Handling Halos

Your correspondent, "Partisan", shows clearly the errors which come from too rigid an orthodoxy. Marx himself and Engels knew the advantages of flexibility; "Partisan's" writings seem to show what Marx meant when he said that he himself was not a Marxist.

"Partisan" points out that the rise and victory of the middle class was a necessary prelude to the rise and victory of the proletariat, for without a middle class there can be no proletariat. (It has been remarked—Russia is a fine example of this process.) Then he calls Charles I a villain, and Cromwell a hero, because the one opposed and the other furthered the rise of the middle class. But should not "Partisan" go further? In 1835 certain middle class M.P.'s had a new Poor Law passed, which brought sections of the rural workers to actual starvation; Cobbett opposed them because he loved the English peasantry. But such a poor law was (to adopt the Marxist hypothesis) a necessary step in the emancipation of the middle class from state control; with the Reform Bill and the Corn Law repeal it made middle class predominance assured. Will "Partisan" hand the halo to the M.P.'s and send Corbett to perdition? To be consistent, he should. And will he bless those who sought to retain the 16-hour working day, and curse those like Robert Owen who thought that 8 or 10 hours were enough? I think he should, for the middle class was still climbing to power in the 1820's and 30's, and the long working day helped their climb. They had not yet fulfilled their historic mission of calling the proletariat into existence.

This reductio ad absurdum may point to the source of "Partisan's" folly. He is handling (rather clumsily) a key to the historical process which can claim no more than the discovery of facts. The dialectic in itself can provide no basis for value judgments. "Partisan" may reply that the only valid values are proletarian values. And here we meet a fallacy which is not his alone, but the general property of Marxism. Dialectical materialism had perhaps its brightest moment when it showed how values and value judgments arose from the ideology of a specific class, and so from the economic arrangements which gave dominance to that class. There are (to summarise) slave-state values, feudal values, and middle class values, appropriate only to slave-owners, feudal nobles, and the middle class respectively. Values, according to this interesting theory, are wholly and in every way relative. And what of proletarian values? If we are consistent, they arise from the ideology of the proletarian class, and so from certain economic arrangements. They (logically) apply only to the proletariat, and so are completely relative. But Marx wanted to say more than that, and so does "Partisan". He wanted to give eternity to the proletariat, to make their dominance the end-point of the human process, to make their values absolute. A religion could no no less. He acted like a normal conscience-stricken European. But in doing so he threw logic and consistency to the winds, and left his theories in two incompatible parts. There is the determinist view of history, as logical as any historicism ever is; there is further a moral impulsion arising solely from generous feeling. But with all this, Marx didn't fall into the same abyss of error as his disciple, "Partisan", who has added his own confusions. Perhaps he will next give praise to the medieval Christian Church—for the Church helped the feudal nobles to dominance, and so prepared the ground for the rise of the bourgeoisie, who in turn nourished the proletarian plant.

W. H. Oliver.