Hyman Levy 1950
Source: A chapter in Two Worlds in Focus: Studies of the Cold War, National Peace Council, London, undated but internal evidence suggests 1950. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Summary: In this chapter the author explains the radical contribution which Marxism has provided in the social field. Hitherto the social processes which have taken place in history had been recorded, but little or no attempt had been made to discover what had caused them. Marx analysed by the scientific method why social development and change had taken and are taking place, and therefore was able to predict the direction of change in the future, the decay of capitalism and the emergence of socialism as the inevitable outcome of the human struggle for greater freedom.
The author contends not only that the Marxist becomes a Marxist through intellectual conviction, reached by a study of the direction of historical movement, but that Marxism necessarily involves moral judgements and a realisation of certain values. The human motives which produce a particular type of civilisation with its various incidents denote the rejection or acceptance of certain values. The author takes as one example the value which is placed on cultural influences in the Soviet Union, contrasting the encouragement and economic security which are offered to the creative artist with the poverty and economic uncertainty which have frequently been the fate of the artist under the capitalist system. The values which a society professes may not be the values which that society in fact observes. The test must lie not in the field of theory alone, but in the actual practice of a civilisation. With the advent of a classless society, the author maintains, the stage is set for a fuller and freer exercise of new human judgements. As men learn to live together in peace and harmony the horizon of their consciousness will be extended and may create a broad front of relatively unchanging moral values.
Marxism finds its first clear statement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The period is significant. Science in its application to machine design and to manufacture had swung into its stride, and a tremendous impetus had been given to the Industrial Revolution. For those with eyes to see and a heart to feel, the effects on the working class in town, mine, and factory were all too obvious; slumdom with its load of suffering humanity, starvation wages, poverty, misery, insecurity and decay; child and women labour, overcrowding and destruction of family life. The scorching flame of the Communist Manifesto (1848) reflects the righteous indignation of those who are no longer prepared to suffer in silence the treatment of human beings as mere instruments of private profit, nor to listen to those who justified this war on a class by prating of the sanctity of private enterprise. To Marx and Engels one was either for or against this abomination, this wholesale sacrifice of human beings on the altar of Mammon; either for a society that needed such conditions of life to perform its capitalist function — or a rebel with all that this implied in personal self-sacrifice.
This is the moral issue that faces every Marxist, the compulsion that drives him, as it has driven others who are not Marxists, to face abuse, misrepresentation, witch-hunting and victimisation, in the effort to seek a solution to this insistent problem.
By the middle of the nineteenth century scientific methodology had received but little attention. Even by the relatively small body of scientific men themselves it was scarcely understood, and in any case thought of only in relation to machine-like processes. To Marx and Engels, influenced as they were by the success of the scientific method, social change was clearly also a process in nature, albeit one with a highly developed form of movement compared with simple physical changes. Here was something brought into play not simply by the interplay of inanimate physical objects, expressing ordinary dynamical and chemical laws, but by the dynamic energy of large numbers of sentient and thinking beings, performing their allotted tasks under the particular scheme of social organisation in operation at the moment, whether it be tribal, feudal or capitalist. Through what pattern of change, they asked, will such activity drive society, when the beings themselves are unaware of the pattern they are creating? Extending the methodology of science to make it appropriate to the analysis of such processes, they found the answer to this precise question, and disclosed the motivating forces of social change. In particular they brought out the general manner in which the capitalist phase must finally pass into a socialist community of peoples. The detailed analysis at the stage of imperialism and finance capitalism, the inherent instability of its economy that must show itself in booms, slumps and a drive to war, colonial and imperialist, was examined in meticulous detail by Lenin. Only those who have taken the trouble to study these voluminous works are in a position to criticise them. Their correctness, however, stands on its own as a piece of rational analysis, but to Marxists who have thus become conscious of the changing pattern of society, it is at once a guide to political struggle, and a basis for the belief that the struggle will not be vain.
From this standpoint Marxism is presented as an extension of science, emerging, like the latter, from within the capitalist system, but since it plays no part in the furtherance of capitalism as normal science does, predicting rather its decay and collapse, it has been given no place within the normal framework of applied science. In capitalist countries the inducement to study it is therefore a moral and not a professional one, so that the Marxist is an exception. Most of its critics have never even examined it. In socialist countries, where its methodology is used for socialist planning, the inducement is both moral and economic, and Marxism is a matter for general study and of universal interest. There a creative Marxist is accorded high honour; here he is purged and victimised. Early Christians received similar treatment.
To be a full Marxist therefore one must be prepared for self-sacrifice. It follows that even if Marxism is a mistaken theory and practice, he can have taken up his position only through intellectual conviction, just as he turns to its study under the lash of moral indignation. To assert that he accepts what the Kremlin dictates therefore, without question, is simply to show an invincible ignorance of the springs of human conduct. It is one of the commonest misrepresentations.
It will be apparent then that Marxists are impregnated with moral judgements. Are Marxists then conscious of these, and what place do they find in their theory? These two questions are not distinct. Both Christians and Marxists accept the same criterion: ‘By their deeds shall ye know them.’ The behaviour of a person or of a group reflects their values, not necessarily what they profess. A society, for example, that condemns individuals to death for sheep-stealing expresses in such actions that the institution of private property is more important than the sanctity of human life. That was, of course, the judgement of a property-owning class. It was obviously not the judgement of the property-less class of the period. A Marxist begins by separating out those values that are generally accepted in a class-divided society like our own, from those that reflect mainly the outlook and interests of the dominating class. If the institution of private property passes, the latter value will in effect become moribund. It might then become possible, without contradiction, to talk of the sanctity of human life, and to treat life as such. But there can be no absolutes. To demand that millions of human beings sacrifice their lives, and the well-being of their dependents, in order that a certain war may be won is to assert that the objectives of that war are more significant than the personalities, loves, brotherhood, friendship and personal loyalties of the victims. How can one, without contradiction, assert that human individuality represents the highest value and at the same time justify the strategic bombing of cities with its indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children, precisely such individuals?
Marxists, although they do not accept the necessity for war, accept a certain underlying principle in this as a social and historical fact. Every society, whether socially stratified or not, must decide the degree of unregulated individual activity that can be allowed, compatible with an ordered development of social life. In the same measure society does, in fact, demand personal sacrifice for what is asserted to be the common good, although in fact it may merely be the good of a dominant class masquerading as the good of the whole. This does not mean that the Marxist does not place a high value on personal qualities, or, as it is sometimes foolishly stated, denies the existence of the individual as such, or dismisses the importance of a sense of right or wrong in the individual or in his conscience. How can he, when these are so clearly compelling factors that have turned him to the study of Marxism? On the contrary he sees that social coherence, common effort to a socially desirable end, cannot be achieved without them. The one is bound up with the other. Rather it is that the objective problems with which the ‘pricking of conscience’ is associated are of a different nature in socialist society from those in an individualistic community. The encouragement of comradeship, friendship, mutual respect and loyalty to social ideals is an essential element in socialist planning. It is not that the individual is nothing without society; it is rather that the individual is something because of society, and because of the individual contribution he makes towards its development. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend.’ To this the Marxist might agree, but he would add, ‘especially if the friend be an unknown comrade’.
To give verbal adherence to these values is one thing. To write them in deeds is another. The Marxist denies that capitalist society takes the question of deeds seriously. Individuals do — but not society. The very fact that it is ridden with social distinctions and class snobbery, class-divided, split into groups with conflicting social ideals — all this is evidence of a lack of coherence and unity. How can an acquisitive and competitive society breed comradeship and brotherly love, unless it be among those who combine to fight it? How can overcrowding, unemployment, extortionate rents for ‘furnished’ slums, breed anything but disillusion, anger, hatred of the proximity of one’s fellow men, and the disruption of family life? No Royal Commission has ever been set up to find a clear-cut answer to the question, ‘What is the cause of poverty?’, nor would any industrial firm be interested, because it would see no material profit in it. Contrast this with the undeniable fact that the USSR, Communist China, the Eastern European Democracies, have all been established in the practical struggle to solve this very problem. This is an indictment of values in capitalist society — especially social values — and it is an evasion to counter-attack by asking where do Marxists have a place for human personality, as if the questioners have a clean bill. They have not.
Values occur at various levels. Individuals express them in their behaviour. The National Peace Council, trade unions, the Cooperative movement as seen through its interest in education, the Federation of British Industries, the working class, those who control our press, all express values, and finally there are certain values which are accepted irrespective of class or creed. Society is much more to the Marxist than a mere aggregation of individuals. Anyone who has watched the care and attention devoted in the Socialist states to schools, hospitals, crèches, clinics and convalescent homes must see in this a social labour of love, a manifestation of deliberately organised brotherhood. Look at the value which is placed on the cultural development of the wide variety of nationalities in the Soviet Union, their music, literature, dramatic, plastic and graphic arts. Czarist Russia was a prison of nations. Today these peoples are expressing a new upsurge of aesthetic appreciation that has been stifled in the past. New values are being created. Gipsy and Yiddish theatres play to packed audiences. Even peoples like the Esquimaux, who had not attained to the level of a written language, have been provided with one in order that a new avenue of expression may be opened up to them. Only in a society set free, can such an organic and integrated value-movement be inaugurated. It is the people in its infinite variety expressing itself through its hitherto untapped reserves of human energy.
Consider now a special group — writers, artists and musicians — and the relation of the values of this group to those of the community, the relation of the creators of art to those who appreciate the aesthetic content of the work. To argue as some do that the artist is some kind of mystic being who is necessarily a law unto himself, is to deny the existence of any such relation, and to repudiate any mutual ethical responsibility. Or it suggests that the artist may enjoy the social amenities provided by the brain and brawn of others, but there is no reciprocal duty to make his work necessarily meaningful to others. The Marxist asserts that there is a value-relationship here that requires examination. He has no patience with the practice in capitalist society that would leave the publisher, using the criterion of profit, to determine what literature or music the public may enjoy. This — to him shoddy — idea, is on a par with the shallow assertion that the films, theatre and press provide the public with what it wants, as if an individual presented with a choice between two evils wants the lesser evil. In this connection also we must note that in capitalist society art tends to be divorced from the people. Any man in the street will provide proof of this. Here then are two problems — how can artists be encouraged to produce of their best, and how can the latent aesthetic capacities of the people be evoked and encouraged to further development? To the Marxist they are two aspects of the same problem. The artist comes from the people, and it is the people who have to value his work, in the last resort. An artist is concerned with reality, even in his highest flight of fancy. Experiment is as essential for him as for the scientist, and in neither case is the criterion of its ‘truth’ merely personal or subjective alone. In being true to the world around him, including his fellow-men, he is true to himself. It is therefore an unintelligent artist who imagines he can mirror reality, in the deepest sense, without being to some extent also a teacher. This means that for a significant part of his work he must speak in the idiom of his people, extracting from and adding to their experience. An artist does not stand alone but draws others with him. This is all that Soviet critics have asked of their artists, and in return Soviet society provides them with a security and a level of life unheard of, except for film stars, in capitalist society. To regard artists as geniuses born out of their day, and to leave them for commercial exploitation or to starve in a garret (since they are born out of their time) is to deny a value in practice that one asserts in theory. In our acquisitive society no parent looks without concern on a decision of his sons or daughters to devote themselves to writing, painting or music. That is an indication of the social value we place on these matters as opposed to the ‘verbal’ value we place on the genius. Finally let it be added that Marxists regard criticism as in itself a contribution to creative work, but one that is also effectively expressed through the group. Hence before it is voiced it is thrashed out by a body of experts. This organised effort is the practical manifestation of a social value. These illustrations bring out the variety of levels at which values manifest themselves in a socialist society, the conscious way in which they are organised for expression and encouragement, and the new types of values that therefore emerge. Since all this is intimately bound up with the fact that the class struggle has been resolved there, it is not easy for those in one half of the world to sense the moral compulsions of those in the other half. To deny their existence, or to assert that one is absolute and the other relative, is naive. Each has to be seen against the changing background of the society from which it emerges. To the Marxist who sees society beginning to move itself consciously and unerringly towards its historic goal of a classless society, the stage is being set for a conscious widening of the range of human experience, and a fuller and freer exercise of new human judgements and values. As the economic sources of disagreement vanish and men learn to live together in peace and harmony, it may be that they will create also a broad front of relatively unchanging moral values, to which one can accord something of the status of natural law on the ethical plane.