118
PARTISAN REVIEW
developed economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out
of the human brain."
To understand Marxism, we must understand its genesis. Marx
and Engels
wanted
socialism as intensely as Saint-Simon, Fourier, or
Owen, but forty years of utopianism had convinced them of the fu–
tility of drawing up "rational" schemes of social organization and
attempting to float them by exhortation and example. Imagine, then,
the satisfaction they felt when they became convinced that the opera–
tion of social and economic laws would inexorably bring about pre–
cisely the end they desired. We miss the whole point if we think of
them as devitalized scholars probing dispassionately into the laws of
social change. They were socialists to begin with, and they found what
they wanted to find.
Engels himself lets us see the slightness of the clues that started
them on their way to their vast conclusions: "In 1831, the first work–
ing-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first
national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists,
reached its height.... The new facts made imperative a new exami–
nation of all past history. Then it was seen that
all
past history, with
the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles."
It was Marx, of course, with his Hegelian training, who made the
breathtaking leap to this final generalization. It was not enough for
him to find a force-i.e., the proletariat-that could and inevitably
would achieve socialism; he had to sanctify this discovery by relating
it to an even more sweeping generalization about the dynamics of all
history.
The immediate and very desirable effect of Marx's work was to
concentrate the attention of socialists on the analysis of social pro–
cesses. One can refuse to accept the dogma of Marxist infallibility and
still be greatly in Marx's debt.
If
his economic theories are sometimes
cloudy, his historical writings are brilliantly clear. The chapter of
Capital
called "Primary Accumulation" is one of the great examples
of his insight. Two other chapters, "The Working Day" and "Capital–
ist Accumulation," taken with Engels' earlier
Conditions of the Work–
ing Class,
give an unforgettable account of life in the first stages of
industrial capitalism. And such inspired pamphlets as
The Civil War
in France
and
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
take us
below the surface to see the forces at work in the political struggles
of the mid-nineteenth century.
If,
however, Marx's preoccupation with historical processes has
given us a great intellectual heritage, it must also be held responsible
