VI Conclusion

The preceding remarks are partly attempts at interpretation, and partly critical emendations of some of the concepts and opinions expressed by Marx and in the Marxian literature. But how many other points deserve to undergo revision ! Beginning with that concentration of private property in a few hands, which threatens to become something like the discredited iron law of wages, and ending with that strange statement in the history of philosophy that the labour movement is the heir of German classical philosophy. And attention could thus be given to another group of questions which we have not discussed (ea. to the conception of future society) in regard to their detailed elucidation and their practical and historical applications. (60) If that decomposition of Marxism, which some have predicted, (61) meant a careful critical revision, it would indeed be welcome.

To sum up, in the meantime, the chief results which are suggested in the preceding remarks: they maintain.

1. In regard to economic science, the justification of Marxian economics, understood not as general economic science, but as comparative sociological economics, which is concerned with a problem of primary interest for historical and social life.

2. In regard to the philosophy of history, the purification of historical materialism from all traces of any a priori standpoint (whether inherited from Hegelianism or an infection from ordinary evolutionism) and the understanding of the theory as a simple, albeit a fruitful, canon of historical interpretation.

3. In regard to practical matters, the impossibility of inferring the Marxian social programme (or, indeed any other social programme) from the propositions of pure science, since the appraisement of social programmes must be a matter of empirical observations and practical convictions; in which connection the Marxian programme cannot but appear one of the noblest and boldest and also one of those which obtain most support from the objective conditions of existing society.

4. In regard to ethics, the abandonment of the legend of the intrinsic immorality or of the intrinsic anti-ethical character of Marxism.

I will add a remark on the second point. Many will think that if historical materialism is reduced to the limits within which we have confined it, it will not only no longer be a legitimate and real scientific theory (which we are indeed prepared to grant) but will actually lose all importance whatever, and against this second conclusion we once more, as we have done already on another occasion, make vigorous protest. Undoubtedly the horror expressed by some for pure science and for abstractions is inane, since these intellectual methods are indispensable for the very knowledge of concrete reality; but no less inane is the complete and exclusive worship of abstract propositions, of definitions, of theorems, of corollaries: almost as if these constituted a sort of aristocracy of human thought. Well! the economic purists (not to draw examples from other fields, though numbers could be found in pure mathematics) prove to us, in fact, that the discovery of scientific theorems, strictly, unimpeachably scientific,is frequently neither an over-important nor over-difficult matter. To be convinced thereof we need only remark how many eponimi of new theorems issue from every corner of the German or English schools. And concrete reality, i.e. the very world in which we live and move, and which it concerns us somewhat to know, slips out, unseizable, from the broad-meshed net of abstractions and hypotheses. Marx, as a sociologist, has in truth not given us carefully worked out definitions of social phenomena, such as may be found in the books of so many contemporary sociologists, of the Germans Simmel and Stammler, or of the Frenchman Durckheim; but he teaches us, although it is with statements approximate in content and paradoxical in form, to penetrate to what society is in its actual truth. Nay, from this point of view, I am surprised that no one has thought of calling him 'the most notable successor of the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli'; a Machiavelli of the labour movement.

And I will also add a remark on the third point if the social programme of Marxism cannot be wholly included in Marxian science, or in any other science, no more can the daily practice of socialist politics be, in its turn, wholly included in the general principles of the programme, which programme, if we analyse it, determines (1) an ultimate end, (the technical organisation of society); (2) an impulse, based on history, towards this end, found in the objective tendencies of modern society (the necessity for the abolition of capitalism and for a communistic organization, as the one possible form of progress); (3) a method (to accelerate the final phases of the bourgeoisie, and to educate politically the class destined to succeed them). Marx, owing to his political insight, has for many years in a striking manner, joined with, and guided by his advice and his work, the international socialist movement; but he could not give precepts and dogmas for every contingency and complication that history might produce. Now the continuation of Marx's political work is much more difficult than the continuation of his scientific work. And, if, in continuing the latter, the so-called Marxians have sometimes fallen into a scientific dogmatism little to be admired, some recent occurrences remind us of the danger, that the continuation of the former may also degenerate into a dogmatism with the worst effects, i.e. a political dogmatism. This gives food for thought to all the more cautious Marxians, amongst whom are Kautsky and Bernstein in Germany, and Sorel in France; Labriola's new book, too, contains serious warnings on the matter.

November, 1897.