Historical Materialism (1970)

From the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The credit for the elaboration of contemporary materialism undoubtedly belongs to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The economic aspects of historical materialism, together with the system of views concerning the problem, the method, and the categories of political economy for these we are indebted to Marx and Engels. What had previously been achieved in this field can be regarded as preparatory. Before Marx finalised his views, materials, often abundant and valuable had been collected, but these had not been systematised, and consequently had not been valued or used as they should have been.

The basic question of philosophy is the relation between ideas and things. The treatment of this question divides philosophers into two main contending schools—the Idealist and the Materialist. The Idealist school states that ideas are primary, and that matter is secondary; that the material world as known to the senses is illusory; that mind alone is real. The point of view of the materialist is directly opposite. The materialist contends that matter is primary and ideas are secondary; that mind is a function of matter (the brain) and that ideas are a reflection of material things.

Marx arrived at the materialist viewpoint quite early in his career, but he lifted it to a higher plane by combining it with the dialectical method of Hegel. The dialectic was not new—in fact it was known to the ancient Greeks— but Hegel, by his universal application of it, had given it a new significance.

The dialectic method used by Marx is the system by which he enquired into, and traced the connection and the series of joints and links that make up the process of historical evolution; by which he investigated one stage succeeds another in the development of society.

Marx in these investigations used the dialectical method in a different way to Hegel. Hegel was an idealist, and to him the process of evolution was the outward manifestation of the growth of the absolute Idea, which developed according to its own laws. To Marx, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated in the brain. The dialectical method of thought is a reflection of the dialectical process in material life. By combining the dialectical method with materialism and applying it to the problem of social change, Marx produced an entirely new concept of the historical process: the Materialist Conception of History. Previously historians had in nearly every case explained changes in social life and institutions in terms of growth of ideas. These ideas frequently became personified in great men and history was usually regarded as being the story of the activities of these great men. Where and how ideas originated was a question in the main ignored by historians. To Marx, ideas were a mental reflection of material things. To him, therefore, changes in social life were not to be explained by changes in ideas, but conversely changed in ideas were to be explained by changes in social life.

In the introduction to his Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote:

  I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of the state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general process of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life.

The material conditions of life include man’s environment and his physical nature. Changes in the physical environment and in man’s own physical nature are hardly perceptible so they cannot explain historical changes. From the physical point of view both the world and man are much the same as they were two hundred years ago. Yet during the last two centuries changes have taken place which have changed man’s social life. The most important condition of life is the social production of the means of satisfying man’s needs. The method of producing the means of life (food, clothes, housing etc.) does change often very rapidly, and this, Marx considered to be the cause of changes in the structure of society generally.

In order to carry on production man has to enter into social relations, that is, to co-operate with his fellows.

The social relations—the relations between men and economic classes of men—existing at a given time correspond to a definite stage in the development of the means of production.

The means of production consist of the tools, machines, all kinds of transport. methods of organisation, discoveries of science used in production. The primitive technique of ancient times had corresponding to it the social relations of slave and slave owner, patrician and pleb; feudal technique, the relations of serf and feudal lord, handicraftsman and merchant; while present day capitalist technique has corresponding to it the social relations of wage worker and capitalist.

Marx called the social relations and the productive technique to which they correspond the economic foundations of society. Upon this rests the legal political, moral, religious, ethical, artistic, in a word, the ideological superstructure. There is a different ideology, for slavery, feudalism, and capitalism.

As technique develops, social relations change and the ideas and institutions resting upon this economic foundation are correspondingly transformed. Though changes in society are brought about by the evolution of the technical basis, social development is not a mechanical process. It works through human beings organised in classes.

At a certain stage in their development the technical forces of production come into conflict with the existing social relations. The interest of the ruling class determine that they should endeavour to keep in existence the prevailing state of things, and that they should attempt to prevent the full development of the productive forces. The interest of the subject class, on the other hand, lies in the direction of changing the existing state of things, of revolutionising society, and of allowing development of the productive forces.

Then comes the period of social revolution, when men consciously identify themselves with the interest of the class to which they belong, and when they consciously struggle to further those interests. If the struggle results in a victory for the lower class, as in the French Revolution, the reactionary ruling class is stripped of power; the state machine and all other institutions are transformed to serve the needs of the new ruling class; and the productive forces are freed from the obstacles placed in the way of their development. For a time economic development proceeds rapidly producing new classes, new social relations, and new ideas. Ultimately the time again comes when the technical forces for production come into conflict with the social relations. The new ruling class, once revolutionary, now becomes reactionary. Again a social revolution is at hand.

Since the days of Marx it has become the normal procedure for the historians to direct attention to the economic factors in history. Many and various ‘economic interpretations of history’ have been offered for popular consumption and very frequently the materialist conception of history is confused with these economic interpretations. Marx, as an historian, not only drew attention to the economic basis upon which society rests, but also recognised the struggle of classes as the vehicle by which society moved from stage to stage. “The history of hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggles," wrote Marx and Engels on the first page of the Communist Manifesto and in the following pages is given the description of the struggles of the capitalist class against its opponents, and its subsequent rise to power.

The modern capitalist class had its origins in the town burghers of the Middle Ages. Mediaeval society was in the main a society of self-sufficient districts, the manorial villages, but with the rise of towns trade and industry developed. This undermined the position of the peasants and their overlords, the feudal aristocracy. The feudal lords struggled to retain their privileges, which enabled them to tax and in numerous ways to place burdens on the urban population. The town burghers, sometimes in alliance with the King, as in England, were able to break the power of the feudal lords and to remove the regulations, taxes and other barriers that hampered the extension of economic activity.

The discovery of new sea-routes and of the ‘new world’ enormously increased the wealth, size and political importance of the new and growing capitalist class and by the end of the 17th century in England, in France 100 years later, and in Russia during this century, they were able to defeat the last remnants of feudalism. The English revolution in its two phases of the Puritan revolution 1641-1660 and the Whig (or ‘Glorious’) revolution of 1688-1690. and following it the French Revolution of 1789 resulted in a victory for the capitalist class of that period. The Russian Revolution of 1905-1917 has resulted in the rise of capitalism in a form suited to the history and economic development of that country.

The opening of new markets in the period following the English revolution created a demand for an increasing production of goods. Methods of production were continuously improved until finally, with the introduction of steam-driven machinery at the beginning of the 19th century, they were completely revolutionised. This revolution in productive methods caused a revolution in productive relations. From the old bourgeoisie there grew a new class of industrial capitalists and from the domestic workers and peasants there grew a new class of factory workers, the industrial working class. This class chained to the new machinery, exploited and oppressed by the capitalist class, began to struggle for emancipation. The class struggle had reached a new stage and a new phase of history had commenced.

The origin of the workers’ struggle is economic. The workers strive to maintain and improve their standard of life, but this struggle itself assumes a political form. With the aid of political enactments and of the police or, when necessary the armed forces, the state enters the struggle as the protector of the property interests of the capitalists and the workers find themselves not only fighting employers but also the capitalist state. When, with the development of large-scale modern industry, the small labour dispute is displaced by disputes of much larger dimensions, the state more and more openly shows itself to be the executive committee of the ruling class. Among workers there must grow the realisation that economic problems can be solved only by their conquest of political power and the overthrowing of capitalist property relations.

Previous revolutions have placed a minority of society in a position to exploit the majority. The next revolution, the Socialist revolution, is a revolution of a majority as the working class constitutes the bulk of the population in modern society, and can achieve its purpose only by the ending of class- divided society and the ending of all exploitation of man by man. With the ending of all property rights in the means of production, that is the establishment of a new form of society, class conflicts will cease.

The way is prepared for the new progress in which man will replace the blind way of economic forces, by the conscious direction of economically free men—Socialism.

Bob Ambridge

Letter: Marxist ethic? (1983)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ethics is taken to be, on the one hand, the negation of bourgeois ideology and morality and, on the other, as the intellectual and practical anticipation of the humanist values which are to govern relations among individuals in a world community freed from today’s dominant alienating institutions (economic, political, ideological, etc.), then the work of Karl Marx may consequently be understood as an ethical act. As such, this work is one of the most important contributions to a radical transformation of mankind’s destiny: to humanity’s passage from the pre-human to the human stage, from human prehistory to history made by man.

As an ethical act, Marx’s work is based on scientific proof of the opportunity offered to mankind to choose between collective suicide, made possible by technical achievements which escape man’s rational control, and human self-realisation thanks to the reasonable use of the world’s resources and the technical advances of modern science.

As an ethical act, Marx’s teaching and practice was inspired by his view of the rapid cyclical development and expansion of the capitalist mode of production on a world scale, and thus of an increasing proletarianisation of the labouring masses, despite the immense progress in science and technics, and, finally, of mankind’s opportunity for material and intellectual emancipation. It is through a growing consciousness of this opportunity that the proletariat of the industrially developed countries was to constitute itself into political parties and “win the battle of democracy,” either legally, by universal suffrage, or by a revolutionary struggle, i.e. a general strike and the workers’ takeover of the means of production in view of self-management.

As an ethical act, Marx’s theory was offered to the most numerous and poorest class not as a definitive revelation of proletarian slavery and human emancipation but as an instrument for revolutionary self-education in the tradition of the teaching and practice of those great social reformers whose disciple Marx acknowledged to be. Marx, an insatiable reader and scholar, himself provided a definition of his intellectual and literary vocation, while admitting the limits of his theoretical originality, in this following confession to his daughter Laura: “You'll certainly fancy, my dear child, that I am very fond of books, because I trouble you with them at so unseasonable a time. But you would be quite mistaken. I am a machine condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history” (Laura had just married Paul Lafargue and the two were spending their honeymoon in Paris; letter dated 11 April 1868, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Capital).

Marx, who was a disciple of Epicurus, Spinoza and Leibniz as well as of the French and English materialists, succeeded in constructing a world-view which he in no way considered as a new system of thought, nor as a new philosophy or a new science. He never asked that workers study Hegel’s Logic before attacking Capital. Although his master-work remained unfinished, it is perfectly understandable as a set of scientific and critical theses whose aim is to disclose “the economic law of motion of modern society” (Preface to Capital), and as a series of ethical norms and postulates derived from empirical observation of the self-emancipatory efforts and struggles of the modern slaves, the victims not of capitalists but of capital. The object of scientific analysis is the “reign of necessity”; the object of ethical vision is the “reign of liberty” (Capital. Book III, chapter 48 of the edition established by Engels).

In adhering not to any socialist or communist ideology, but to the cause of the working class and of human emancipation, Marx immediately formulated his ethical creed by affirming a “categorical imperative” that was fundamentally different from the one proposed by Kant : “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being ...” (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844). After he had become a member of the Communist League and was entrusted with drawing up its charter and articles of association, Marx thought best to express the meaning of this imperative in the form of an appeal for union, similar to that which, before him, the leaders of the Chartist movement had addressed to the British workers. Marx added to it a world-wide dimension : “Workers of all land, unite!” 

This appeal of 1848 was, nearly twenty years later, to constitute the implicit conclusion to Capital as formulated in the three pages of the chapter entitled: “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.” This chapter ends with two passages taken from the Communist Manifesto in which Marx draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the growth of poverty, oppression, slavery and degradation and, on the other, the revolt of the ever-growing working class, educated, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. Here we find a typical example of the double-sided reasoning, the empirical judgment of the lucid observer paired with the ethical conception of the revolutionary behaviour and emancipatory will of slaves who consciously realise their enslavement.

Marx refused to “prescribe recipes (in the style of Auguste Comte?) for the cook-shops of the future” (Afterward to the second edition of Capital, 1873), just as he never claimed to have invented any new morality intended for the slaves of capital. While we may justly affirm, in Engels’s words, that Marx’s “real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat,” it is wrong to claim that “he was the first to make [this proletariat] conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.” Through this dubious eulogy delivered at Marx’s graveside, Engels became the first bearer of Marxist ideology and thus of a new political superstition, whose principal representatives were to be Lenin and Kautsky. The British proletariat was the first to have gained consciousness of its enslavement and of the conditions for its emancipation. Marx had chosen to cooperate in the movement for the emancipation of the modern proletariat, not as a teacher, but as a disciple of the British proletariat, putting at its service not only the fruits of his studies, but also his energy as a militant. As an ethical act, this choice reduced Marx’s life to that of an intellectual pariah, with a career on the margin of official society, to that of a perpetual beggar, who depended above all on the hand-outs from his friend Engels. It was not as a teacher and founder but as a disciple and pariah that, in 1856, Marx addressed an audience of English workers, referring to the “symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire” in order to remind them that “they will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world which is as universal as capital-rule and wages-slavery.”

Over 125 years after this appeal, in fact a veritable declaration of faith, the “symptoms of decay” have changed into the certainty of a world in decline without there appearing on the horizon the gravediggers of capital and the State. 

Can this phenomenon of decline, which seems to contradict the theses formulated by Marx in the conclusion of Capital (“The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”), be explained with the help of his materialist conception of history, in other words using the scientific method which Marx claimed to have adopted in the course of a radical critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right? If this is the case, can we consider that “the economic law of motion of modern society” which Marx claimed to have revealed the Preface to Capital) to be precisely one of the “truths” resulting from the application of the materialist method? If the answer to both these questions is yes, are we not then obliged to admit that Marx’ s thought is opposed to any kind of ethics and that the famous “categorical imperative” was only a sally, a parody of Kantian morality? 

Does the “economic law” not demonstrate the frightening thesis according to which 

“even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural law of its movement ... it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development” (Preface, Capital).

Here is a thesis which seems to justify certain critics of Marx who take him to task for his “historicism,” for his mania for identifying social science (or the so-called human sciences) and natural science, for his ambition to observe and study human societies with the mind of a natural scientist (physicist, astronomer), for his quasi-Spinozian way of exculpating the individual and blaming the “social conditions” of which the individual remains a product, “however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” (Preface, Capital). 

It follows that neither the capitalist nor the worker is individually responsible for their destiny, since they are only “the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests.” So, in the end, what remains of the “categorical imperative” to overthrow the social conditions which make the workers slaves and reduce them to beasts of burden?

Marx envisages this overthrow as a long historical stage in a process of evolution which undoubtedly changes the conditions but which also changes men. Hence the “reformism” in Marx’s political theory, a consequence of his determinism which rules out the possibility of a society “skipping” over the phases of its development or “removing” their obstacles by legal enactments. This “reformism” is clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto and in the canon of the IWMA; echoes of it can be found in Capital and in other texts where Marx envisages trade union struggles, demands concerning the shortening of the working day and factory legislation to protect the workers’ health and to promote the coercive education of “factory children,” while imposing on the capitalist mode of production, “by a coercive law in virtue of the State” (Capital, XV, 9) “the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health.” 

As a revolutionary thinker, Marx had to struggle throughout his whole career for “bourgeois” reforms since liberal democracy means the triumph of the freedom of conscience, association and organisation which alone can allow the proletariat to educate itself and to prepare itself for revolution and so for the abolition of capitalism. It is only then that they will be in a position to act in the spirit of the “categorical imperative,” in other words of the ethic which following other reformers Marx placed at the centre of his work. Until the “historic” moment of the revolution, the slaves are only able to “short and lessen the birth-pangs” .

Maximilien Rubel

Paris

(Author of "Marx Without Myth" with M. Manale)

Reply:

If all Rubel means by the words ethics and ethical is that the establishment of socialism ("a classless, stateless and moneyless society" as Rubel puts it in the Introduction to his Marx Without Myth) is not something that will come about automatically as a result of some economic or historical forces operating independently of human will, but rather can only be a deliberate choice, or act of will, on the part of the "most numerous and poorest class" in capitalist society, then we would not quarrel with him. We, too, do not regard socialism as being mechanically inevitable but as something that can only  come about as a result of a conscious dcision by the wage and salary earning majority.

But we would not use the word ethical to make this point. In fact we would have a strong objection to doing so as this word, at least in English, is so closely associated with parsons and other moral preachers that it inevitably gives rise to the impression that those who use it are appealing to some abstract, eternal morality. But socialism is not a moral issue in this sense; it s a class issue. It is first and foremost the solution to the very material problems of the majority class in society, not the realisation of some abstract moral or ethical principles. In this connection it is interesting to note that Marx himself never described his "teaching and practice" as an "ethical act" and even less as an "ethical creed".

We agree that Engels went too far in the passage from his speech at Marx's graveside in which he said that Marx was the first to make the working class conscious of the conditions for their emancipation. Of course he wasn't. No one was, as this is something that workers learn as a result of their experiences as an exploited class under capitalism and, as Rubel correctly points out, it was from the working class movement (Chartists, trade unionists) that Marx himself first learned about the class struggle and socialism. But then speeches made at funerals are not meant to be taken too literally. To blow this statement up so as to make Engels "the first bearer of Marxist ideology and thus of a new political superstition" is to be extremely unfair to Engels. No more than Marx did he use the word "Marxism". In fact it was Engels who recorded for posterity Marx's famous statement, "One thing is certain, that I am no Marxist" (Engels letter to Bernstein, 2-3 November 1882).

It is true that we ourselves do use the word Marxism but this is not in the sense of a "new systems of thought", a "new philosophy" or a "new science" invented by a genius called Karl Marx, but simply to indicate that we acknowledge that Marx was a socialist in the same sense that we are and that we accept in general his method of analysing society, history and economics. We of course fully agree that the "Marxism" of Russia, China and the like (and also that of the various Leninist groups and grouplets) is a political superstition, an ideology designed to disguise the fact that these countries, far from being socialist, are also capitalist and class-divided.

We take it that the last paragraph is intended as a direct criticism of our opposition to a socialist party advocating reforms. Marx advocated reforms, says Rubel, implying (we suppose) that we ought to as well. This is a rather curious position for someone who has spent a lifetime denouncing the making of Marx's views into a dogma to take up! Logically he might have been expected to hold that socialists should base their policy today on an examination of today's circumstances and not on what one particular nineteenth century socialist may or may not have said or done. In any event this is the position we take up.

It is true that, as Rubel states, Marx did support trade union action over wages and hours of work, factory laws to protect the health and safety of workers, and political democracy. Let us take these subjects one by one and see exactly what our position on them is.

Trade Unionism: Our members are, as individuals, members of existing trade unions and work within them alongside their fellow workers to resist downward pressures on wages and working conditions and, when circumstances permit, to improve them. Like Marx we urge workers not to exaggerate these defensive actions but to strive for the abolition of the wages system.

Factory legislation: This is the one type of reform which a minority of socialist MPs could consider voting for. For we are not opposed to social reforms under capitalism as such: if they really do protect the safety and health of workers or promote their education they ought to be accepted, What we are opposed to is a socialist party seeking support on the basis of promises to achieve such reforms. This is why we do not advocate reforms, desirable as some of them might be. We freely recognise that our position here differs from that of Marx, but then Marx did not experience what happens when a party tries to combine advocating socialism and advocating reforms: it attracts support mainly for its reform programme and eventually ends up being a mere party of capitalist reform. The evolution of the German Social Democratic Party before the first world war is a case in point.

Political democracy: Here we fully agree with Rubel (and Marx) that this "means the triumph of the freedom of conscience, association and organisation which alone can allow the proletariat to educate itself and to prepare itself for the revolution, and so for the abolition of capitalism". The working class in the nineteenth century were right to fight for this in Britain and elsewhere and Marx was right to encourage and join in the workers' struggle for an effective universal suffrage. Similarly today the workers in state-capitalist dictatorships like Poland and Russia are justified in making the same demands. The existence of political democracy is very important for socialists and for the working class generally, as it provides a means for propagating socialist ideas and for establishing socialism peaceably.

We know that Rubel only speaks of Marx's "reformism" in inverted commas but there is still an ambiguity in his position. For he talks of the overthrow of capitalism being "a long historical stage" and seems to imply that social reforms are necessary and desirable as a way of "shortening and lessening the birth-pangs" of this stage. It is true that there is "a long historical stage" involved in the overthrow of capitalism but this is going on now: it is more or less gradual evolution of the majority socialist understanding necessary before socialism can be established.

Reforms don't come into this, or rather don't any more since for Marx the reforms he supported were merely necessary to create the preconditions (a reasonably healthy and educated working class, freedom of speech and association, universal suffrage) for this evolution, preconditions which have long existed in most of the developed capitalist countries. Today in fact reforms are necessary for the smooth running of capitalism and so are advocated by all political parties, even those which openly support capitalism.

If all Rubel means is that as long as there is no majority in favour of socialism all workers can do is to seek the best they can out of capitalism then we would agree. We however would see this as essentially involving only trade union and trade union type activity. We suspect that Rubel might see this as also involving voting for reformist parties and candidates, to which we would be very much opposed.

Editors.

Is the working class still the agent of socialism?

Originally posted on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog, this book review is from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

G A Cohen departed this world on the 5th of August and one of his major works has been reviewed in the Socialist Standard which is worth a peruse.

If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? By G A Cohen. Harvard University Press, 2001.

In 1978 Cohen wrote a basically sound (if tedious) book called Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In this series of lectures given in 1997 but only published as a paperback last year he explains why he now thinks Marx was wrong after all.

He claims that Marx's agency for the socialist revolution was the "industrial" working class which would form the majority of the population but that this has not come about because of the rise of modern technology which has resulted in the "industrial" working class forming a shrinking proportion of the working population. However, Marx was well aware that the development of the division of labour and specialisation would lead to the development of a section of the working class not involved in direct factory work.

When workers are trained to perform certain tasks for example, they have to be taught and instructed, and this involves teachers and instructors. The teacher or instructor can teach or instruct inside the factory or outside it in a school or college. It is absurd to regard the teacher as an industrial worker when employed inside the factory but a "middle class" professional when employed in a school or a college. The function they perform is exactly the same and so also is their relationship to the means of production – they are still teaching or training future workers and they are still reliant on a wage or salary in order to survive.

As industry becomes more complex and as technology develops there is a need for an increasing army of educators, organisers, researchers and the like. As a result the proportion of "front line", factory workers shrinks. This change in the composition of the working population does not alter one iota their relationship to the productive wealth of society, nor does it alter the fact that it would be in their interest to overthrow capitalism. There is no justification for regarding factory workers as being exploited whilst teachers, lecturers, organisers, researchers, etc are able to escape this exploitation. It is true that most of these "white collar" workers would deny that they are being exploited but so also would most factory workers.

Cohen claims that workers in advanced industrial countries are no longer exploited (not that he defines what he means by exploitation). His claim is that exploitation now takes place in the factories and sweatshops of underdeveloped countries and that only these fit Marx's description of the industrial proletariat. However, he goes on, these again cannot be regarded as the agents of revolutionary change as they do not constitute the majority of the population in these countries because they are swamped in a sea of peasants. He does not pay any attention to the fact that the "exploitation" of his workers in the underdeveloped world has led to the undermining of the incomes of factory workers in the advanced countries.

He concludes from this that there is no hope of a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and that only a development of altruistic attitudes can usher in a better and different world. He can only come to this pathetic conclusion by either ignoring or not understanding the capitalist system.

Most liberal political philosophers who claim to strive for "a just and equal society" view modern society as being stratified from top to bottom into different income and status groups ("social classes") and that it can only be a question of redistributing wealth more "fairly" within these groups. Other political philosophers see this as posing a potentially serious problem in that it could lead to a slacking of effort on the part of the top strata as this could affect their efficiency and effectiveness "in the pursuit of the general good". In other words, that there is still a need for some inequality in order to provide an incentive for those able and willing to take on demanding, responsible positions in society.

Volumes and volumes are written on this theme and writers like Cohen demonstrate their learning and cleverness by finding loopholes in each others' theories and developing their own irrelevant versions of the same. What they have to say and write has no bearing on what is happening in the real world. For the real world is not merely made up of a population stratified into different income groups. It is true that the working class can be divided into different income groups. But between these groups there is no direct opposition, tension and conflict – they are just groups of people having different characteristics in terms of income, education and status.

The real world is a world in which the population is divided into two main groups obtaining their incomes in distinct and completely different ways. One group obtains its income from the ownership of the productive wealth of the world and the other group obtains its income from the sale of its labour power to the owners of productive wealth. The first group has to attempt to continually increase the productive wealth its owns by continually revolutionising their productive techniques and by attempting to reduce or limit the income of the non-owners. To do this they have to accumulate as much wealth as possible under given market conditions. The whole system depends upon, and is defined by, this compulsive need of capitalists to accumulate wealth. To think that it is possible to intervene or halt this process through any system of redistribution of incomes – either through taxation or "rich" egalitarian political philosophers foregoing part of their incomes – is unrealistic nonsense. The social system such philosophers wish to reform bears no resemblance to the social system they conjure up in their analyses.

Nowhere is Cohen's pathetic position more clearly demonstrated than in his belief that he and his fellow philosophers are "rich". They are not rich even by comparison with other salary earners; when compared with the incomes of the capitalist class their incomes are pitiful. What is more, like most workers they have to consume their incomes in order to survive at the prevailing standards of comfort of their peers. The individual consumption of the capitalists, on the other hand, although often colossal when compared to the individual consumption of workers, is normally only a small proportion of their income as they are compelled to accumulate most of it in order to survive as capitalists. 

Lew Higgins.