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PARTISAN REVIEW
ning parallel to it, but in either case incapable of affecting it. To lend
itself to the misunderstanding of such people has been one of the main
curses of Marxism ever since the days when Marx himself declared
that as for
him
he was no Marxist and when Engels, in
his
letter to
Joseph Bloch, said that "many of the recent 'Marxists'" were certainly
turning out "a rare kind of balderdash."
Marx and Engels were not simple-minded; and they had rejected
what they called the "pure mechanism" of the French eighteenth
century philosophers. They saw, as Engels says, the impossibility of
applying "the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and
organic nature," in which, though the laws of mechanics had also a
limited validity, they were certainly "pushed into the background by
other and higher laws." And so in society, to quote another of Engels'
letters, it was "not the case that the economic situation is the
sole
active cause
and everything else only a passive effect."
What then? In what sense was it true that economics determined
social relations and that ideas were derived from these?
If
the ideas
were not "passive effects," what was the nature and extent of their
activity? How could they act upon economic conditions? How could
the theories of Marx and Engels themselves help to produce a pro–
letarian revolution?
Well, the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their
own point of view with any very great degree of exactitude. What is
important and inspiring in it is the idea that the human spirit
will
be able to master its animal nature through reason; but they managed
to make a great many people think they meant something the op–
posite of this: that mankind was hopelessly the victim of its appetites.
For Marx had dropped philosophy proper with the fragments of the
"Theses On Feuerbach"; he had intended to write a book on the
Dialectic after he should have got done with "Capital," but he never
lived to undertake it. Engels did attempt late in his life-first in "Anti–
Diihring,'' which had the approval of Marx, and then in
his
short
work on Feuerbach and
his
long letters to various correspondents,
written after Marx's death-to explain the general point of view. But
Engels, who had confessed in
his
youth, at the time when he was
studying philosophy most earnestly, that he had little natural aptitude
for the subject and who even in later years wrote to Marx of
his
"weakness
en fait de theor:ie,"
provided no more than a sketch for a
system. And
if
you look up and piece together all that Marx and
Engels wrote on the subject, you do not get a very satisfactory picture.
Max Eastman, in
his
remarkable study "Marx, Lenin and the Science
of Revolution," has shown the discrepancies between the statements
