Is There a Marxist Doctrine?

Many people declare themselves to be either opponents, or adherents, or qualified adherents of the Marxist doctrine. No one thinks of asking himself: Had Marx, in fact, a doctrine? One cannot imagine that something which has excited so much controversy might not exist. Yet such is frequently the case. The question is worth raising and examining. Perhaps, after an attentive examination, we shall find that a negative answer is called for.

It is generally agreed that Marx was a materialist. He was not always so at all stages of his career. As a young man, he had set out to work out a philosophy of labour in a spirit very closely akin, at bottom, to that of Proudhon. A philosophy of labour is not materialist. It arranges all the problems connected with man around an act which, constituting a direct and genuine grip on matter, contains man’s relation to the opposing term. The opposing term is matter. Man is not reduced to it; he is placed in opposition to it.

Along this road, the youthful Marx did not even begin the sketch of a sketch. All he supplied were a few indications. Proudhon, for his part, only shed thereon a few flashes amid much smoke. Such a philosophy remains to be worked out. It is perhaps indispensable. It is perhaps more particularly a need of our time. There are a number of signs indicating that in the last century the germ of it was in process of formation. But nothing came of this. Possibly it is something that is reserved for our century to accomplish.

Marx was checked when still a young man by an accident very common in the nineteenth century; he began to take himself seriously. He was seized with a sort of messianic illusion which made him believe that he had been chosen to play a decisive role for the salvation of mankind. Thenceforward it was impossible for him to preserve the ability to think in the full sense of the word. He abandoned the philosophy of labour that was germinating in his mind, although he continued, less and less often as time went on, to include here and there in his writings formulas inspired by it. Being unable to work out a doctrine, he seized upon the two beliefs most current in his time, both of them meagre, superficial, mediocre and furthermore impossible to conceive in conjunction: the cult of science and utopian socialism.

In order to adopt them together, he gave them a fictitious unity by means of formulas which, if one enquires into their meaning, eventually fail to reveal any, except a sentimental state of mind. But when an author chooses his words with skill, the reader is rarely ungracious enough to raise such a question. The less meaning a formula possesses, the thicker is the veil drawn over the illegitimate contradictions of a line of thought.

This does not mean, of course, that Marx ever set out intentionally to deceive the public. The public he had to deceive in order to be able to live was himself. That is why he surrounded the basis of his conception with metaphysical clouds which, after one has looked at them fixedly for a certain length of time, become transparent, but reveal themselves to be empty.

However, he did not merely give a fictitious connection to the two systems that he had taken over ready-made, he also thought them out afresh. His mind, though of insufficient range to meet the requirements for creating a doctrine, was capable of ideas of genius. In his works there are compact fragments whose truth is unchanging, and which naturally have their place in any true doctrine. Thus it is that they are not only compatible with Christianity, but of infinite value to it. They must be taken back from Marx. This is all the easier in that what nowadays goes by the name of Marxism, that is to say the current of thought which claims to stem from Marx, makes no use of them at all. Truth is too dangerous to touch. It is an explosive.

The nineteenth-century cult of science consisted in the belief that the science of the period, by means of a simple development in certain directions already defined by the results achieved, would provide a definite answer to all the problems that could present themselves to man, without exception. What has, in fact, happened is that science, after expanding a little, has itself “cracked up”. The science in favour today, although derived from the former, is a different science. Nineteenth-century science has been reverently deposited in the museum under the label “classical science”.

It was well constructed, simple and homogeneous. Mechanics was its queen. Physics was its core. As this last was the branch in which by far the most brilliant results had been achieved, it naturally exercised considerable influence over all other studies. The idea of studying mankind in the same way as the physicist studies lifeless matter was bound thenceforth to impose itself, and was in fact extremely widespread. But man was hardly thought of except as an individual. Matter was now the flesh; or else there was an attempt to define a psychological equivalent of the atom. Those who reacted against this obsession with the individual were also in reaction against the cult of science.

Marx was the first and, unless I am mistaken, the only one—for his researches were not followed up—to have the twin idea of taking society as the fundamental human fact and of studying therein, as the physicist does in matter, the relationships of force.

Here we have an idea of genius, in the full sense of the word. It is not a doctrine; it is an instrument of study, research, exploration and possibly construction for every doctrine that is not to risk crumbling to dust on contact with a truth.

Having had this idea, Marx hastened to render it barren, as far as lay with him, by plastering over it the wretched cult of science of his time. Or rather, Engels, who was far inferior to him and knew it, performed this operation for him; but Marx covered it with his authority. The result was a system according to which the relationships of force that define the social structure entirely determine both man’s destiny and his thoughts. Such a system is ruthless. Force counts for everything there; it leaves no hope for justice. It does not even leave the hope of conceiving justice in its truth, since all that thoughts do is to reflect the relationships of force.

But Marx was a generous soul. The sight of injustice made him suffer really, one might say in his flesh. This suffering was intense enough to have made it impossible for him to live had he not harboured the hope of an imminent and earthly reign of complete justice. For him, as for many, need was the best of proofs.

The majority of human beings do not question the truth of an idea without which they would literally be unable to live. Arnolphe did not question the faithfulness of Agnès. The supreme test for every soul is perhaps this choice between truth and life. Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. This sentence would be frivolous if it affected only those who under no circumstances are prepared to die. They are, in fact, quite rare. It becomes terrible when applied to those who refuse to part with the ideas—even should they be false—without which they feel themselves incapable of living.

The current conception of justice in Marx’s day was that of the socialism which he himself named utopian. It was very poor in intellectual effort, but as a sentiment it was noble and humane, desiring liberty, dignity, well-being, happiness and every possible good for all. Marx adopted it. He attempted merely to give it greater precision, and so tacked some interesting ideas on to it, but nothing really of the first order.

What he did change was the character of hope. A probability based on human progress could not suffice him. To assuage his anguish, a certitude was necessary. You cannot base a certitude upon man. If the eighteenth century harboured this illusion at times—and it did so only at times—the upheavals caused by the French Revolution and war had been sufficiently appalling to cure men of it.

In previous centuries, those who required a certitude rested it on God. Eighteenth-century philosophy and the wonders of technical science seemed to have carried man to such heights that the habit of doing so had been lost. But later on, when the radical inadequacy of everything human began to be felt once more, it became necessary to seek for a support. God was out of fashion. So matter was taken. Man cannot bear for more than a moment to be alone in willing the good. He needs an all-powerful ally. If you do not believe in the remote, silent, secret omnipotence of a spirit, there remains only the manifest omnipotence of matter.

Herein lies the inevitable absurdity of all materialism. If the materialist could set aside all concern for the good, he would be perfectly consistent. But he cannot. The very being of man is nothing else but a perpetual straining after an unknown good. And the materialist is a man. That is why he cannot prevent himself from ultimately regarding matter as a machine for manufacturing the good.

The essential contradiction in human life is that man, with a straining after the good constituting his very being, is at the same time subject in his entire being, both in mind and in flesh, to a blind force, to a necessity completely indifferent to the good. So it is; and that is why no human thinking can escape from contradiction. Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth. Plato knew this. But the cases can be distinguished. There is a legitimate and an illegitimate use of contradiction.

The illegitimate use lies in coupling together incompatible thoughts as if they were compatible. The legitimate use lies, first of all, when two incompatible thoughts present themselves to the mind, in exhausting all the powers of the intellect in an attempt to eliminate at least one of them. If this is impossible, if both must be accepted, the contradiction must then be recognized as a fact. It must then be used as a two-limbed tool, like a pair of pincers, so that through it direct contact may be made with the transcendental sphere of truth beyond the range of the human faculties. The contact is direct, though made through an intermediary, in the same way as the sense of touch is directly affected by the uneven surface of a table over which you pass, not your hand, but your pencil. The contact is real, though belonging to the number of things that by nature are impossible, for it is a case of a contact between the mind and that which is not thinkable. It is supernatural, but real.

There is an equivalent, an image as it were, very frequent in mathematics, of this legitimate use of contradiction as a means of reaching the transcendental. It plays an essential role in Christian dogma, as one can perceive with reference to the Trinity, the Incarnation, or any other example. The same applies to other traditions. It provides, perhaps, a criterion for discerning which religious and philosophical traditions are authentic.

It is, above all, the fundamental contradiction, that between the good and necessity, or its equivalent, that between justice and force, whose use constitutes a criterion. As Plato said, an infinite distance separates the good from necessity. They have nothing in common. They are totally other. Although we are forced to assign them a unity, this unity is a mystery; it remains for us a secret. The genuine religious life is the contemplation of this unknown unity.

The manufacture of a fictitious, mistaken equivalent of this unity, brought within the grasp of the human faculties, is at the bottom of the inferior forms of the religious life. To every genuine form of the religious life there corresponds an inferior form, which is based to all appearances on the same doctrine, but has no understanding of it. But the converse is not true. There are ways of thinking that are compatible only with a religious life of inferior quality.

In this respect the whole of materialism, in so far as it attributes to matter the automatic manufacture of the good, is to be classed among the inferior forms of the religious life. This is demonstrated even in the case of the bourgeois economists of the nineteenth century, the apostles of liberalism, who adopt a truly religious accent when they talk about production. It is demonstrated to a far greater degree still in the case of Marxism. Marxism is a fully-fledged religion, in the impurest sense of the word. In particular it shares in common with all inferior forms of the religious life the fact of having been continually used, according to Marx’s perfectly accurate expression, as an opium of the people.

For that matter, only a shade of difference, something infinitely small, separates a spirituality like Plato’s from materialism. He does not say that the good is an automatic product of necessity, but that the Spirit has domination over necessity through persuasion; it persuades necessity to cause most of the things that take place to turn towards the good, and necessity is overcome by means of this wise persuasion. Similarly, in the words of Aeschylus: “God does not arm himself with any violence. Everything that is divine is effortless. Dwelling on high, his wisdom yet succeeds in operating from thence, from his pure throne.” We find the same conception in China, in India, in Christianity. It is expressed in the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, which it would be better to translate: “Our Father, the one in heaven”; and even better by the wonderful words: “Your Father which is in secret.”

The share of the supernatural here on earth is that of secrecy, silence, the infinitely small. But the operation of that something infinitely small is decisive. Proserpina did not think she was committing herself to anything when, yielding partly to constraint, partly to enticement, she consented to eat just one pomegranate seed; but from that moment, for ever after, the other world was her kingdom and her motherland. A pearl in a field can scarcely be seen. The grain of mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds.

The decisive operation of the infinitely small is a paradox; the human intelligence has difficulty in acknowledging it; but nature, which is a mirror of the divine truths, everywhere presents us with images of it. Catalysts, bacteria, fermenting agents are examples. Compared with a solid body, a point is something infinitely small. Yet, in each body, there is one point which predominates over the entire mass, so that if that point receives support, the body does not fall. The keystone supports a whole building from above. Archimedes said: “Give me a point of leverage and I will lift the world.” The silent presence of the supernatural here below is that point of leverage. That is why, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Cross was compared to a balance.

If an island completely cut off had never had any other than blind inhabitants, light would be for them what the supernatural is for us. One is tempted to think at first that for them it would be nothing, that by creating for their use a system of physics with all theory of light left out, one would be giving them a complete explanation of their world. For light offers no obstacle, exerts no pressure, is weightless, cannot be eaten. For them, it is absent. But it cannot be left out of account. By it alone the trees and plants reach towards the sky in spite of gravity. By it alone seeds, fruits, all the things we eat, are ripened.

In assigning a transcendental unity to the good and to necessity, one gives an incomprehensible solution to the fundamental human problem, especially when one adds thereto—as is indispensable—the still more incomprehensible belief that something of this transcendental unity is communicated to those who, without understanding it, without being able to make any use either of their intelligence or of their will in regard to it, contemplate it with love and desire.

That which escapes the human faculties cannot, by definition, be either verified or refuted. But consequences follow from it which are situated at the lower level, in the sphere accessible to our faculties; these consequences can be submitted to a verification. In point of fact, this test is successful. A second indirect verification arises out of universal consent. On the surface, the extreme variety of religions and philosophies would seem to indicate that this test is non-existent; this consideration has even led many minds into scepticism. But a closer examination reveals that, except in countries that have subordinated their spiritual life to imperialism, a mystic doctrine lies at the secret core of every religion; and although the mystic doctrines differ from each other, they are not only similar but absolutely identical as regards a certain number of essential points. A third indirect verification is inward experience. It is an indirect test, even for those who make the experiment, in the sense that it is an experience which escapes their faculties; they grasp only the exterior aspect of it and know it. Nevertheless, they also know its significance. Throughout past centuries there has been a very small number of human beings, obviously incapable not only of lying but also of self-deception, whose testimony in this matter is decisive.

These three tests are perhaps the only possible ones; but they are sufficient. One can add to them the equivalent of a reductio ad absurdum by examining the other solutions, those which manufacture a fictitious unity for the good and for necessity at the level of the human faculties. They give rise to absurd consequences, whose absurdity can be verified both by reasoning and by experience.

Among all these inadequate solutions, far the best, the most useful, the only ones perhaps which contain some fragments of pure truth, are the materialist solutions. Materialism accounts for everything, with the exception of the supernatural. This is no small gap, for in the supernatural everything is contained and infinitely surpassed. But if one leaves the supernatural out of account, one is right to be a materialist. This universe, minus the supernatural, is only matter. In describing it solely as matter, one seizes upon a particle of truth. In describing it as a combination of matter and of specifically moral forces belonging to this world, that are on a level with nature, one falsifies everything. That is why, for a Christian, Marx’s writings are of much greater value than those, for example, of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, who found a way of being atheists without being materialists. They were atheists, not only in the sense that they more or less definitely excluded all notion of a personal God—which is also the case with certain Buddhist sects that in spite of this have raised themselves up to the mystical life—but in the sense that they excluded everything which is not of this world. They believed—these simpletons—that justice is of this world. This forms the extremely dangerous illusion contained in what are called the principles of 1789, non-religious faith and so on.

Among all the forms of materialism, the works of Marx contain one extremely valuable indication, although he himself made hardly any real use of it, and his followers even less, much less—the idea of nonphysical matter. Marx, rightly regarding society as being the human fact of primary importance in this world, directed his attention only to social matter; but one may similarly consider, in the second place, psychological matter; several trends in modern psychology point in this direction, although, unless I am mistaken, the notion of it has not been formulated. A certain number of current prejudices prevent this from being done.

The idea is this; it is indispensable to any well-founded doctrine; it is central. Under all the phenomena of a moral order, whether collective or individual, there is something analogous to matter properly so called. Something analogous; not matter itself. That is why the systems which Marx classified under what he called mechanical materialism, with a touch of justifiable disdain—systems which set out to explain the whole of human thought on the basis of a physiological mechanism—are nothing but nonsense. Thoughts are subject to a mechanism which is proper to themselves; but it is a mechanism. When we think of matter, we think of a mechanical system of forces subject to a blind and rigorous necessity. The same applies to that non-tangible matter which is the substance of our thoughts. Only it is very difficult to grasp therein the notion of force and to conceive the laws of this necessity.

However, even before arriving at that stage, it is already extremely useful to know that this specific necessity exists. It enables us to avoid two mistakes into which we are continually falling, for as soon as we get away from the one we fall into the other. The first is the belief that moral phenomena are exact copies of material phenomena; for example, that moral well-being results automatically and exclusively from physical well-being. The other is the belief that moral phenomena are arbitrary and can be brought about by auto-suggestion or suggestion from without, or indeed by an act of will.

They are not subject to physical necessity, but they are subject to necessity. They are exposed to the repercussion of physical phenomena, but it is a specific repercussion, in conformity with the specific laws of that necessity to which they are subject. Everything that is real is subject to necessity. There is nothing more real than the imagination; what is imagined is not real, but the state of mind in which imagining occurs is a fact. Given a certain state of imagining, this state can only be modified if the causes capable of producing such an effect are brought into play. These causes have no direct connection with the things imagined; but, on the other hand, they are not just anything. The relation between cause and effect is as rigorously determined in this field as it is in that of gravity. Only it is harder to know.

The mistakes made on this point are countless and are the cause of countless sufferings in daily life. For example, if a child says he isn’t feeling well, is kept away from school, and all of a sudden finds the strength to play with some little friends, his indignant family think he has been lying. They say to him: “Since you had the strength to play, you had the strength to work”. But the child may very well have been sincere. He was held back by a genuine feeling of exhaustion which the sight of his little friends and the attraction of playing with them have truly dissipated, whereas school lessons did not contain a sufficient stimulus to produce this effect. Similarly, it is naïve of us to be astonished when we firmly make a resolution and do not stick to it. Something stimulated us to make the resolution, but that something was not powerful enough to bring us to the point of carrying it out; what is more, the very act of making a resolution may have exhausted the stimulus and thus prevented even a start being made in carrying it out. This is what often happens when extremely difficult actions have to be undertaken. The well-known case of St Peter is probably an example.

This type of ignorance is continually stepping in to vitiate the relations between governments and peoples, between the ruling classes and the masses. For example, industrialists can only think of two ways of rendering their workers happy: either by raising their wages, or else by telling them they are happy and sacking the wicked communists who assure them to the contrary. They are unable to understand that, on the one hand, a workman’s happiness consists above all in a certain attitude of mind towards his work; and that, on the other hand, this attitude of mind can be brought about only if certain objective conditions—impossible to know without making a serious study of the subject—have been fulfilled. This twin truth, suitably transposed, is the key to all the practical problems of human existence.

In the operation of this necessity which governs men’s thoughts and actions, the relations between society and the individual are very complex. But the primacy of the social is obvious. Marx was right to begin by positing the reality of a social matter, of a social necessity, of whose laws one must at any rate have caught a glimpse before venturing to reflect on the destinies of the human race.

This idea was original in relation to his time; but, absolutely speaking, it is not original. Indeed, it is probable that no truth is really original. The true intention of Machiavelli, a man of genius, was probably to work out a mechanics of social relations. But much farther back Plato had the reality of social necessity constantly present in his mind.

Plato felt above all very strongly that social matter is an infinitely greater obstacle to overcome between the soul and the good than the flesh properly so called. That is also the Christian conception. St Paul says that we have to war not against the flesh, but against the devil; and the devil is on his own ground in social matter, since he was able to say to Christ, as he showed him the kingdoms of this world: “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me …” That is why he is called the Prince of this world. Since he is the father of lies, this means, then, that social matter is the cultural and proliferating medium par excellence for lies and false beliefs. Such is certainly Plato’s conception. He compared society to a huge beast which men are forced to serve and whose reflexes they study in order to derive therefrom their beliefs concerning good and evil. Christianity retained this image. The beast in the Apocalypse is sister to the one in Plato.

The central, fundamental conception in Plato—which is also a Christian conception—is that all men are absolutely incapable of having on the subject of good and evil opinions other than those dictated by the reflexes of the beast, except for predestined souls whom a supernatural grace draws towards God.

He did not develop this conception to any extent, although it is present behind all his writings, no doubt because he knew that the beast is wicked and revengeful. It provides a subject for reflection that is almost unexplored. Not that we have here a truth which is self-evident, far from it; it is very deeply hidden. It is hidden especially by conflicts of opinion. If two men are in violent disagreement about good and evil, it is hard to believe that both of them are blindly subject to the opinion of the society around them. In particular, he who ponders those few lines of Plato is very strongly tempted to attribute to the influence of the beast the opinions of those against whom he argues, while attributing his own to a correct view of justice and the good. But one has only understood the truth formulated by Plato when one has recognized it as true for oneself.

Actually at a given period, in a given social body, the differences of opinion are far fewer than it appears. There are far more conflicts than there are differences. The most violent struggles often divide people who think exactly, or almost exactly, the same thing. Our age is very fertile in paradoxes of this kind. The common fund whence spring the various trends of opinion at any given period is the opinion of the great beast at that period. For example, during the past ten years, every political tendency, including the very tiniest little groups, was accusing all the rest, without exception, of fascism, and having the same accusation levelled at it in return; except, of course, for those who regarded this epithet as a form of praise. Probably the epithet was always partially justified. The European great beast of the twentieth century has a pronounced taste for fascism. Another amusing example is the problem of coloured peoples. Each country waxes very sentimental over the wretched fate of those under the rule of other countries, but becomes highly indignant if any doubts are cast on the perfect happiness enjoyed by those under its own rule. There are many similar cases, in which the apparent difference between attitudes actually constitutes a sameness.

Furthermore, since the beast is huge and men are tiny, each one is differently placed in relation to it. Following up Plato’s image, we may imagine that among those with the task of grooming it, one takes charge of a knee, another of a claw, another of the neck, another of the back. Perhaps it likes being tickled under the jaw and patted on the back. One of its attendants will consequently maintain that it is tickling which constitutes the supreme good; another that it is patting. In other words, society is composed of groups which interlock in all sorts of ways, and social morality varies from group to group. It would be impossible to find two individuals whose social backgrounds were truly identical; each man’s background is composed of a network of groups which is nowhere else repeated in exactly the same way. Thus the apparent originality of individuals does not contradict the proposition that thought is completely subordinated to social opinion.

This proposition is the very one advanced by Marx. The only difference between him and Plato on this point is that he (Marx) is unaware of the possibility of exceptions brought about through the supernatural intervention of grace. This gap leaves the truth of a part of his researches quite intact, but is the reason why the rest is simply verbiage.

Marx sought to apprehend the mechanism of social opinion. The phenomenon of professional morality supplied him with the key to it. Every professional group manufactures a morality for itself in virtue of which the exercise of the profession, so long as it conforms to the rules, is quite outside the reach of evil. This is an almost vital need, for the stress of work, whatever it may be, is in itself so great that it would be unbearable if accompanied by anxious concern about good and evil. In order to protect oneself from this, armour is necessary. Professional morality fills this role.

For example, a doctor called upon to attend a man condemned to death will generally not ask himself the extremely agonizing question whether it is right to cure him. It is an accepted thing that doctors must try to cure their patients. Even for the slaves of Rome a particular morality was applicable, whereby a slave could do no wrong if acting in obedience to his master’s orders or in his interests. Naturally, this morality was inculcated by the masters; but it was also largely adopted by the slaves, which is why the rebellions of slaves, considering their number and horrible misery, were rare. At the time when war was a profession, fighting men had a morality whereby any act of war, in accordance with the customs of war, and contributing to victory, was legitimate and right; including, for example, the violation of women or the killing of children when towns were sacked, for the licence given to the soldiers on these occasions was indispensable to maintain the morale of the army. Business has its own morality in which stealing is the blackest of crimes and any profitable exchange of an article for money legitimate and right. The characteristic common to all these moralities, and to every kinds of social morality, was formulated by Plato in definitive terms: “They call just and beautiful things that are necessary, for they do not know how great in reality is the distance which separates the essence of the necessary from that of the good.”

Marx’s conception is that the moral atmosphere of a given society—an atmosphere which permeates everywhere and combines with the morality peculiar to each social group—is itself composed of a mixture of group moralities whose dosage precisely reflects the amount of power exercised by each group. Thus, according as a society is ruled by great landed proprietors, or military men, or commercial men, or industrialists, or bankers, or bureaucrats, it will be wholly impregnated by the world conception bound up with the professional morality of such landed proprietors, military men, and so on. This world conception will everywhere find expression, in politics, in the laws, even in the abstract and apparently disinterested speculations of the intellectuals. Everyone will be governed by it, but no-one will be conscious of the fact, for each will think that it is a question, not of some particular conception, but of a way of thinking inherent in human nature.

All this is to a large extent true and easy to verify. To cite but one example, it is curious to note the importance attached to theft in the French penal code. When accompanied by certain aggravating circumstances, it is more severely punished than the rape of children. And yet the men who drew up this code not only had money, but also children whom no doubt they loved; if they had had to choose between losing a part of their wealth and having their children defiled, there is no reason to suppose that they would have preferred their money. But when drawing up the code they were, unbeknownst to themselves, simply the organs of social reflexes; and in a society based on commerce, theft is the prime anti-social act.Whereas the white slave traffic, for example, is a kind of commerce; that is why we have only with difficulty and half-heartedly brought ourselves to punish it.

So many facts, however, seem to contradict the theory that it would be refuted as soon as examined, were it not that it has to be qualified by the consideration of time. Man is a conservative creature, and there is a tendency for the past to subsist by its own weight. For instance, a considerable portion of the penal code dates from a time when commerce was much more important than it is today; thus, generally speaking, the moral atmosphere of a society contains elements originating among former ruling classes that have since disappeared or more or less fallen into decay. But the converse is true also. Just as a head of the opposition, destined to become one day prime minister, already has a following, so a more or less feeble class, but one destined soon to rule, already has around it an outline of the ideological trend that will dominate with and through it. It is in this way that Marx explained the socialism of his period, including the phenomenon Marx. He saw himself as the swallow which by its mere presence announces the near approach of spring, that is to say of the revolution. He was a portent for and of himself.

The second step in his explanatory attempt consisted of a search for the mechanism of social power. This part of his thought is extremely feeble. He thought he could affirm that the relationships of force in a given society, if traces of the past are excluded, depend entirely on the technical conditions of production. These conditions being given, a society has the structure which makes the maximum production possible. In trying continually to produce more and more, it improves the conditions of production. Thus these conditions change. A moment comes when a break in continuity takes place, as when water that is being gradually heated suddenly starts to boil. The new conditions make a new structure necessary. An effective change-over of power occurs, followed, after a certain interval marked by more or less violent manifestations, by the corresponding political, legal and ideological changes. When the manifestations are violent, this is called a revolution.

There is a right conception here, but, by a strange irony, it flatly contradicts Marx’s own political standpoint: it is that a visible revolution never takes place except to sanction an invisible revolution already accomplished. When a social class noisily seizes power, it is because it already silently possessed that power, at any rate to a very large extent; otherwise it would not have the strength necessary to seize it. It is an obvious fact, from the moment one regards society as being governed by relationships of force. This is clearly evidenced by the French Revolution, which, as Marx himself showed, officially handed over to the bourgeoisie the power which it already possessed in fact, at any rate since the time of Louis XIV. It is further evidenced by recent revolutions which, in several countries, have placed the whole of national life under the power of the State. Before this, the State already played a vast role and was almost everything.

The plain consequence to be drawn, it seems, for a partisan of the workers’ revolution is that, before launching the workers into the adventure of a political revolution, one must try to find out if methods exist likely to enable them to lay hold silently, gradually, almost invisibly, of a considerable part of real social power; and that one must either apply these methods if they exist, or give up the idea of a workers’ revolution if they do not. But obvious as this consequence is, Marx did not perceive it, and that because he could not face it without losing what was for him his reason for living. For the same reason, his disciples, whether reformists or revolutionaries, were in no danger of seeing it. That is why it is possible to say, without fear of exaggeration, that as a theory of the workers’ revolution Marxism is a nullity.

The rest of his theory of social transformations is based on a number of foolish misapprehensions. The first consists in adopting, in the case of human history, Lamarck’s explanatory principle “the function creates the organ”, the principle whereby the giraffe is supposed to have made such efforts to eat bananas that its neck has been lengthened. It is the type of explanation which, without containing so much as the beginning of an indication for the solution of a problem, gives the false impression that it has been solved, and thus prevents it from being posed. The problem is to discover how it is the organs of animals find themselves adapted to needs; by bringing forward as an answer the supposition of a tendency to adaptation inherent in animal life, you fall into the error ridiculed for all time by Molière in connection with the dormitive virtue of opium.

Darwin cleaned up the problem thanks to the simple and brilliant idea of conditions of existence. It is surprising that there should be animals on the earth. But once there are, it is not surprising that there should be a correspondence between their organs and their requirements for living, for otherwise they would not live. There is no chance whatever that anyone will ever discover in some remote corner of the world a species whose exclusive diet is bananas, but which is prevented by an unfortunate physical malformation from eating them.

Here is one of those all-too-obvious pieces of evidence which nobody sees until some inspired intuition makes them manifest. In actual fact, this one had been recognized by the Greeks, as is the case with almost all our ideas; but it had afterwards been forgotten. Darwin was a contemporary of Marx. But Marx, like all scientists, was very much behindhand in matters of science. He thought he was doing a scientist’s work in purely and simply transferring Lamarck’s naïve ideas to the social sphere.

He even introduced an additional arbitrary element by assuming that the function not only creates an organ capable of carrying it out, but further, roughly speaking and on the whole, the organ capable of doing so with the highest possible degree of efficiency. His sociology is based on postulates which, when submitted to the examination of reason, are found to be invalid, and which, when compared with the facts, are manifestly false.

He assumes in the first place that, given the technical conditions of production, society possesses the structure capable of using them to the maximum. Why? By virtue of what necessity should things take place in such a way that productive capacity is utilized to the maximum? In point of fact, no one has any idea of what that maximum may be. It is only clear that there has always been a good deal of waste in all societies. But this idea of Marx’s is based on such vague notions that one cannot even show that it is false, for lack of the ability to grasp it.

Secondly, society is assumed to be continually endeavouring to improve production. This is the postulate of the liberal economists transferred from the individual to society as a whole. It can be accepted with reservations; but, in fact, there have been many societies in which for centuries people thought only of living as their forefathers had lived before them.

Thirdly, this effort is assumed to react on the actual conditions of production, and that always in such a way as to improve them. If one applies reasoning to this assertion, it is seen to be arbitrary; if one compares it with the facts, it is seen to be false. There is no reason at all why in trying to make the conditions of production furnish a greater yield they must always be developed. One can just as easily exhaust them. That very often takes place—in the case of a mine or a field, for example. The same phenomenon occurs, from time to time, on a grand scale, and provokes great crises. It is the story of the hen with the golden eggs. Aesop knew far more about that subject than Marx.

Fourthly, when this improvement has gone beyond a certain point, the social structure, which previously was the most efficient from the production point of view, is no longer so; and, according to Marx, this fact alone necessarily results in society abandoning that structure and adopting another as efficient as possible.

This is the height of arbitrary reasoning. It does not withstand a minute’s close examination. Certainly, of all the men who have taken part in political, social or economic changes in past centuries, not one has ever said to himself: “I am going to bring about a change in the social structure in order that present productive capacity may be utilized to the maximum.” Nor can one discern the least sign of any automatic mechanism which would result from the laws of social necessity and set going a transformation when productive capacity was not being fully utilized. Neither Marx nor the Marxists have ever furnished the slightest indication in this sense.

Must we therefore suppose that behind human history there is an all-powerfiil spirit, a wisdom that watches over the course of events and directs it? In that case Marx would seem to accept, without saying so, the truth recognized by Plato. There is no other way of accounting for his conception. But it remains bizarre all the same. Why should this hidden spirit watch over the interests of production? Spirit is what tends towards the good. Production is not the good. The nineteenth-century industrialists were alone in confusing the two. The hidden spirit which directs the destinies of the human race is, however, not that of a nineteenth-century industrialist.

The explanation is that the nineteenth century was obsessed by production, and especially the progress of production, and that Marx was slavishly subject to the influence of his age. This influence made him forget that production is not the good. He also forgot that it is not the only necessity, and this is the cause of a further foolishness—the belief that production is the sole factor in relationships of force. Marx purely and simply forgets war. The same thing happened to the majority of his contemporaries. The men of the nineteenth century, while gorging themselves on Béranger’s songs and Epinal pictures in praise of Napoleon, had almost forgotten the existence of war. Marx once thought of briefly indicating that the methods of warfare depend on the conditions of production; but he did not perceive the converse relationship whereby the conditions of production are governed by the methods of warfare. Man can be threatened with death, either by nature or by his fellow man, and force, in the final analysis, comes down to the threat of death. When considering relationships of force, one must always think of force under its two-fold aspect of material need and of arms.

The result of this oversight on Marx’s part has been a ridiculous confusion in Marxist circles, when confronted with war and the problems relating to war and peace. There is absolutely nothing in what is called Marxist doctrine to indicate the attitude a Marxist should adopt in regard to these problems. For a time like ours, it is a quite serious lacuna.

The only form of war Marx takes into consideration is social war—open or underground—under the name of the class struggle. He even makes of it the sole principle for explaining history. Since, on the other hand, the development of production is also the sole principle of historical development, it must be supposed that these two phenomena form but one. But Marx does not say how each can be reduced to the other. Certainly the oppressed who revolt or the inferiors who want to become superiors never entertain the thought of increasing society’s productive capacity. The only connection one can imagine is that men’s permanent protest against the social hierarchy maintains society in the requisite state of fluidity for productive forces to shape it at will.

In that case, the class struggle is not an active principle, but merely a negative condition. The active principle remains that mysterious spirit which watches over the maintenance of production at the maximum level, and which Marxists sometimes refer to, in the plural, as the productive forces. They take this mythology with the utmost seriousness. Trotsky wrote that the 1914–18 war was in reality a revolt of the productive forces against the limitations of the capitalist system. One may ponder for a long time over such a pronouncement, wondering what it means, until one is forced to admit that it has no meaning.

Yet Marx was right in regarding the love of liberty and the love of domination as the two motive-springs which keep social life in a permanent state of unrest. Only he forgot to prove that that is a materialist principle of explanation. It is not self-evident. The love of liberty and the love of domination are two human facts which can be interpreted in several different ways.

Furthermore, these two facts have a far wider bearing than the relation of oppressed to oppressor, which alone held Marx’s attention. You cannot make use of the notion of oppression without having first made a serious effort to define it, for it is not clear. Marx did not take the trouble to do this. The selfsame men are oppressed in certain respects, oppressors in certain other respects; or again may desire to become so, and this desire can override the desire for liberty; and the oppressors, for their part, think far less often about keeping those under them obedient than of getting the better of their equals. Thus there is not the counterpart of a battle with two sides opposing each other, but rather an extraordinarily complicated tangle of guerilla forces. This tangle is nevertheless governed by laws. But they remain to be discovered.

Marx’s only real contribution to social science lies in the submission that such a science is needed. That is already a good deal; it is in fact immense; but we are still where he left us. This science is still needed. Marx did not even get ready to begin to establish it. Much less his followers. In the term “scientific socialism”, which is Marxism’s own way of describing itself, the epithet “scientific” corresponds to nothing but a fiction. One would even be tempted to say more crudely a lie; only that Marx and the majority of his followers did not intend to lie. If these men had not been in the first place their own dupes, one would have to designate as a swindle the operation by which they have converted to their own exclusive benefit the respect felt for science by the men of today.

Marx was incapable of any real effort of scientific thought, because that did not interest him. All this materialist was interested in was justice. He was obsessed by it. His admirably clear view of social necessity was of a kind to plunge him into despair, since it is a necessity powerful enough to prevent men, not only from obtaining, but even from conceiving justice. He did not want anything to do with despair. He felt in himself, irresistibly, that man’s desire for justice is too deeply implanted to admit of a refusal. He took refuge in a dream wherein social matter itself takes charge of the two functions that it denies man, namely, not only to accomplish justice, but to conceive it.

He labelled this dream “dialectical materialism”. This was sufficient to shroud it in mystery. These two words are of an almost impenetrable emptiness. A very amusing game—though rather a cruel one—is to ask a Marxist what they mean.

All the same, by searching hard, one can discover a sort of meaning in them. Plato named dialectics that movement of the soul which, at each stage, in order to rise to the sphere above, leans for support on the irreducible contradictions of the sphere wherein it finds itself. At the end of this ascent, it is in contact with the absolute good.

Contradiction in matter is imaged by the clash of forces coming from different directions. Marx purely and simply attributed to social matter this movement towards the good through contradictions, which Plato described as being that of the thinking creature drawn upwards by the supernatural operation of grace.

It is easy to see how he was led to this. To begin with, he adopted unreservedly the two false beliefs to which the bourgeois of his time clung so hard: first, the confusion between production and the good, and consequently between the progress of production and progress towards the good; and secondly, the arbitrary generalization by which the progress of production—so strongly felt in the nineteenth century—is made the permanent law of human history.

Only, as opposed to the bourgeois, Marx was not happy. The thought of human misery distressed him terribly, as it does anyone who is not insensitive. He needed, by way of compensation, something catastrophic, a striking act of revenge, a punishment. He could not visualize progress as a continuous movement. He saw it as a series of violent, explosive shocks. It is certainly useless to ask oneself which was right, the bourgeoisie or he. This very notion of progress in favour during the nineteenth century is devoid of meaning.

The Greeks used the word “dialectics” when thinking of the virtue of contradiction as support for the soul drawn upwards by grace. Since Marx, for his part, combined the material image of contradiction with the material image of the soul’s salvation, namely, the clashes between forces and the progress of production, he was perhaps right to use this word “dialectics”. But, on the other hand, this word, when coupled with the word “materialism”, immediately shows up the absurdity of the idea. If Marx did not feel it, that was because he borrowed the word, not from the Greeks, but from Hegel, who was already using it without any precise meaning. As for the public, it was in no danger of being shocked; Greek thought is no longer a sufficiently living thing for that. On the contrary, the words were very suitably chosen so as to lead people to say to themselves: “That must mean something”. When readers or listeners have been brought to that state, they are very open to suggestion.

Formerly, in adult education centres for the people, workers used sometimes to say, with a sort of timid eagerness, to intellectuals calling themselves Marxists: “We should very much like to know what dialectical materialism is”. There is little likelihood that they were ever satisfied.

As for the mechanism of the automatic production of the absolute good through social conflicts, there is no difficulty in grasping what Marx’s conception of it was; all that is very superficial.

Since the origin of social lies is to be found among the groups struggling for domination or emancipation, the disappearance of such groups would abolish lies, and man would live in justice and in truth. And what is the mechanism by which these groups can be made to disappear? It is very simple. Every time there is a social transformation, the dominant group falls and a relatively lower group takes its place. One has only to generalize; the whole of the science, and even the thought, of the nineteenth century, suffered from that vicious habit of uncontrolled extrapolation; except in the case of mathematics, the idea of limit was almost unknown. If each time a group lower in the scale attains to the dominant position, one day the lowest of all will do so; thenceforth there will be no more inferiors, no more oppression, no longer a social structure composed of hostile groups, no longer any lies. Men will possess justice, and because they possess it, they will know it as it is.

It is thus that we must understand the passages in which Marx seems completely to exclude the very notions of justice, truth or good. So long as justice is absent, man cannot conceive it, and a fortiori he cannot become possessed of it; it can only come to him from outside. Since society is vitiated, poisoned, and the social poison permeates all men’s thoughts without exception, everything that men imagine under the name of justice is simply lies. Anyone who talks of justice, truth, or no matter what type of moral value, is a liar or allows himself to be hoodwinked by liars. How, then, is one to serve justice, if one does not know it? The only way to do so, according to Marx, is to hasten forward the operation of that mechanism, inherent in the very structure of social matter, which will automatically bring men justice.

It is difficult really to be sure whether Marx thought that the role of the proletariat in this mechanism, by putting it closer to the future society, communicated to it and to the writers or militants who ranged themselves on its side an initial glimpse, as it were, of the truth, or whether he regarded the proletariat simply as a blind instrument of that entity which he named “history”. It is probable that his thoughts fluctuated on this point. But it is certain that he regarded the proletariat, together with its allies and leaders brought in from outside, above all as an instrument.

He regarded as just and good, not that which appears to be so to minds warped by the social lie, but solely that which could hasten the appearance of a society without lies; on the other hand, in this field, everything which is effective, without exception, is perfectly just and good, not in itself, but relatively to the final goal.

Thus in the end Marx fell back into that group morality which revolted him to the point of making him hate society. Like the feudal magnates of old, like the business men of his own day, he had built for himself a morality which placed above good and evil the activity of the social group to which he belonged, that of professional revolutionaries.

This is what always happens. The type of moral failing that we most fear and hate, that fills us with the greatest horror, is invariably the one into which we fall, when we do not seek the source of the good in the place where it dwells. It is the snare perpetually laid for each man, and against which there is but one protection.

This mechanism for producing paradise imagined by Marx is something obviously puerile. Force is a relationship; the strong are so in relation to those weaker than themselves. It is impossible for the weak to take possession of social power; those who take possession of social power by force always form—even before this operation—a group to which human masses are subjected. Marx’s revolutionary materialism consists in positing, on the one hand that everything is exclusively regulated by force, and on the other that a day will suddenly come when force will be on the side of the weak. Not that certain ones who were weak will become strong—a change that has always taken place; but that the entire mass of the weak, while continuing to be such, will have force on its side.

If the absurdity of this does not immediately strike us, it is because we think that number is a force. But number is a force in the hands of him who disposes of it, not in the hands of those who go to make it up. Just as the energy contained in coal is a force only after having passed through a steam engine, so the energy contained in a human mass is a force only for a group outside the mass, much smaller than the mass, and having established with it relations which, as a result of very close study, could perhaps be defined. It follows from this that the force of the mass is used on behalf of interests which are exterior to it, exactly as the force of an ox is used in the interests of the ploughman, or that of a horse in the interests of the rider. Someone may knock the rider off and jump into the saddle in his place, then get knocked off in his turn; this may be repeated a hundred or a thousand times; the horse will still have to keep on running under the prick of the spur. And if the horse unseats the rider, another will quickly take his place.

Marx was perfectly well aware of all this; he set it forth brilliantly in connection with the bourgeois State; but he wanted to forget it when it came to the revolution. He knew that the mass is weak and only constitutes a force in the limits of others; for, were it otherwise, there would never have been oppression. He let himself be persuaded solely by generalization, by applying the limiting process to that perpetual change which periodically sets those who were weaker in the place of those who were stronger. The limiting process, when applied to a relation one of whose terms it eliminates, is altogether too absurd. But this wretched form of reasoning sufficed for Marx, because anything suffices to persuade the man who feels that, if he were not persuaded, he could not live.

The idea that weakness as such, while remaining weak, can constitute a force, is not a new one. It is the Christian idea itself, and the Cross is the illustration of it. But it has to do with a force of quite a different kind from that wielded by the strong; it is a force that is not of this world, that is supernatural. It operates after the manner of the supernatural, decisively, but secretly, silently under the aspect of the infinitely small; and if it penetrates the masses by radiation, it does not dwell in them, but in certain souls. Marx accepted this contradiction of strength in weakness, without accepting the supernatural which alone renders the contradiction valid.

Similarly, Marx sensed a truth, an essential truth, when he realized that man can conceive justice only if he has …

(Here the manuscript, written in London in 1943, breaks off.)