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In fact, though Marx had many wistful theories about the eventual
shape of communist society, the idea of a return to some primitive com–
mune was, explicitly, not one of them. Marx argued rather sanctimo–
niously against the pristine little communes of his day, even in that
classic communist text,
The German Ideology,
which Koestler cites. For
Marx, the proletarian revolutionist would have to embrace what was
present and imminent in capitalism: the science of political economy, the
revolutionary power of capitalist traders to dissolve the primitive rela–
tions of feudal society, the new technologies of competing factories that
promised to end scarcity, and so on. Koestler explores none of these
principles, though some are just taken for granted .
What
did
seem to draw Koestler in was Soviet Marxism's familiar
and reassuring positivist ethos, so much like Haeckel's, a laboratory
style of positing historical directions and making positive claims.
Indeed, Koestler conceded that Marxist social-scientific rhetoric trans–
ported him back to the serene state of mind he had acquired as a young–
ster, when the world was in chaos, and science seemed on the verge of
making it orderly.
What, after all, does Engels actually write in "Ludwig Feuerbach and
the End of Classical German Philosophy" that Koestler would have par–
ticularly latched onto? At the risk of oversimplifying an already over–
simple thesis, it was Engels's view that communists
should
see
themselves in the materialist paradigm begun by Hobbes, to which
Feuerbach, an inspiration to Marx, was merely a contributor. Engels
argued (again, much like Haeckel) that thinking was no more than a
passive process of accepting imprints on mind, that men were a kind of
matter-in-motion, affective appetites, and that their relations of produc–
tion divided them into classes, which determined their thought. The
only novelty Koestler would have encountered in Engels's argument was
something a disciple of Haeckel would have particularly admired,
namely, an attempt to reconcile Marx's materialist version of class strug–
gle and consciousness with Darwin's conception of evolution. Ever since
his eulogy at Marx's graveside, Engels had begun to claim that Marx
had done for the social world precisely what Darwin had done for the
natural world. Communists were thus to think of classes as evolving
"historically," by which he meant organically, as if endowed with the
directed force of an animal species.
"Irrespective of their wills," Engels writes, classes played out their part
in a determinate "struggle for existence," from feudalism to capitalism,
from capitalism to revolutionary crisis.
It
was the "irrespective of their
wills" part that Koestler liked best. He conceived of the Party's brain trust
