This part of the book details Marx’s delineation of the Struggle. He saw it as an ongoing, rational war between the compliant and self satisfied bourgeois and the underclass that gave their work away for pennies. Berlin skips around a lot, and so it is possible that this section will be updated and revised as excerpt further along; he does not adhere to the system of chapters that he himself devised. He seems to feel that that too is petty and bourgeois and so he roams around Marx’s life and view, scattering them helter-skelter throughout.
Once Marx identified the struggles of his own time with not only his native German proletariat but all the workers of universe, he then devoted the rest of his own life to their planning. Their victory was secure, but human courage, determination and ingenuity could bring it about nearer and thus make the ultimate transition less painful. This would mean less friction and also less waste of human substance; which of course meant that that that too would be good.
Henceforth, he positioned himself as a commander, and felt that he was actually engaged in a military and political campaign. As such he did not feel that he should continually call upon himself and others to show reason for engaging in a war, or for being on one side rather than the other: the state of war and one’s own position in it are given; they are facts, not to be questioned, and endlessly examined but to be accepted. One’s sole business is to defeat the enemy; all other problems are academic, and so beside the point.
Thus, the almost complete absence in Marx’s later works of discussions of ultimate principles, of all attempts to justify his opposition to the bankrupt bourgeoisie. The merits or defects of the enemy, is of no interest during the battle; they are a given. To introduce them during the conflict, was not only irrelevant issues but would divert the attention of one’s troops (supporters) from the crucial issues with which, whether or not they recognize them, they are faced, and in doing so not only weaken their power of resistance, but possibly subvert it.
So the questioning of motives was ignored by Marx. Instead he concentrated on knowledge of one’s own resources and of those of the adversary; he assumed the rest as it was naturally apparent. To him, knowledge of the history of society, and the laws which govern it, was indispensable to this end and Das Kapital is an attempt to provide such an analysis.
The almost complete absence of an explicit moral argument, or f any appeal to the moral conscience or the underinnings of a principle was unique. Equally striking was the absence of a detailed prediction of what will or should happen after the victor; all the focus instead was on the practical problems of action and war.
Marx wrote that Socialism does not appeal, it demands; it does speak of rights, but of a new form of life, liberated from constricting social structures, before whose inexorable approach the old social order has visibly begun to disintegrate. Moral, political, economic conceptions and ideals alter with the social conditions from which they spring: to regard any one of them as universal and immutable is tantamount to believing that the order to which they belong—in this case the bourgeois order—is eternal, which is underlies the ethical and psychological doctrines of idealistic humanitarians (fools all) from the eighteenth century onwards.
Contempt and loathing poured from Marx’s pen, upon the common assumption made by liberals and utilitarians, that since the interests of all men are ultimately, and have always been, the same, a measure of understanding, goodwill and benevolence on the part of everyone may yet make it possible to arrive at some sort of general consensus satisfactory to all.
Marx countered, that if the class war is real, and it most certainly was, these interests are totally nonsensical as how could a class system have evolved in the first place? A denial of this fact canonly because the questioner was stupid or cynical and totally disregarded the truth, which he felt was a peculiarly vicious form of hypocrisy or self-deception repeatedly exposed by history.
This fundamental difference of outlook, is what distinguishes Marx sharply from the bourgeois radicals and Utopian socialists whom, to their own bewildered indignation, he fought and abused savagely and unremittingly for more than forty years.
He detested their romanticism, emotionalism, and humanitarian appeals of every kind, and, in his anxiety to avoid any appeal to the idealistic feelings of his audience, he systematically tried to remove every trace of the old democratic rhetoric from the propagandist literature of his movement. He neither offered nor invited concessions at any time; he did not enter into any dubious political alliances, since he despised all forms of compromise.
The manifestos, was his and subsequently his supporters’ profession of faith and so also programmes of action. He appended his name to them, but they contain scarcely any references to moral progress, eternal justice, the equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization, and other such phrases which were the stock-in-trade (and had once genuinely embodied ideals) of the democratic movements of his time; he looked upon these as so much worthless cant, indicating confusion of thought and ineffectiveness in action; in short they obscured the true message.
Since the war, his war, must be fought on every front and all the time, , and, since contemporary society is politically organized, a political party must be formed out of those elements which in accordance with the laws of historical development are destined to emerge as the conquering class. They must be taught that what seems so secure in existing society is in reality, doomed to swift extinction, a fact which men may find it difficult to believe because of the immense protective façade of moral, religious, political and economic assumptions and beliefs, but this is because the moribund bourgeois class consciously or unconsciously creates it, and so blind itself and others to its own approaching fate.
It requires both intellectual courage and acuteness of vision to penetrate this smoke-screen and perceive the real structure of events. The spectacle of chaos, and the imminence of the crisis in which it is bound to end, will of itself convince a clear-eyed and interested observer—for no one who is not virtually dead or dying can be a disinterested spectator of the fate of the society with which his own life is bound up—of what he must be and do in order to survive. This cannot be a subjective scale of values revealed differently to different men, determined by the light of an inner vision, but instead must be knowledge of the facts themselves, that everyman can easily discern and know, and so must, according to Marx, determine their rational behavior
A society is judged to be progressive, and so worthy of support, if it is one those institutions who are capable of the further development of its productive forces without subverting its entire basis.
A society is reactionary when it is inevitably moves into an impasse, unable to avoid internal chaos and its ultimate collapse in spite of the most desperate efforts to survive. Those very efforts are what creates the irrational faith of its populace in its own stability, it is the anodyne that all dying orders use to conceal the stench of death, from themselves.
Nevertheless, what history has objectively condemned will be inevitably swept away: and to say that something ought to be saved, even when that is not possible, is to deny the rational plan of the universe.
===========from the book by Sir Isaiah Berlin, Marx’s Life and his Environment.
Tough medicine indeed.
In my anguish... 