THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
69
that Marx and Engels made at various times; Sidney Hook, in
his
extremely able but less acutely critical book "Towards the Under–
standing of Karl Marx," has tried to iron out the inconsistencies, to
state with precision what has been ·left in the vague, and to formulate
a presentable system. The main point about the philosophy of
Marxism for us here is that its emphasis is considerably shifted be–
tween the first phase of its creators and their latest.
If
we read "The
German Ideology" of 1845-6-into which an element of satire enters–
we find that we are having it drummed into us that all the things
that men think and imagine grow straight out of their vulgarest needs;
if we read Engels' letters of the nineties, written at a time when
peop)e interested in Marxism were beginning to ask fundamental
questions, we get an old man's soberest effort to state
his
notion of
the nature of things, and it produces an entirely different impression.
"Marx and I," he wrote, "are partly responsible for the fact that
at times our disciples have laid more weight upon the economic factor
than belongs to it. We were compelled to emphasize its central
character in opposition to our opponents who denied it, and there
wasn't always time, place and occasion to do justice to the other
factors in the reciprocal interactions of the historical process."
Let us see now how Engels envisaged these "reciprocal inter–
actions."
The first image which comes to our mind when we hear about
the Marxist view of history-an image for which, as Engels says, he
and Marx themselves are partly responsible-is a tree of which the
roots are the methods of production, the trunk is the social relations,
and the branches, or "superstructure," are law, politics, philosophy,
religion and art-whose true relation to the trunk and the roots is con–
cealed by "ideological" leaves. But this is not what Marx and Engels
meant. Their tree is more in the nature of that curious oriental one
of which the branches droop down to the ground and take root there.
The ideological activities of the superstructure are regarded by them
neither merely as reflections of the economic base nor as simple
ornamental fantasies which grow out of it. The conception is a great
deal more complicated. Each of these higher departments of the
superstructure-law, politics, philosophy, etc.-is always struggling to
set
itself free from its tether in economic interest and to evolve a
professional group which shall be partly independent of class bias
and the relation of whose work to the economic roots may be ex–
tremely indirect and obscure. These groups may act directly on one
another and even back on the social-economic basis.
Engels, in one of these letters, tries to give some idea of what
