The men of science and their “religion”. (1925)

From the September 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

The subject of the history of the conflict between science and religion, is one which provides its students with an interest from more than one point of view. Not only does it reveal how, with the advance of scentific knowledge, religion has been compelled to either abandon or modify its teachings, it also shows how accommodating some scientists can be when dealing with religion.

That the positive outcome of science spells death to religion is a fact which some scientists either attempt to conceal or avoid in their own peculiar way. Like certain of the leading lights of the Church, who pretend that the findings of modern science can be harmonised with religion, some “scientists” are not averse to trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Readers of Herbert Spencer will recall his celebrated attempt in this direction, as given in the first part of his work, “First Principles.” In that work, Spencer speaks of all things, including the universe, as having proceeded from “an infinite and Eternal Energy.” But, said Spencer, about this “Infinite and Eternal Energy” we neither know nor can know anything; it being “an inscrutable mystery.”

This “Unknowable,” Spencer declared, belongs to the sphere of religion, whilst all that is known or is knowable belongs to the domain of science. Therefore, to follow Spencer, since religion and science are totally independent of each other, the one concerned with “The Unknowable,” the other with the knowable, both should keep within their own province and be “reconciled.” In reality, this was Spencer’s way of performing a feat of mental gymnastics. For surely there could be no stranger reconciliation. Religion is made to give up to science all that is knowable, and to rest contented with absolutely nothing to live upon. The humour of the position is delightful, although, apparently, the humour was not intended by Spencer. His so-called reconciliation reminds one of the man who agreed to being with his mother-in-law on condition that she committed suicide.

However, there was little need for surprise when it was learned that Spencer himself found it necessary to state in his “Autobiography” that he regarded his work on “The Unknowable” as being “relatively unimportant.” In fact, he agreed that it had no direct bearing on his general scientific works. Nevertheless, “The Unknowable” has comforted many poor souls who must have an abstraction of some kind to worship.

The fatal mistake made by Spencer rested on his treating religion and science as though they are absolutely exclusive subjects. And the same thing is done by certain of the present day scientists. But while this position may be a very convenient one to those who desire to avoid an “awkward” situation, it is none the less unscientific and absurd. For, fundamentally, religion and science are not as the poles apart in the sense laid down by Spencer. Both are concerned with explaining the world around us. Religion claims to explain the universe in terms of the supernatural, everything, to the religionist, even when he claims to accept the doctrine of evolution, is the outcome of “God Almighty.” Science, on the other hand, explains everything, as far as actual knowledge goes, along lines of natural causation, and finds no need for the “hypothesis of God” to explain anything. Thus, since religion and science are seen to be fundamentally opposed in their explanations of natural phenomena, the conflict between them is inevitable and irreparable. Nevertheless, not all scientists are prepared to indicate the logical outcome of their own work in the field of science; some prefer to pander to the prejudices of the religionists. To give a case in point : In connection with the recent trial in America, where a teacher was charged with “breaking the law” by teaching evolution, Professor J. Arthur Thomson contributed an article to the Daily News on “Evolution and the Bible.”

In that article Professor Thomson quite easily disposed of those people who rely upon Bible teachings to refute the principle of evolution. He reminded his readers that the evolution doctrine is the only scientific account yet advanced to show how living things came to be as they are. He also pointed out that, while there is unanimity among scientists regarding the fact of evolution, there is a considerable difference of opinion among them regarding the “factors of evolution.” Further, the Professor well describes the doctrine of evolution as “a piece of naturalistic historical description.” But, as the old saying goes, after the Lord Mayor’s Show comes the dust cart—instead of showing how all this conflicted with religion, the Professor attempted to “square the circle” in the following manner :—

“It should be noted, however, that the fundamentalist reaction and obscurantism may be partly due to a lack of carefulness in the scientific presentation of evolutionism. Thus the evolution theory has often been presented as if it necessarily implied an acceptance of a mechanistic or materialistic philosophy; and man’s affiliation with mammals has often been stated in a manner so crude that it has obscured his apartness. There is no reason in the world, as far as we know, why a sound evolutionist should not have a religious philosophy. Rather there is, we think, every reason in the world for being both evolutionist and religious.”—Daily News, July 14th, 1925.

Now, it would have proved interesting had the Professor explained what he meant by “a materialistic philosophy,” and how an evolutionist could embrace religion. As they stand, these statements may mean anything and everything but the right thing. Anyhow, there is good ground for believing that Professor Thomson has a special reason for slighting materialism. Materialists have long been the butt of misrepresentation and abuse. As Engels once said of certain of the opponents of materialism, they represent it to mean “gluttony, drunkenness, carnal lust, and fraudulent speculation.” In fact, materialism has been charged with every conceivable vice. Hence the desire of certain “scientists” to repudiate materialism. Nevertheless, the fact is that the doctrine of evolution and science in general, does logically imply a materialistic philosophy, Professor Thomson and other scientists notwithstanding. For that philosophy is simply a view of nature founded upon the facts established by modern science. As Professor Sir Ray Lankester says :—

“The history of scientific discoveries is a history of materialistic successes : for no scientific discovery has ever been made that is not based upon materialism and mechanism.”

Some scientists may disown materialism, but, as another writer has observed, “it lies at the basis of all their efforts.” No matter in which department of science a scientist may be engaged, whether as Astronomer, Geologist, Biologist or Sociologist, his business consists of ascertaining positive knowledge of nature’s workings. And one of the outstanding facts of modern science is, that there is no break or gap in the continuity of natural phenomena. Where gaps exist, the scientist explains that they are only in our knowledge, and not in the “framework of things.” An isolated happening in nature is a myth, for cause and effect is seen to be the rule operating throughout. From this it follows then that the idea of supernatural interference is a figment of the imagination. Science has rendered “God” not only unemployed, but unemployable, without even the power to draw the “dole.” 

When Professor Thomson tells us that an evolutionist may have a religion, we are prompted to suspect that he associates a meaning with religion which it will not logically bear. Nowadays religion has come to mean all sorts of things, and thus we hear of “the religion of ethics,” “the religion of humanity,” and even “the religion of Socialism.” But this is all so much a matter of confusing the issue. Historically, religion has meant the belief in and worship of supernatural beings, and this is its essential meaning to-day; it cannot be separated from the god idea. As Engels has said : “If religion can exist without God, then alchemy can exist without its philosopher’s stone.”

Scientific investigation has revealed that religion first took form in primitive times through the ignorance of primitive men concerning the world around them. Fear and ignorance gave primitive man his gods, and Jehovah, the God of the Bible, is really no more than the gods of the savage transformed under the pressure of a continuous social development. Thus, “religious philosophy,” to use Professor Thomson’s phrase, necessarily implies a belief in this “God” and implies the acceptance of the story of creation.

The evolutionist who can harmonise the myth of “Divine creation” with the principle of evolution may be regarded as sincere, but only at the expense of his sanity. If the Professor, in his capacity of biologist, attempted to explain the differences between man and the anthropoids by saying, “God created them,” he knows he would be ridiculed by his brother biologists. And well deserved such ridicule would be.

Robert Reynolds

Some publications. (1906)

Book Review from the April 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origin of Life, by Joseph McCabe. (Watts & Co.,) 6d.

Professor Oliver Lodge is a gentleman with whose name the churches delight to conjure. He is one of the very few persons of intellectual standing upon whose help the churches, in their strenuous battle against extinction, always rely. He is their stand-by, the straw at which they catch in their efforts to keep their heads above the waters of oblivion which threaten to engulf them. He is a brake to their feet slipping dangerously upon a sharply deflected path. He enables them to dig their toes into the projections (of ignorance) and hang on.

Nevertheless the gospel according to St. Lodge differs from the gospels of that shadowy quartet of New Testament worthies as the proverbial chalk differs from the proverbial cheese. The god in whom his faith finds lodgement (no joke) is as intangible and elusive as the god of the churches is tangible and well defined—to that eye of faith exclusively the property of the church (and chapel) man. The Churches either don't understand this, or do understand—and bury the difference in their quaking hearts. But to our even churchman Professor Lodge is '"agin" the "atheist" (a term embracing everything " agin" the Church'), and is therefore roped in for the defence of the "faith of our fathers." Hence the alacrity with which the Professor's last book, "Life and Matter," is seized upon and hurled in the face of the presumptuous layman in whose sight "miserable and degraded Monism" and the "extravagant, pretensions" and ''rather fly-blown productions" of Professor Haeckel find favour. (It should be mentioned here in fairness to Professor Lodge that the chaste descriptions and the gravely scientific language in quotation marks are his own).

"Life and Matter" purports to be a criticism of the well-known "Riddle of the Universe" by Professor Haeckel, whose name and work have become a haunting horror—a sort of unholy ghost—to those who sit in the darkness of clerical enlightenment. Mr. Joseph McCabe's brochure is a reply to Professor Lodge. Mr. McCabe is the English translator of Haeckel and one of his most doughty champions. His style, while perfectly fair and courteous, is delightfully trenchant, and the manner in which he "goes for" Professor Lodge affords us who are accustomed to, and if the truth must out, rejoice in, the dialectical "rough and tumble," much satisfaction. He finds small difficulty in disposing of Professor Lodge's anti-Haeckel diatribes and effectively establishes the charge he brings against the Lodge method by showing it to be based upon unblushing misquotation. As is moderately well known, Professor Lodge has been repudiated by biologists of established repute, while his dogmatism (the particular failing he alleges with little justification against Haeckel) was recently very roundly censured and his pretensions to biological knowledge crushed by a vigorously worded intervention from Professor Ray Lankester. Mr. McCabe presents the problem which Haeckel has made such valuable contribution to the solution of, very ably and summarises the arguments for the monistic position with considerable skill. We cordially commend his book to the consideration of our readers.

Marx, Engels and Science (2019)

Ray Lankester

From the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

That Marx followed the progress of natural science can be seen from the fact that chemistry professor Carl Schorlemmer and evolutionary biologist Ray Lankester were among the nine who attended the private funeral gathering to mourn the passing of an obscure economic scientist whom Engels eulogized as ‘the best hated and most calumniated man of his times.’

Engels studied mathematical physics in many sources, including the classic eighteenth-century Traité de dynamique by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (co-publisher with Denis Diderot of the great French Encyclopédie).  However, his primary modern source for mathematical physics was the Feynman lecture course of his day, the celebrated nineteenth-century Treatise on Natural Philosophy by Thomson and Tait (popularly known as ‘T&T’).

Engels’s primary modern source for chemistry was the celebrated Treatise on Chemistry by Roscoe and Schorlemmer. Those familiar with the Marx-Engels correspondence will have met organic chemist Carl Schorlemmer as a Marx/Engels comrade-in-exile from 1848 and their trusted scientific consultant.

The two treatises that Engels primarily studied happened to be the standard university textbooks from the mid–nineteenth century right up to the First World War.

Engels adopted a field (non-atomic) approach to electricity (of course, the electron had yet to be discovered, but so too had quantum electrodynamic field theory). To deprive Marx of an atomic theory is to ignore his PhD dissertation on Epicurus in which he famously defended Epicurus’s statistical atomic ‘swerve’ (a Greek pre-echo of quantum indeterminism) for allowing ‘free will’ to arise within a primarily deterministic atomic world.

Volume 31 of Section of Marx Engels Collected Works MEGA(2) [not yet translated into English] lets us glimpse the extent to which Marx took an active interest in the progress of natural science. A paper by MEGA scholars Somnath Ghosh and Pradip Baksi sets out the contents of Marx’s scientific notebooks of 1877-83:

Notebook 1. On the Atomic Theory
Notebook 2. Tabular summaries of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 3. Tables of chemistry
Notebooks 4 & 5. Tables of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 6. Formulae of organic chemistry

Marx’s Notebook Sources include:

• Chemistry: Lothar Meyer, Henry Roscoe, Carl Schorlemmer, Friedrich Kekule
• Modern chemistry: Marx attended August Hoffmann’s lecture course at the Royal College of Chemistry, London
• Agricultural Chemistry: Justus Liebig
• Physiological Chemistry: Wilhelm Kuhne
• Human Physiology: Ludimarr Hermann; Johannes Ranke
• Physics: Benjamin Witzschel
• Geology: Joseph Jukes
• Studies in electromagnetism: Edouard Hospitalier

Forthcoming natural scientific materials (perhaps now published) include Marx’s notes and excerpts on Physics, History of Technology, Geology, Soil Science, History of Agricultural Plants, Agricultural Chemistry, Physiology of Plants, of Animals and of Human Beings, parts of Mathematics and on the interrelationships of the Natural Sciences and Philosophy. One day we will discover just what the mature Marx actually wrote about the latter.

WJC

Science and the Working Class. (1923)

From the January 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although many of the bourgeois scientists, like Professor Ray Lankester, complain that the capitalists do not spend more money on the promotion of science, the fact is that they spend sufficient to meet their requirements.

What are their requirements? Profits.

The capitalists live by exploiting the working-class, and only in so far as any scientific discovery will lead to the obtaining by them of a greater share of the world's wealth, will they encourage the promotion of scientific knowledge.

There is, however, nothing new in this characteristic of the capitalists; their whole history is associated with this fact. In their struggle for supremacy over the feudal barons, the early capitalists discovered one of the obstacles to their advance was that pillar of feudal society, the Roman Catholic Church, of which Engels says :—

  “It united the whole of feudalised Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world.”—(Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Page 24. Kerr edition.)

Therefore, to undermine the "divine rights" of the feudal rulers, was one of the immediate tasks set before the capitalists; a task that was largely accomplished by the aid of science.

Coincident with the struggle of the capitalists to gain a greater share of political power proceeded the revival of scientific learning, and while science had hitherto been the humble servant of the church, confined within the limits set by the faith, and, says Engels, "for that reason had been no science at all,” it now revolted against the church, and sided with the bourgeoisie in their revolutionary mission.

For the development of industrial production, the capitalists needed a science which ascertained the properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of nature. Thus were they constrained to allow the scientists freedom to study the forces of nature. Natural science and the newly discovered natural laws served as tools in the hands of the bourgeoisie against the nobility, clergy-rights, and feudal lords. Social institutions were proved to be man’s own handy-work, and not the result of divine intervention. So with science unhampered by the restrictions of feudalism, rapid advances were made in scientific knowledge.

At the same time such events as the discovery of the new sea route to India, the "fairyland full of immeasurable treasure,” and the discovery of America "with its inexhaustible supply of gold and silver,” also stimulated the growth of science, inasmuch as these discoveries opened up the possibilities of a world market, and satisfied the demands of wealth production on a large scale, as against the handicraft mode of production which prevailed hitherto.

From then down to the present time science has been harnessed to the car of industry, and it can be truthfully said that, nowadays, with its aid, wealth can now be produced almost as plentifully as water. But to the student of working-class politics, there is another side to the story. The socialist is not at all concerned as to whether the capitalists spend little or no money at all on scientific experiments, he knows that they will see to this themselves; what does concern him is that every fresh application of science to industry is a means of increasing the exploitation of the working-class. As the capitalist class own and control the means of wealth production, they also own the wealth when it is produced; only a minor fraction of this wealth goes back to the wealth producers; this fraction they must have to enable them to repeat the performance of producing wealth. Both classes will strive to obtain as great a share of the wealth as possible, but the capitalist being masters of the situation will be in the most favourable position; consequently, any new device to lower the cost of production will be eagerly sought after them. The most up-to-date machinery, or the latest discovery of science, as long as it can be utilised in the productive process, generally serves to increase their share of the wealth produced.

As an instance of the application of scientific methods as an aid to production, I have before me a report of a lecture delivered at the meeting of the British Association held at Hull. Speaking on the subject of Psychology and Industry, Dr. Charles Myers said :—

  “That the function of the psychologist was to try to discover how unnecessary movements causing needless fatigue could be done away with.”

He then went on to give an instance of an application of this psychological test.

  “He told us how in a well-known chocolate factory this had been overcome, and certain improvements had been suggested and adopted; and by the elimination of many unnecessary movements endlessly repeated, the workers had been able to increase their output ; and not only felt less fatigued, but also more contented at the end of the day/’— Daily News, September 8th, 1922.

Mr. Rowntree, of York, also testified to this in greater detail, and spoke of the excellence of the results obtained. So we learn that, leaving aside the point about the workers being more contented at the end of the day, by the application of the test the output of wealth was greater. As to whether the workers were contented at the end of the week, in the event of their discharge, our psychologist does not enlighten us. So just as the mathematical and other sciences have assisted in the exploitation of the working class, so mental science or, to give it its Sunday name, Psychology, is made to serve a similar purpose. Nevertheless, what has been said does not mean that the workers should not devote their I spare time to the study of scientific subjects, on the contrary they should use every means at their disposal to make themselves acquainted with science. As already pointed out, science in the hands of the master-class served them well in their struggle for their emancipation, as it has served them well since.

The workers must also utilise science to gain a knowledge of the means by which they can achieve their freedom from capitalist domination.

The study of the science of society, Sociology, which covers the entire range of human development, including the social sub-sciences such as history, economics, ethics, politics and psychology, will provide the key to the overthrow of the system under which the workers are robbed. The workers of the world must awaken to a recognition of the necessity of education, that is education that will give them an understanding of the laws of social evolution. They should learn all about the nature of the process by which they are robbed and kept in subjection. With this knowledge they will take the necessary action to establish Socialism; then as owners of the world's forces of production, they will welcome every fresh advance of science as an aid to the happiness of society. Fellow-workers make a study of and organise for the establishment of Socialism.

Robert Reynolds.

Sir Ray Lankester and Karl Marx. (1929)

From the September 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Sir Edwin Ray Lankester called forth the following letter, written by Max Beer and published in the Daily Herald on August 20th :—

  It may interest your readers to learn that Sir E. Ray Lankester was, at the beginning of the 'eighties, an admirer of Karl Marx.
  In the archives of the German Social Democracy there are some letters of his to the author of Das Kapital. He was one of the dozen mourners who, in March, 1883, followed the hearse of Marx from Haverhill to Highgate Cemetery.

Where Do We Go From Alienation? (1974)

From the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years Marxism has taken on a different look. The existence in German of early philosophical writings of Marx was known since before the war. The English publication in the late nineteen-fifties of The Holy Family and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 set loose the theory of alienation which Marx formulated as a young man and echoed in his work nearly fifteen years later. Its appearance at first was gratifying enough; here was Marxism come in from the cold, as it were, and revealed as humanism.

From there, however, it has become an academic industry. Preliminary and marginal Marx is turned over in repetition of the thirties’ nonsense-debate as to What he Really Meant. Then, it was about political economy; now, about Man. It’s a sad reflection that Marx and Engels meant their work to make explicit the struggle of the working class, and the academics have obstructed that happening by making it as esoteric as possible. An Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Economics in November dealt with “some theoretical aspects of Marx’s original work” under the heading “The Fundamental Marxian Theorem”. A feeling, no doubt, that so valuable a property cannot be left to the workers’ mucky hands.

But from this scholarship world where theses are hatched to fly in ever-decreasing circles, influences seep down. There is the case of the Left, with leadership increasingly claimed as of right through comprehension of Marxism’s alleged inner mysteries. And there is alienation as not only the vogue-word of the times but one pronounced as substitute for an analysis of practically anything. What is to be said about capitalism in 1974? Alienation. How is the subject-life of millions to be explained? They are alienated. The cry of “alienation” has rendered Marxism as a vague universal humanitarianism instead of the mechanics of the class struggle.

Words and Men

Of course Marx had a conception of the nature of man. He saw man’s distinctive ability to “make his vital activity into an object of his will and consciousness”: his power to create his own environment, to change it and thereby change himself. He saw how capitalism militated against human fulfilment in those terms — productive activity, the “species-life” of man, was appropriated from him. Using Feuerbach’s word, he proposed that man under capitalism was alienated from the product of his labour and the act of production; from other men; and ultimately, therefore, from his own nature.

What does “alienation” mean? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives it as “estrange” or, in legal application, “transferring ownership to another”. The first is a stilted but everyday one. Jane Austen in Persuasion has: "What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals . . .” The second is found in records of changes in the holding of land, as:

   Further alienation occurred in 1636 to Charles Maynard, one of the Auditors of His Majesties Court of Wards and Liverys, who in 1639 became the purchaser of the manor and the whole of its rights and privileges.

(A Calendar of Deeds, pub. 1923)

It is important that these meanings should not be confused. Up to quite recent years legal actions were occasionally brought by husbands for “alienation of the affections” of their wives. What was envisaged was not estrangement — which had obviously taken place anyway — but the loss of the wife’s services and duties: a matter of property.

The German words Marx used for alienation were “Entfremdung”, “Verausserung” and “Entäusserung” They correspond with the English meanings above, the first two referring to property and the last to personal relations. Marx seems to have used them more or less indistinctly. In the Communist Manifesto “entäusserung des menschlichen wesens” is “alienation of humanity”, and in Vol. I of Capital (p.708, Kerr edn.) the word “entfremden” is used in “estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”.

In his book Marx's Theory of Alienation István Mészáros attempts to explain the difference:

  When the accent is on “externalization’ or “ojectification”, Marx uses the term "Entäusserung” (or terms like “Vergegenständlichung”), whereas “Entfremdung” is used when the author's intention is to emphasize the fact that man is being opposed by a hostile power of his own making, so that he defeats his own purpose.

This explanation is less important than the actual translations into English. Why did Moore and Aveling, who translated Vol. I of Capital, choose and Engels as editor approve “estrange” — and, elsewhere, “divorce”? All three knew Marx and were well placed to render what was in his mind. Yet we know for a certainty that any modern scholar would seize on “alienate”, because the intellectual fashion of the time says so. And with it is conveyed a heavy philosophical package.

Changes of Thinking

The theory of alienation appeared initially as Marx’s first view of the capitalist world, an interim enquiry between the Hegelian philosophy of his youth and his major historical and economic analysis. The academicians will have none of that, however. David McLellan in Marx Before Marxism declares:

   Those who claim to find a break between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ Marx usually maintain that alienation is a concept that was central to Marx’s early thought but which he abandoned later . . . These statements are, however, inaccurate.

For McLellan, the Grundrisse of 1857-8 is the final word:

  The Grundrisse, then, are as Hegelian as the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ and their publication makes it impossible to maintain that only Marx’s early writings are of philosophical interest, and that in the later Marx specialist economic interests have obscured the earlier humanist vision.

Mészáros takes the same standpoint, pouring scorn on those who believe Marx put aside the alienation concept and quoting from The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value. But difficulties immediately arise. Except the Grundrisse these are all early works, and both Marx and Engels wrote deprecatingly of them later. A. Voden in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels recalled a conversation in 1893 in which Engels refused to have an interest in “publishing old manuscripts from publicistic work of the forties”; and Marx spoke of The German Ideology as having been meant mainly for “self-clarification”. Indeed, The German Ideology—only two years after the 1844 Manuscripts—makes ironical references to “the self-estrangement of man”. Likewise the Communist Manifesto (1848) ridicules the German academics:

  They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”.

(SPGB edition, p. 85)

More Reservations

Having claimed that Marx never gave up the alienation theory, Mészáros has to qualify the assertion:

  But once it is conceived in its broadest outlines—in the Manuscripts of 1844— it becomes possible to let the general term “recede” in the presentation . . . This is why it is not at all surprising to find that the works which followed the Manuscripts of 1844, up to about 1856—and written for publication—are far less densely populated with the word “alienation” than the first broad synthesis.

This is “special pleading” with a vengeance, and it does not stand up for a moment. If Marx really thought on those lines, that having stated a theory there was no need to go on reiterating it, he did not act accordingly over the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history; these, once begun, never “recede” in his work. To look at this another way, Marx’s main works have been extant for generations. In them the words “alienate” and “estrange”, and statements on the condition of man, have been perfectly comprehensible as part of his economic analysis. It is only the early and preparatory works which put them in the context of a philosophical theory belonging, at that, to Marx’s intercourse with the Hegelians and Feuerbach.

But what about Engels? According to both Mészáros and McLellan, Marx was first influenced towards the alienation concept by Engels’s Outline of a Critique of Political Economy (1843-44); and there is Engels’s own work on Feuerbach. Mészáros and McLellan both lay stress on Marx’s unfulfilled intention to produce an enormous work on mankind, of which Capital was the first “brochure”. It should be taken for granted that Engels, as the lifelong collaborator of Marx, would share the pursuit of the alienation theory and seek to complete what Marx allegedly left unfinished. But not only did Engels dismiss their early philosophical work and describe its “semi-Hegelian language” as “not only untranslatable, but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German” (letter to Mrs. F. K. Wischnewetsky, 1886); the theory is — despite the wide range of his social investigation — entirely absent from his own post-juvenile writings.

A Sterile Concept

It is possible, of course, to brush off Engels on the grounds that he was not Marx. That is what Kamenka. in The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, attempts to do. However, in the Introduction to Marx and Engels : Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer argues and offers evidence that for Marx the alienation theory was a youthful aberration which he shared Engel’s wish to forget. He points out that Marx’s last published writing, A Workers' Enquiry (1880), showed him preoccupied with further economic research “into the deeds and misdeeds of capitalist exploitation” (Marx’s own words):

  It consisted of a hundred questions directed to workers as to their conditions, their treatment by their employers and governmental agencies, their conditions at home, their diet, their children, the frequency and duration of strikes, the workingmen’s societies, and so on.

And in 1881 Marx wrote to a Russian correspondent about his friend Ray Lankester’s essay Degeneration. Of Marx’s interest in it, Feuer says: “Evidently it was related to an even more basic questioning of his philosophical standpoint which he never articulated.”

What then are we left with? A theory which Marx may or may not have retained; which Engels apparently discarded altogether; of uncertain terminology; and in the absence of which, Marxism has existed as a lucid, coherent and not-at-all-deficient body. Its being put in the fore of left-wing Marxism has damaged that coherence, despite claims that it gives “a fuller view”. Bertell Oilman in his book Alienation presents value, appropriation, the money-system etc. as facets of alienation; Mészáros asserts the importance of economics to be as

  a vital link in the programme of gaining mastery over the various causal factors involved, serving the purpose of practically superseding alienation in all spheres of life.

This does not expand the existing view of Marxism: it diminishes it. If a working man understands (in fact, he already does) that he is estranged from life’s potentialities by being exploited, that is proper consciousness. But if he is to be asked to say he is first and foremost alienated, and exploited as part of it, that is futile.

Meaning and Purpose

This brings us to the question: where does the theory of alienation lead? Any theory is going to be reduced in frequent usage to the common-or-garden, and at this level it has already become sheer do-gooding with a highfalutin name. Four years ago a TV programme on political dissent showed a member of a well-known left-wing group expounding alienation: “There — on the other side of that wall — you could die, and nobody would know about it!” Of course there is an appeal in this kind of “theorizing”, and being able to invoke the pre-scientific Marx for it. It is not only more romantic but easier than learning the economics of capitalism.

At the academic level, however, there is not much improvement. Oilman gives a clear and readable account of the alienation theory, but seems conscious at the end of the problem of not knowing what to do with it: his critical summary turns out to be chiefly a criticism of Marx’s economic categories after all. And Mészáros, after attacking the “hot air”, “falsifications” and “grotesque ideas” of misinterpreters of Marx, emerges as a supporter of the regimes in Cuba, China and Eastern Europe and a believer that the critical breakdown of capitalism is almost upon us. Since this is merely the old rubbish of the Left, the alienation theory looks to have been brought forward as a convoluted support for it.

  

Only one conclusion is possible. The Marxian Socialism which makes sense is founded on the economic theory of Marx about which there is no surmise. It does not at all exclude “human” considerations; on the contrary, it has no meaning if it does not begin from indignation at what capitalism does to the great majority of people. But nor can it have meaning unless it is understood to be rooted in the class struggle. The way to Marx’s “human society” is not through contemplating “freedom as essence” (Oilman’s phrase) but by consciousness aimed at abolishing exploitation.

Robert Barltrop