On the Contradictions of Marxism

To my mind, it is not events which make a revision of Marxism a necessity, it is Marx’s doctrine, which, because of the gaps and inconsistencies it contains, is and has always been far inferior to the role people have wanted to make it play; which does not mean to say that either then or since anything better has been worked out. It is the recollection of my own personal experience that leads me to express so categorical a judgment, and one so calculated to cause offence. When, in my youth, I read Capital for the first time, I was immediately struck by certain gaps, certain contradictions of the first importance. Their very obviousness, at that time, prevented me from placing confidence in my own judgment; I said to myself that so many great minds that have embraced Marxism must also have perceived these patently clear gaps and inconsistencies; that therefore the former must certainly have been filled in, the latter resolved, in other works on Marxist doctrine. How many young minds are not thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts? As for me, in the years that followed, the study of Marxist literature, of Marxist parties or those which go by that name, and of events themselves, was only able to confirm me in the judgment formed in my youth. So it is not by comparison with the facts, but in itself, that I consider Marxist doctrine to be defective; or rather, I think that the body of writings by Marx, Engels and those who have taken them as guides does not constitute a doctrine.

There is a contradiction, an obvious, glaring contradiction, between Marx’s analytic method and his conclusions. This is not surprising; he worked out the conclusions before the method. Hence Marxism’s claim to be a science is rather amusing. Marx became a revolutionary in his youth, under the influence of noble sentiments; his ideal at this period was, indeed, humane, clear, conscious, reasoned, quite as much as—and even considerably more than—during the subsequent years of his life. Later, he tried to work out a method for studying human societies. His vigorous mind did not allow him to manufacture a mere caricature of a method; he saw, or at any rate glimpsed, an authentic method. Such are the two contributions he made to the history of thought: in his youth, he perceived a new formula for the social ideal, and in his maturity, the new or partly new formula of a method for interpreting history. He thus gave double proof of genius. Unfortunately, loth, as all strong characters are, to allow two separate men to go on living in him—the revolutionary and the scientist; averse also to that sort of hypocrisy which adherence to an ideal unaccompanied by action implies; insufficiently scrupulous, moreover, in regard to his own thought, he insisted on making his method into an instrument for predicting a future in conformity with his desires. To achieve this, he was obliged to give a twist both to the method and to the ideal, to deform the one and the other. In the slackening of his thought which permitted such deformations, he allowed himself—he, the nonconformist—to be carried away into an unconscious conformity with the most ill-founded superstitions of his day, the cult of production, the cult of big industry, the blind belief in progress. He thus dealt a serious and lasting, maybe irreparable blow—at any rate one difficult to repair—both to the scientific and to the revolutionary spirit. I do not think that the workers’ movement in this country will become something living again until it seeks, I will not say doctrines, but a source of inspiration, in what Marx and Marxists have fought against and very foolishly despised: in Proudhon, in the workers’ groups of 1848, in the trade-union tradition, in the anarchist spirit. As for a doctrine, the future alone, at best, will perhaps be able to provide one; not the past.

Marx’s ideas about revolutions can be expressed thus: a revolution takes place at the moment when it is already nearly accomplished; it is when the structure of a society has ceased to correspond to its institutions that these change and are replaced by others which reflect the new structure. In particular, the section of society which the revolution places in power is the same as that which already, before the revolution, although victimized by the prevailing institutions, in fact played the most active role. Broadly speaking, “historical materialism”, so often misunderstood, means that institutions are determined by the actual mechanism of the relations between men, which in turn depends on the form taken at each moment by the relations between man and nature, that is to say on the way in which production is carried out; production of consumer goods, production of the means of production, and also—an important point, although Marx leaves it undeveloped—production of the means of making war. Men are not the impotent playthings of fate; they are eminently active beings; but their activity is at each moment limited by the structure of the society which they form among themselves, and only modifies that structure in its turn by a ricochet, once it has modified the relations between them and nature. The social structure can never be modified except indirectly.

On the other hand, the analysis of the present system—an analysis that is found scattered through several of Marx’s works—fixes the source of the cruel oppression suffered by the workers not in men, nor in institutions, but in the very mechanism of social relations. If the workers are exhausted by fatigue and want, this is because they do not count for anything and the growth of the factories counts for everything. They do not count for anything because the role that the majority of them play in production is that of mere cogs, and they are degraded to this role of cogs because intellectual labour has become separated from manual labour, and because the development of machinery has taken away the privilege of skill from man so as to transfer it to inert matter. The growth of the factory counts for everything, because the spur of competition is continually forcing factories to expand in order to subsist; consequently “the relationship between consumption and production is reversed”, “consumption is only a necessary evil”; and if the workers are not paid according to the value of their labour, this is simply the result of the “reversal of the relationship between subject and object” which sacrifices man to lifeless machinery and makes production of the means of production the supreme aim.

The role of the State leads to a similar analysis. If the State is oppressive, if democracy is a delusion, it is because the State is composed of three permanent bodies, recruited by co-option and distinct from the people, namely, the army, the police and the bureaucracy. The interests of these three bodies are different from those of the population and consequently opposed to them. It follows that the “State machine” is oppressive by its very nature, its mechanism cannot function without crushing the citizens; the best will in the world cannot turn it into an instrument for the public good; the only way to stop it from being oppressive is to smash it. Moreover—and in this matter Marx’s analysis is less rigorous—the oppression exercised by the State machine is identical with that exercised by big industry; this machine is automatically at the service of the principal social force, namely, capital, or in other words the equipment of industrial undertakings. Those who are sacrificed to the development of industrial equipment, that is to say the proletariat, are also those who are exposed to the full brutality of the State, and the State keeps them by force in the position of slaves of the undertakings.

What are we to conclude? The conclusion forces itself on the mind: nothing of all this can be abolished by means of a revolution; on the contrary, all this must have disappeared before a revolution can take place; or if it does take place beforehand, it will only be an apparent revolution which will leave oppression intact or even increase it. Yet Marx reached precisely the opposite conclusion; he concluded that society was ripe for a revolution of liberation. Do not let us forget that nearly a hundred years ago he already thought such a revolution to be imminent. On this point at any rate he has been strikingly refuted by events, strikingly so in Europe and in America, still more strikingly so in Russia. But the refutation provided by events was scarcely necessary; in Marx’s doctrine itself the contradiction was so striking that it is surprising neither he, nor his friends, nor his followers became aware of it. How were the factors of oppression, so closely bound up with the actual mechanism of social life, suddenly to disappear? How, given big industry, machinery and the degradation of manual labour, could the workers be anything but mere cogs in the factories? How, if they continued to be mere cogs, could they at the same time become the “ruling class”? How, given the techniques of war, policing and administration, could the military, police and administrative functions cease to be specialized callings, professions, and consequently the prerogative of “permanent bodies, distinct from the population”? Or else must we assume a transformation of industry, of machinery, of the technique of manual labour, that of administration, that of war? But such transformations are slow, gradual; they are not the result of a revolution.

One can say that to such questions which immediately follow from Marx’s analyses, neither Marx, nor Engels, nor their disciples provided the least answer. They passed them over in silence. In regard to one point only did Marx and Engels draw attention to a possible transition from the capitalist system towards a better form of society; they thought they saw that the very development of competition must bring about automatically, and in a brief space, the disappearance of competition and at the same time that of capitalistic property. In effect, the concentration of undertakings was taking place under their eyes, just as it still is under ours. Seeing that it is competition which, under the capitalist system, turns the expansion of undertakings into an end, and men, whether considered as producers or consumers, into a mere means, they could indeed regard the disappearance of competition as equivalent to that of the system itself. But they reasoned wrongly in one respect; just because competition, which causes the small to be devoured by the big, gradually reduces the number of competitors, you cannot therefore conclude that this number must one day necessarily be reduced to one. Moreover, Marx and Engels, in their analysis, omitted one factor: war. Marxists have never analysed the phenomenon of war, nor its relation to the economic system; for I do not call the simple assertion that capitalist greed is the cause of wars an analysis. What a gap! And what credence can be given to a theory which claims to be scientific and is capable of such an omission? For since industrial production is nowadays not only the chief source of wealth but also the chief means of carrying on war, the result is that it is subjected not only to competition between undertakings but to a still more urgent and imperative competition—that between nations. How is that competition to be abolished? Must it, like the other, abolish itself by the progressive elimination of competitors? Must we wait, in order to be able to look forward to socialism, for the day when the world will find itself under the pax Germanica or the pax Japonica? That day is not near at hand, if it is indeed ever to come, and the parties which claim to represent socialism do everything possible to postpone it.

The problems which Marxism has failed to solve have not been solved by events, either; they have, in fact, become more and more acute. Although the workers live better than they did in Marx’s day—at any rate in countries peopled by the white race, for it is a different story, alas, in the colonies; and even Russia must perhaps be excepted—the obstacles in the way of their liberation are more difficult to overcome now than then. The Taylor system and those that have followed it have reduced the workers to a far greater extent than before to the position of mere cogs in the factories, except for a few highly-skilled jobs. Manual labour, in the majority of cases, is still farther removed from the work of a craftsman, still more divested of intelligence and skill; machines are still more oppressive. The arms race calls still more imperiously for the sacrifice of the people as a whole to industrial production. The State machine develops day by day in a more monstrous fashion, becomes day by day farther and farther removed from the mass of the population, blinder, more inhuman. Any country that attempted a socialist revolution would be very quickly compelled, in order to defend itself against the rest, to reproduce in magnified form all the cruelties of the system it had set out to abolish, unless the revolution were to spread. Doubtless such a contagion may be expected, but it would have to occur immediately or not at all; for a revolution that has degenerated into a tyranny ceases to be contagious; and, among other obstacles in the way, the exacerbation of nationalist feeling prevents one from being able reasonably to believe in the immediate extension of a revolution in several big countries.

Thus the contradiction between the method of analysis elaborated by Marx and the revolutionary hopes that he announced seems still sharper today than in his time. What are we to conclude from this? Must there be a revision of Marxism? One cannot revise something which does not exist, and there has never been such a thing as Marxism, but only a series of incompatible assertions, some of them well founded, others not; unfortunately, the best founded are the least palatable. We are still asked if such a revision should bear a revolutionary stamp. But what do we understand by the word “revolutionary”? It is capable of a good many interpretations. Does being a revolutionary mean expecting in the near future some blessed catastrophe, some upheaval which realizes on this earth a part of the promises contained in the Gospels, and gives us finally a society wherein the last shall be first? If that is what it means, then I am not a revolutionary, for such a future—which incidentally would overwhelm me with joy—is to my mind, if not impossible, at any rate altogether improbable; and I do not think that anyone can nowadays have solid, serious reasons for being a revolutionary in this sense.

Or else does being a revolutionary mean calling forth by one’s wishes and helping by one’s acts everything which can, directly or indirectly, alleviate or lift the weight that presses upon the mass of men, break the chains that degrade labour, reject the lies by means of which it is sought to disguise or excuse the systematic humiliation of the majority? In that event it is a case of an ideal, a judgment of value, something willed, and not of an interpretation of human history and of the social mechanism. Taken in this sense, the revolutionary spirit is as old as oppression itself and will go on for as long, even longer; for if oppression should disappear, it will have to continue in order to prevent its reappearance; it is eternal; it has no need to undergo a revision, but it can become enriched, sharpened, and it must be purified of all the extraneous accretions that can come to disguise and corrupt it. This eternal spirit of revolt which quickened the Roman plebeians, which fired almost simultaneously, towards the end of the fourteenth century, the wool workers of Florence, the English peasantry, the artisans of Ghent, what can it take and assimilate from the works of Marx? It has to take from thence precisely that which has been almost forgotten by what is called Marxism: the glorification of productive labour, considered as man’s highest activity; the assertion that only a society wherein the act of work brought all man’s faculties into play, wherein the man who works occupied the front rank, would realize human greatness to the full. We find, in Marx’s early writings, lines concerning labour that have a lyrical accent; we also find some in Proudhon and in certain poets, in Goethe, in Verhaeren. This new poetry, appropriate to our time, which forms perhaps its chief claim to greatness, must not be lost. Therein the oppressed must find evoked their own mother-country, which is hope.

But in other respects Marxism has seriously debased that spirit of revolt which, in the last century, shone with so pure a light in our country. It has mingled with it at the same time flashy pseudo-scientific trimmings, a messianic eloquence, an unfettering of appetites that have disfigured it. Nothing entitles one to assure the workers that science is on their side. Science is for them, as indeed for everyone today, that mysterious power which has, in a single century, transformed the face of the world through industrial technique; when they are told that science is on their side, they immediately think they possess an unlimited source of power. Nothing of the kind! You do not find among the communists, socialists or trade-unionists of this or that tendency any clearer or more accurate knowledge of our society and its mechanism than you do among the bourgeois, conservatives or fascists. Even if the workers’ organizations were superior in the matter of knowledge, which is not at all the case, they would not for that reason have in their hands the indispensable means of action; science is nothing, in actual fact, without technical resources, and it does not bestow them, it only enables one to make use of them. It would be still more erroneous to maintain that science makes it possible to predict the triumph of the workers’ cause in the near future; it is not so, and you cannot even believe in good faith that it is so unless you resolutely shut your eyes. Nothing entitles one either to assure the workers that they have a mission, an “historic task”, as Marx used to say; that it is up to them to save the world. There is no reason to attribute to them such a mission, any more than to the slaves of antiquity or the serfs of the Middle Ages. Like the slaves, like the serfs, they are unhappy, unjustly so; it is well that they defend themselves; it would be better if they could liberate themselves; and that is all that can be said about it. These illusions that are showered on them, in a language that mixes together religious and scientific commonplaces in deplorable fashion, are fatal to them. For they lead them to believe that things are going to be easy, that they have a modern god called Progress to push them from behind and a modern providence called History to do the donkey work for them. Finally, nothing entitles one to promise them, at the end of their liberation effort, enjoyments and power. A certain facile irony has done considerable harm by pouring cold water on the lofty idealism, the almost ascetic spirit animating socialist groups at the beginning of the nineteenth century; it has only succeeded in degrading the working class.