republicans, put it – to be free was ‘to be in your own power’ and not dependent on the will of anybody else.

The key difference between republican and negative freedom can be illustrated in this way: On the negative conception of freedom a slave who is not interfered with, and left to do as they please, is free. While on the republican conception what makes someone free is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination. Even though a slave may be left to go about as they please, at any point they could be interfered with according to the arbitrary whims of their master. The knowledge that arbitrary interference can be applied at any point is enough to be a restriction to liberty, behaviour and comment must continually be self-monitored so as to avoid the sanction of the master. On the republican account, freedom is a status relation within a society that makes it impossible to be the helpless victim of arbitrary interference. As Sidney wrote in his 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ‘he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’

In the English Civil War, disputes between Crown and Parliament drew upon this language of dependency and dominion, drawing upon common-law texts which had their basis in the Roman Digest. The effect of Royal prerogative was that those living under the king were reduced to a state of servitude. This was not because of any actual or threatened interference, but because the continuation of rights and freedoms was dependent on the goodwill of the King, and this could be withdrawn at any point. It was this state of dependency, of being under the dominion of the King, that was the threat to freedom. When King Charles was executed, the charge was that he had ruled arbitrarily and so tyrannically. The Act that abolished the monarchy declared that the effect of prerogative had been ‘to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject’.

As well as being central to the English revolution, these ideas would surface again a century later in the French and American revolutions. The central idea was that it was only possible to have individual freedom through being a citizen of a self-ruling republic. To live under the dependence of a monarch, or in the American case under a colonial power, is to be reduced to the status of a slave. This understanding of freedom as being a state of independence left some controversy as to the normative status of industrial production and wage labour in the early years of the American republic. Wage labour was seen as being a state of dependency and so a form of unfreedom which was degrading to the moral health of the nation. ‘Free labour’, either in the form of small-scale production where the producers also owned their means of production or that of independent homesteaders was seen as being more conducive to building a strong and resilient nation.

Freedom as emancipation

Reaction against revolutionary and democratic movements in France and America saw the development and spread of the idea of freedom as non-interference. This, together with the irresistible rise of international commerce with its permanent dependence on wage labour, saw a decline in republican ways of thinking about freedom by the late 18th century. The concept of negative freedom, in the form of voluntarist ideas about freedom of contract, was one that was more suitable for the needs of the capitalist class. Though republican ideas about freedom would continue to persist in the labour and nascent socialist movements.

‘Something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come’ wrote the labour republican Ira Steward in 1873. Early socialists would continue to use the language of ‘wage-slavery’, ‘self-emancipation’ and other tropes drawn from radical republican heritage.

But they did not just adopt republican ideas wholesale; they responded to and critiqued them. Republican language focussed on an undifferentiated ‘people’ as the basis for a self-governing republic, socialist language on the proletariat as the group-agent capable of changing society. The first English translation of Communist Manifesto was in a newspaper entitled The Red Republican, and here the difference between radical republican and socialist ideas can be seen in contrast side by side. Labour republicans, such as the Knights of Labor, sought to lessen the dependence of the working class through the development of workers co-ops, etc. Marx’s Capital can be understood as an intervention within the labour movement against the prominence of such ideas. Socialist critique argued that it was not enough for individual groups of workers to separately own their own enterprises, market competition would still present itself as a form of impersonal domination.

Understanding freedom as non-domination provides a rich foundation for criticising capitalist society. The formally ‘free’ contract that the wage labourer enters into turns out to be a one-way ticket into a relation of dependency. Employers impose the same kind of arbitrary interference upon workers as kings on their subjects. The importance of non-domination in the foundations of socialism is why it has to be a movement for collective self-emancipation and why authoritarian attempts to impose it on an unwilling or passive population would be doomed to failure. Rather than being the ‘real interests’ of the proletariat imposed by an authoritarian state, freedom as non-domination is a collective good. The extent to which it is achieved depends on the extent to which it has been secured for others.

DJP

Marxism and Inevitability – The Critics Criticised (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There’s a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may.”

Is Marxism the prose Rubaiyat of economic fatalism? Many pseudo-Marxists have half believed it. Quite a few critics of Marxism—Eastman, Berlin, Popper, etc., have wholly asserted it. A host of sentimental liberals and political do-gooders have also chosen to see Marxism as a secularised version of—”and the good must come to pass.” For such critics Marxism is either a synonym for Kismet or a variation of “The Lord will provide.”

It is true that the Communist Manifesto states, “Capitalism is its own grave-digger; its fall and the victory of the proletariat are alike inevitable.” This has been taken up by opponents of Marxism and echoed and re-echoed down the corridor of the years as evidence of the fact that Marxism spells out fatalism with a capital f. Yet anything less like religious or philosophical quietism than the Communist Manifesto it would be hard to imagine. Not only do its pages breathe political activism but it ends with a stirring call to action—”Workers of the world unit,” utterly at variance with any predestined assumptions. It is not difficult, however, to tear a sentence from its context and make the author appear to say the opposite of what he actually meant.

Now this particular type of criticism of Marxism pivots on the word “inevitability.” If we are to believe the critics of Marx the term inevitability, especially as related to human society, is synonymous with fatalism or predestination—”The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.” Thus in the Marxist scheme of things, vide the critics, inevitability means that human wills are writ so small as to be virtually non-existent.

The word “inevitability” as used by the critics in reproaching Marx carries a stigma; the stigma being that human beings are but puppets in some vast cosmic process. But is that the only significance which can be given to the word? One of course does not deny that in a given context the word “inevitability” can be synonymous with fatalism. What one does deny is that in the Marxist context they mean the same thing.

Let us, to paraphrase Marx, consider the word “inevitability” a little more closely and see how its meaning varies with the context. Thus we say night, inevitably follows day. Do we imply by such a statement that fatalism or predestination of some kind is involved in the rotation of the earth on its axis? It can, we think, be agreed that the regular sequence of events connected with the solar system has nothing to do with fatalism or any other kind of supernaturalism. Some one might, of course, say “but is it not true that men are nevertheless powerless to control solar events?” Here it would seem that inevitability implies the powerlessness of men. But surely the answer is that such events being non-human have nothing to do with the powers possessed by socially organised men. Therefore the question of powerlessness on the part of humans in non-human processes does not arise. The power of human beings lies in the fact of their ability to understand and utilise natural phenomena to their social advantage.

Again the inevitable sequences of events which occur in the solar system are of inestimable advantage to humans during the course of their lives. It enables one to go to bed supremely confident that after a night’s sleep one will wake up and it is morning. And to feel assured that in making an appointment a week hence the solar sequence of things will not have been reversed. If solar events were so arbitrary that in the words of the song “when it’s night time in Italy it’s Wednesday over here” then life on this planet would be a matter of conjecture. If inevitability, then, entails some aspect of a regularised and sequential eternity one can only add—long live inevitability.

One can further expand the advantage which inevitability has for us humans. Thus if we know that “A” will always bring about “B” then the certainty of this knowledge gives us an assured basis for utilising it. Such knowledge not only gives us power to understand the world but the power to change it.

On the other hand, if events were so capricious that water raised to a certain temperature did not always produce steam, or in switching on an electric kettle the water got colder instead of hotter, then the organisation of knowledge consequent upon an inevitable sequence of things would be impossible.

It does not follow then that inevitability pre-supposes the powerlessness of humans. It can, in fact, imply the contrary. Thus, for example, if the Moscow Dynamos were to meet a scratch village eleven we could say the result would be inevitable. This would not be because of the inability of the scratch side to kick a ball but of the highly trained athletic power of the Dynamos.

Now the working class in Capitalist society constitute not only the bulk of the population but are a highly trained productive class. Potentially they are the most powerful social group and the only section capable of basically transforming existing social conditions. When Marx spoke of social inevitability he was not as vulgar critics such as Eastman and Isaiah Berlin contend, postulating mysterious agencies beyond the control of humans, but had in mind the latent powers resident in the working class.

Marxists recognise, however, that inevitability has a twofold character; one of denial as well as one of affirmation. From one aspect it can be considered as a restraint on human power. From another, a source of possibilities and opportunities. Thus Capitalism through its social productive agencies constitutes a fetter on the free and fullest use of human skills and productive resources; just as the ownership of these productive resources by a class gives them power over the lives of others and inhibits their free development. Only in a classless society can human activity be equal, creative and shared.

If then extant society gives rise to certain social consequences inseparable from its existence, i.e. if “A” always affects “B” then, in order to eliminate “B” we must get rid of “A.” It is this recognition of the “must” which makes possible our decision to achieve the “ought.” Because the pressures and conflicts of Capitalism are permanent, powerful and pervasive, it becomes not a matter of preoccupation for the few but the concern of the many. If “A” is then a necessary condition for “B” this itself promotes the idea and need of getting rid of the cause. To say that in a system such as Capitalism which generates the consequences of its existence as a continuous and cumulative process men will never, never be able to correctly diagnose their social ills is to condemn them to a moronic level utterly out of keeping with their own history.

The Marxist concept of inevitability links the negative and positive aspect of the social situation and reveals the driving force of social change.

Socialists do not deny human will and choice. What they say is that if men are to raise themselves to a truly human stature this exploitative set-up where magic and myth, charlatanism and violence are agencies through which social problems are mediated, must go and the choice can only be a social arrangement of free and equal access to social wealth. Given the means the choice is inevitable.

Among the critics of Marx, and they are numerous, are those who fail to grasp the aspects of affirmation and denial in the concept of inevitability. For them social laws are another name for pre-determinism or an animistic notion of causality. They regard society, if they can commit themselves to such an organised notion, as a laissez-faire arrangement which can be altered and re-altered like a meccano set. Having no social charts or compass they remain as “free” as a cockle boat in mid-ocean.

There is also irony in the criticism of Marxism which asserts that not only is Marx’s inevitability, fatalism, but Socialism is utterly impossible. To the Marxist “aye” they can only counter with an everlasting “nay.” Their inevitability is shot through and through with fatalism, a sublime belief that inscrutable agencies control men and make it impossible for them to master a world.

Such critics can be shown on analysis to be supporters of the “eternal status quo.” For that reason their misunderstanding of Marxism is perhaps—inevitable.

Ted Wilmott

The Russian Invasion of Finland (1939)

From the December 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx Condemns Stalin's Policy of Conquest

The Russian excuse for invading Finland is that military considerations necessitate frontier revision. Marx, writing in 1870, had something to say about such claims when put forward by Germany towards France.

The passage below is quoted in “Karl Marx,” by I. Berlin (Home University Library, 1939. P.223).

  “If limits are to be fixed by military interests there will be no end of claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory: they can never be fixed fairly or finally because they always must be improved by the conqueror or the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seeds of fresh wars. History will measure its retribution, not by the extent of square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest ” (italics Marx’s)

Marxism Today (1967)

From the September 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

On an occasion such as the centenary of the publication of Volume I of Marx's Capital it is appropriate to consider whether Marxism is more widely accepted today than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, but no simple answer can be given to that question.

Some parts of Marxist theory seem to have lost ground while others have gained; but to a large extent both developments have to be weighed against the extent to which acceptance has been based on less than full understanding.

In the most shallow aspect, the use of Marx as a name to inspire political movements, a notable change has taken place. At one time there were social democratic parties in European and other countries which described themselves as Marxist and do so no longer. But it is a change of little real significance. Nominal acceptance of Marxism by the leaders meant little to the majority of members. It did not determine their principles and policy, as was to be proved by their attitude to capitalist wars and, when they became governments by their disregard of Socialism and absorption in the sterile task of trying to administer capitalism. How little Marxism meant to these parties can be shown by comparing them with the British Labour Party. While they professed to be Marxist the British Party made no such claim: as a former secretary put it, the British party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. Yet as political parties and as governments their behaviour was identical.

While the social democratic parties have dropped their lip service to Marx this role has been taken by the communist parties but with just as little justification.

Certainly one aspect of Marxism, the Materialist Conception of History has made a large and increasing impact though many of those who have been influenced do not regard themselves as Marxists and some may indeed even be unaware of the source of the influence. Sir Isaiah Berlin, eminent Oxford Professor of Political and Social Theory and by no means an uncritical admirer of Marx acknowledged the debt in an interview published in the Observer (6.11.66).

. . . there are certain originally resisted truths which Marxism put on the map. For example, the notion that . . . classes exist and class consciousness exists and has a decisive effect on men — that, although violently exaggerated, is now something no rational man denies. The notion of reification, to use a technical term —the idea that human beings tend to regard institutions which they themselves have in the past created as something objective and inexorable, the product of objective laws, like the phenomenon of gravitation — whereas they can in fact be altered by sufficient concentration and direction of human will-power and energy, if necessary by revolution — is again something which is by now accepted by quite a large number of sane thinkers.

A non Marxist historian, the late Professor Hearnshaw claimed for Marx that he “created the beginnings of scientific outlook in social studies" and that “the aspirations towards human equality, perhaps the most significant feature of the modern mind, draws its chief nourishment from him".

When we turn to Marx’s writings on economics it is a different story. The attitude of the popular TV and newspaper commentator, Bernard Levin, is typical of most of the Press and of the academic world. He wrote:

Das Kapital is after all, a vast book of no more relevance to conditions in Britain today . . . than the controversial philosophy of Haeckel or Henri Bergson. All Marx's major prophecies have been conclusively proved wrong by events, and much of his theory has been entirely exploded for half a century, indeed, the central economic doctrine—his labour theory was shown to be based on a misconception almost in his own lifetime. (Daily Mail, 13.9.65).

Regrettably, as so often happens with Marx-critics, Levin did not explain why he holds the labour-theory to be erroneous, or what are the major prophecies disproved by events. (Could he perhaps be induced to use our columns to tell us more?) There is however, a sufficient, if not exactly good, reason why Marx's writings appear to the popular commentators, the economists and politicians to be irrelevant. Marx scientifically analysed the way in which capitalism works according to its own economic laws and he put the capitalist system in perspective in the evolution of society. He saw the future of mankind in the replacement of capitalism by Socialism. He did not and could not work within the false assumption that capitalism is eternal and that we must therefore seek daily expedients to lessen the chaos and correct the contradictions inherent in the capitalist order. It was therefore only to be expected that the economists and politicians in today's world should decide that Marx has nothing to offer of use to them.

Confident in their baseless belief that it only needed expertise and goodwill to get rid of all the “bad" features of capitalism they did not want to read Marx and learn there that they were wasting their efforts. But how does this prove Marx to be irrelevant or show his prophecies to be wrong?

Marx showed how capitalism functions through expansions and contractions of the market and production and why it needs unemployment They ridiculed the idea as old fashioned, and did they not have Keynes to show them how to achieve full employment? But just as the Labour Government in 1929-31 planned to reduce unemployment and ended with achieving a record level, so in 1967 after nearly three years in office, the Wilson government in July scored the highest summer unemployment (nearly 500,000) for any year since the war.

Marx showed too (the misconceived labour-theory, according to Levin) that the money commodity, gold, has value like any other commodities, and that an over-issue of inconvertible paper money will push up prices. This, too, they scoffed at, but events have proved Marx right.

Also on the Labour government's prize exhibit, the incomes policy, Marx had something to say a hundred years ago. In the early days the Labour Party had the simple belief that the cure for an oncoming crisis is to push up wages. Marx was familiar with this argument and pointed out that if it were true crises would never happen because as a fact, in a period of boom, wages invariably rise and rise faster than the increase in production of consumer goods. Standing their former belief on its head the Labour government now seeks to prevent crises by preventing wages from rising: if they had read Marx's analysis of the situation they would have known that this was equally pointless except from the standpoint of protecting profits.

So who has been proved wrong, Marx or his detractors?

In another field Marxism was under fire from two opposite quarters—from those who said Marx did not know about the growth of monopoly and from those who said that his observations on the trend towards concentration of industry and wealth were mistaken.

Both were wrong. Marx fully understood the anxiety of capitalists to protect themselves if they could, against competition by forming monopolies and it ill becomes Labour Party critics to venture into this because, in their lack of any comprehensive economic understanding, they started as a party committed to the doctrine of keeping capitalist units small and competitive, only to come now to an officially backed policy of encouraging mergers so that British capital can stand up to the big battalions in capitalism abroad.

Before leaving Marx and his prophecies perhaps Mr. Levin, particularly in the light of current developments in Russia would like to show that Marx was wrong in prophesying that it was impossible for that country, or any other, to leap into Socialism without going through the normal phases of capitalism

Edgar Hardcastle

Darwin and socialism (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The viewpoint that discerns and identifies an historic linkage between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in regard to their respective, earthshaking theories seems not to be obvious to scientists, generally, in our times. Most scientific people, to the extent that they do attempt analysis of our social system, are no more cognisant of the traditional Marxist critique than is the bulk of the population. When it comes to political science, their thinking is dominated by the ruling class approach to the extent of permitting their political views to influence, or colour, their research efforts. In any case, a century and a quarter after the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species it would not be easy to find scientists, other than an occasional Marxist, who do see a connection between scientific evolution and scientific socialism.

This was not always the case and in the decades immediately following the publication of Darwin’s monumental work in 1859. there was frequent and heated debate among scientists over the question. For example in 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the famed German embryologist, delivered an eloquent address in which he defended and propagated Darwinism which was, at that time, under violent attack. A few days afterwards Virchow, the noted pathologist, assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution raising a terrible cry of alarm: “Darwinism leads directly to socialism".

The German Darwinians, headed by Haeckel and Oscar Schmidt, immediately protested, insisting that Darwinism is in direct, open and absolute opposition to socialism. In the words of Schmidt, writing in the Ausland of 27 November 1877

If the Socialists were prudent they would do their utmost to kill, by silent neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable.

And Haeckel wrote (in Les preuves du transformisme, Paris, 1879. p. 110 et seq):

. . . there is no scientific doctrine which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the equality of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction with the necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals . . .

In the ever popular misconception of Marxist goals. Haeckel portrayed socialism as a demand for “equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions and equal enjoyments". And having erected this straw man (one need not elaborate on the vast difference between the concept of equality in work and rewards on the one hand and a society based on from each according to one’s ability to each according to one’s needs, the societal goal of socialism, on the other) the scientist demolished it with an outpouring of words calculated to demonstrate that Darwin’s theory of descent proved that there can be no scientific validity to the “socialist goal" of equality in work or reward. In fact it proved, he argued. that the tendency of society is not even toward democracy — let alone socialism — that it can only be evolving in the direction of aristocracy!

But that was all argued out a long time ago and little if anything seems now to be said about a relationship between Darwinism and human societies. The Darwin theory has long since graduated to the status of an accepted fact by all but a minority of die-hard fundamentalists whose effect on the machinery of capitalist society is minimal at most. The capitalist class has long since accepted Natural Selection. To them, perhaps, it also provides a logical explanation for their own status; they, the "fittest", have survived the no-holds-barred struggle.

In point of fact, Darwinism has nothing to do with democracy, aristocracy, socialism, or any other sort of social system. The theory of Natural Selection, no doubt, was somewhat applicable to primitive humans but once they got organised into civilised societies (slavery, serfdom, capitalism) their survival depended more on human-made factors than natural. True, there is a ferocious competition among members of the same class — for profits or for jobs — as well as relentless contention between the classes (workers against capitalists) in capitalist society. But that is a by-product of this social order and will become non-existent in a society based on common ownership and free access to all wealth.

But aside from this factor, scientists for the most part have gone overboard on Natural Selection. As Darwin also pointed out, human beings have always been social animals with the propensity for mutual aid. At the end of Chapter 11 of The Descent of Man he wrote:

The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers, through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, etc, though still remaining in a barbarous state, and. secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men. No country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa; no country presents more fearful physical hardships than the Arctic regions; yet one of the puniest races, that of the Bushmen, maintains itself in Southern Africa. as do the dwarfed Esquimaux in the Arctic regions . . . (p.333, Modern Library ed.)

So much for what Haeckel had to say — especially on that “pitiless" struggle for existence that supposedly has always taken place among the human race. Even among the most primitive it was not that pitiless — according to Darwin and Mutual Aid naturalists such as Peter Kropotkin. Populations among the more primitive have always been small — whereas in civilised societies, despite the most horrible hardships, death-dealing implements and pollutants unimagined by primitives, populations have continued to multiply. Mutual aid does play an important role, even under advanced capitalism.

But what of the socialists and their reaction to Darwinism? Beginning with Marx himself, there was tremendous enthusiasm. Darwin’s book was published in the same year as Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the words of John Spargo of the old Socialist Party of America:

. . . Marx regarded it as a fortunate coincidence that his own book appeared in the same year as that of Darwin. He recognised at once the importance and merit of Darwin's work, and at once brought it to the attention of his fellow radicals at their meetings. Liebknecht has told us how for months the Marx circle spoke of nothing except the value of Darwin’s work. With great frankness Marx likened his own work in the sociological field to that of Darwin in the biological field, and he was always manifestly pleased when others made the comparison Once, in the late sixties, when it had become commonplace in Marxian circles. W. Harrison Riley, editor of the International Herald, made the now familiar comparison and Marx replied: "Nothing ever gives me greater pleasure than to have my name thus linked with Darwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable. Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution”. (Karl Marx: His Life and Work, B. W Huebsche, NY. 1910. p 200)

It did not take long for Darwin to indicate that he was not anxious to be thought of as belonging to “the Social Revolution". Isaiah Berlin writes, in his Karl Marx, His Life and Environment:

(Marx) offered to dedicate his Capital to Darwin, for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries. regarding him as having, by his theory of evolution and natural selection, done for the morphology of the natural sciences what he himself was striving to do for human history.

But Darwin was apparently not interested in being identified with a revolutionary socialist. He must have realised that his own book would give him more than enough troubles as it was, so:

(he) hastily declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end — the advancement of human knowledge. (A Galaxy Book, NY, Oxford University Press. 1959. p.232)

We should also have a brief look at what Engels had to say on the subject. In his Anti-Duhring, he devotes some eleven pages to a defence of Darwin against the attack by Herr Eugen Duhring, a German “reformer” of socialism:

The main reproach levelled against Darwin is that he transferred the Malthusian population theory from political economy to natural science, that he was held captive by the ideas of an animal breeder, that in his theory of the struggle for existence he pursued unscientific semi-poetry, and that the whole of Darwinism, after deducting what had been borrowed from Lamarck, is a piece of brutality against humanity. (Foreign Languages Publishing House. Moscow. 1954. p.97)

A little later Engels writes:

Now Darwin would not dream of saying that the origin of the idea of the struggle for existence is to be found in Malthus. He only says that his theory of the struggle for existence is the theory of Malthus applied to the animal and plant world as a whole. However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles arc required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature — the contradiction between the countless host of germs which nature so lavishly produces and the small number of those which ever reach maturity, a contradiction which in fact for the most part finds its solution in a struggle for existence — often of extreme cruelty . . . the struggle for existence can take place in nature, even without any Malthusian interpretation. For that matter, the organisms of nature also have their laws of population, which have been left practically uninvestigated, although their establishment would be of decisive importance for the theory of the evolution of species. But who was it that lent decisive impetus to work in this direction too? No other than Darwin, (page 99)

In retrospect one can understand the excitement of revolutionaries like Marx and Engels, in the latter half of the 19th Century, over a book such as Origin of the Species. The basic message of Darwinian evolution, they were certain, would sweep the world and with the spread of scientific information superstition would be forced into swift retreat. The superstition of religion had been, historically, a major pillar of capitalism. Origin of the Species knocked the very props from under it. And the general acceptance of biological evolution must, they thought, lead inexorably to an acceptance of social evolution and the principles of socialism.

To put it mildly, the pioneers of scientific socialism were over-optimistic. On the one hand, in these last two decades of the 20th Century, we have a battle still being waged between so-called Scientific Creationists and Evolutionists while religions such as Roman Catholicism and various Protestant denominations are able to teach Darwinian evolution in their Church-owned schools of higher learning with no apparent damage to the future stability of their adjoining temples of superstition. On the other hand, some nations of state capitalism such as Russia. China and North Korea, have demonstrated that they are able to carry on the basics of a capitalist economy with little more than a limited toleration of religion — or no apparent organised religion whatever.

So the general acceptance of Darwinism in modern biology, even in the “communist" and “socialist" worlds has added little to the basic political understanding of the workers.

Harmo.

Marxism or Machiavellianism? (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a familiar principle of capitalist politics that that means justify the end and so any "tactics" can be used in order to achieve political power. Machiavellianism is alive and well in 1977, and the old master of deceitfulness would be quite proud of his modern disciples in the Palace of Westminster.

Scholars have disagreed as to what Machiavelli's political intentions were. Jeffrey Pulver, writing in 1937 on what constitutes Machiavelli's contribution to political thought, answers plainly: "Nothing at all." It is true that, unlike Marx, Machiavelli did not apply himself to any revolutionary view of society and that his historical observations were less than profound; his advice to aspiring politicians, however, is a frank admission of the way in which leaders win and retain power.

All of Machiavelli's major works—The Prince, The Discourses, and the Florentine Histories—are concerned with political power: the establishment of states, the maintenance of effective governments within them and reasons for, and preventives against, their decline and fall. Unlike Plato and Thomas More they are not concerned with describing a future utopia, but with considering Renaissance Italian society as it was. He was not the first to deal with this subject: many of his contemporaries' writings dealt with

the problems of kingship—countless treatises with such titles as 'De Regime Principum', 'De Officio regis', or 'The governal of princes'—copied and recopied, translated, revised, enlarged and adapted for century after century. (S. Anglo, Machiavelli: a Dissection, p. 189.)

In short, they were writing text books for rulers on how to rule successfully, in the same way as modern advertisements offer free booklets on "How to Influence People and Become Rich". It was Machiavelli's frankness in his advice to princes which has since been seen as shocking by liberal theorists. Alberico Gentile and Garret Mattingly saw The Prince as an outrageous satire; Spinoza and Rousseau saw it as a warning against tyranny; Prezzoloni and Haydn regarded it as a shocking treatise because it attacked Christianity and defended paganism; numerous other philosophers, politicians and social theorists have demonstrated outrage against the views of Machiavelli. And all of them have one thing in common: they do not challenge Machiavelli's fundamental statement that it is virtuous to trick the majority in order to retain power, but have continued to support the capitalist system which depends on obscuring the interests of the majority to safeguard the security of the minority. Perhaps Bertrand Russell is right when he says:

Much of the conventional obloquy that attaches to [Machiavelli's] name is due to the indignation of hypocrites who hate the frank avowal of evil-doing. (History of Western Philosophy, Bk. 3, p. 491.)

The outcry over Machiavelli is, therefore, because he paints a portrait of his ideal ruler (based in fact on Cesare Borgia) which is too accurately descriptive of the way political leaders behave. How well does Laurence Arthur Burd's description of Machiavelli's ideal prince remind one of residents at Number 10, Downing Street:

He must in the first place be entirely free from emotional disturbance; he must be ready to take advantage of the existing state of things; he must be strong enough to sin boldly, if his country's welfare depends upon it; he must be shrewd enough to understand human nature in whatever form he finds it, and, overcoming evil by evil, play with the passions and impulses of men, use them as he pleases, force them to his purpose, manage them. And above all he must be thorough: a single hesitation, a single half-measure might compromise the whole result. He must depend upon himself and his own soldiers; he must abolish all mercenaries and establish a national army of his own subjects. If such a man could be found, of unflinching purpose, dead to every sentiment but the love of his country, willing to save his fatherland rather than his own soul, careless of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honour or disgrace, he might perhaps . . . begin the regeneration of his people.

Machiavelli was not the first to argue against the established belief that the State should be run in accordance with fixed (Christian) moral principles and to propose that rulers should be guided by political and economic expediency. Pontano believed that for the good of the State (i.e. the ruling class interest) a ruler should tell lies (it will be of some comfort to modern political leaders to know that they have Pontano's permission); Patrizzi believed the same, so that people would not know if the nation was in ruin; and Platina claimed that even private citizens could forget about morality if it was for the benefit of the State. Machiavelli realized that:

If morals relate to human conduct, and men are by nature social, Christian morality cannot be a guide for normal social existence. (I. Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Studies on Machiavelli, ed. Myron P. Gilmore) 

In this respect Machiavelli held a similar position to Marx in realizing that morality is socially determined by the needs of the ruling class, and that as society is constantly changing so is morality. The difference between Marx and Machiavelli is that whereas Marx told workers to forget moral values and view society materially, Machiavelli, as an adviser to the rising bourgeoisie of late medieval Italy, sought ways to manipulate existing moral values.

Today workers are still swallowing the morality of the capitalist class—a morality which condemns robbing banks, but encourages mass murder during war time, which censors books but shows every night news of disgusting crimes against humanity in the name of profit, which shows contempt for the workers who produce the wealth of society, and idolizes useless parasites who reap the profits of production. The Machiavellian advice that deluding the masses is the way to retain power is still cherished by political leaders throughout the world. Stalin, Nixon, Mao, Churchill, Thatcher, Powell—all successful masters of the art.

But the delusion of the working class relies upon one factor: the workers' capacity to be deluded. When the working class of all countries unite in class consciousness no attempts, either by force or political cunning, will stop the revolution for Socialism. For the establishment of Socialism lies and deceit will not be necessary. The only words which the Socialist Party of Great Britain have for the working class are simple: toss aside the morals of your masters and organize for a rational society.

Steve Coleman