.

I')

The "’ller.niai 31ok: *'yth and 'aric in the ‘‘arxist Ethic

By

Srady Louis ’'cJ’urtrv

A. 3. (University cf California' 19L?

THESIS

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

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 PREFACE

This is a study of the universe of discourse of Marxism. It

will he the purpose here to understand the Marxist as a committed per

son by analyzing the vocation required by Marxism of its adherents. It

has often occurred to me, when I have had occasion to refer to Marxist

literature, that I discerned an underlying pattern of thought that is

perhaps more familiar to the student of anthropology, psychology, soci­

ology or philosophy, than to the student of political science. I have,

therefore, availed myself of this opportunity to explore Marxism as a

universe of discourse, and only incidentally as a political philosophy

per se. It is not until we understand how a person thinks that we are

able to understand why he thinks and acts as he does. In this respect

it has seemed to me that there is a striking resemblance between Marxism

as a world-view and the myth, magic and ethic of the tribalistic uni

verse of discourse. Therefore I shall apply the tribalistic frame of

reference to Marxism in an attempt to understand how the Marxist thinks.

This, then, is a study of Marxism as an idea rather than of

Marx as a person. Marx, after all, was not necessarily a Marxist as we

understand the term, for the writings of Marx comprise only a small

portion of the vast literature of Marxism, but Marxism as an idea has

had a development and life of its own. Furthermore it should be under­

stood that I am not asserting that an application of the epistemology

of magic is the only way in which one can understand Marxism, but rather

that this is one way of understanding Marxism. Equally I do not assert

that a study of magic is to be applied only to Marxism, but it is with

M882084
ii
 iii

Marxism that we are here concerned.

In any exposition where technical terminology is extensively

employed, it is perhaps best to pause a moment for clarification be

fore plunging into the work at hand. What, after all, is meant by

such words as "myth”, "magic","ethic”, "tribalism”, "rational”, "irra

tional", and "universe of discourse”?

Myth. A myth is the statement of a closed system of reality.

It may be as simple as a story or a legend or it may be so comprehen

sive that it includes the entire universe of discourse of a closed

society. This latter is the distinguishing characteristic that will

interest us most about myth, for no matter how limited or comprehensive

its scope may be, a myth is a whole and attempts to explain or justify

that which is comprehended only within its frame of reference. Viewed

objectively, such an emphasis upon explanation only within one particu­

lar ideology, rationale, or tribal universe of discourse is irrational.

Magic. By magic I do not mean legerdemain. Magic is the con

trol of things and events by a direct act of will on the part of the

magician. Magic does not recognize knowledge as mediate, but only

direct. Magic is operative only in a world of homoeopathy, i.e., where

similarity is recognized as kinship, kinship is likeness, and likeness

is affective, for magic is effective through being affective. Magic

is a way of knowing and doing and a way of understanding the world in

which we live. Magic knows and does by a direct act of will on the

part of the person knowing and doing, and magic is understood by a magi

cal myth which interprets the world in terms of the coercive relationship

of the knower and the known

 iv

Ethic. An ethic is a comprehensive statement concerning morality.

Here we will be primarily concerned, with the goal orientation of the

Marxist ethic where the goal is the act of Revolution and its consequence,

the millennium.

Tribalism. Tribalism is the way of life and manner of thinking

of a closed social group, usually in a primitive or nomadic state,

where authority rests in the office of chieftainship. "New" tribalism

is the revival of this manner of thinking, way of grouping and means of

acting, in modern politics.

Rational. The rational is a method of critical and calculated

inquiry in which answers are sought on the basis of hypotheses subject

to reasoned change, i.e., in which theories are open-ended to allow for

the consideration of new empirical data, rather than closed by certain

fixed preconceptions asserted dogmatically.

Irrational. That is irrational which asserts a closed system of

truth. Such an assertion is irrational for two reasons. First, failure

to allow for alternate means of inquiry is the opposite of the rational

method. Second, irrationality arises from the assertion that all knowl

edge can be directed to conform to one and only one system of truth, for

such an assertion is a magical act of will whereby the universe is

ordered to accommodate itself to this one particular system. As such

it is the positing of rationality in the will rather than in the intel

lect as a faculty of the mind. Closed systems of irrationality may be

accepted a priori, as with a tribal, provincial, or parochial universe

of discourse, or they may be rationally contrived philosophic systems.

It should be noted in this respect that our reference is not necessarily

to any historical school known as "Rationalist" or "Irraxionalist", but

 V

only to rationalism and irrationalism as herein defined.

Universe of Discourse. A universe of discourse is that collec

tion of facts or ideas which is tacitly implied or understood in a given

statement or discussion. Such a collection of facts or ideas is usually

held, and will he here held, to center around certain basic principles.

Marxism is such a universe of discourse centering around the autogenetic

movement of the Hegelian dialectic, the historical validation of the in

clusive magical myth, the goal oriented ethic of the millennial act,

and the charisma of the tribal magician.

The initial chapter of this paper is utilized in a dual capacity.

First, it is used to project the hypothesis that one may meaningfully

speak in terms of a magical universe of discourse and, second, by ex

tracting the three salient characteristics of totemic tribalism it is

used as an outline for the subsequent three chapters. The second chap

ter is concerned with the Marxist act, its millennium, and the goal

oriented ethic it prescribes, the third chapter is concerned with the

state of mind the Marxist brings to his vocation of leadership, and the

fourth chapter is concerned with a detailed epistemological analysis of

the magical tribal myth of the Marxist universe of discourse within

which the ethic of the act and the charisma of the leader are comprehensible.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

PREFACE............................................................................................................................................ ii

Chapter I.MYTH AND MAGIC AS A UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE ... 1

Chapter II. THE MARXIST ETHIC............................. 22

Chapter III. THE MARXIST MIND............................. 43

Chapter IV. THE UNIVERSE OF THE NEWTRIBALISM.............. 67

Myth............................................................................................... 70

Magic............................................................................................. 78

Developmental Essence .................... 8l

Definitional .............................. 90

Protean................................... 99

Conclusion.................................... 118

BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................... 119

vi
 Chapter I

MYTH AND MAGIC AS A UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE

In what follows} the magical or tribal or collec

tivist society will also he called, the closed, society . . .

K. R. Popper

In making this inquiry into the myth and. magic of the Marxist

ethic I have utilized, the anthropological concept of totemic tribalism

as my criterion of significance. Not all tribes are totemic in struc

ture, but all totemic structures have the element of tribal inclusive-

exclusive ideology and it is this thought model which we shall apply as

the measure of the Marxist ethic. Totemic tribalism exhibits three

salient characteristics:

(1) an inclusive and comprehensive ideology;

(2) a belief in success based on solidarity and a magical act

of group will;

(3) an exclusive, charismatic leadership.

Let us look at this first as the anthropologist envisions it.

Speaking of leadership and ideology in totemic tribalism, Bronislaw

Malinowski says

groups in primitive cultures are formed for the purpose of

policing, of carrying on vendettas, and for types of fight
ing, such as . . . raids. The members of the group are
organized under a leader who wields the central authority;
they undergo a period of training; they have exclusive
access to the instruments produced for the carrying out of
the activity; and they have a common ideology and purpose.
Thus through control of the weapons or implements, and since
they are organized, the group is able to impose its will on
the other members of the community.1

1 Bronislaw Malinowski, Freedom and Civilization (New York: Roy, 1944,

p. 248.

1
 2

As for magical group will and. solidarity he says

Magic in its very essence is the belief that man, by vir

tue of his tribal lore . . . can conquer accident . . .
through the assertion of his mystical1y founded power; and
thus secure success in human enterprise. It is the belief
in a man-made, infallible force to achieve practical ends.
Man becomes God in order to dictate his own will to his
followers, or to impose the collective will on nature, on
circumstances, or on destiny.

I shall not assume that any modern totalitarian state is a secret

society "in the large", as it were, and I shall not discuss the question

as to whether Marx was a Marxist, Hegel a Hegelian or Lenin a chiliast,

for that is not the point at Issue. We are not discussing personalities,

but ideas and how they affect people. What is important is that there

is a corpus of ideas, deriving from many sources and focusing on many

issues, that we call "Marxism" and that this corpus of ideas has its

ethic, an ethic that has appealed strongly to a considerable portion of

the morally sensitive element of modern Western civilization. With this

in mind let us delve into the subject of myth and magic in the Marxist

ethic and ascertain the extent to which our criterion of comparison may

be said to apply.

In discussing the emergence of articulate irrationalism in modern

politics one often encounters the term "tribalism" or "the new tribalism"

as descriptive of the closed totalitarian society. As in the case of

many another intellectualist fashion, this is bandied about quite handily

as if there really were a one-to-one relation between the functioning in

microcosm of a tribal social entity and the macrocosm of a modern state

Malinowski, op. cit., p. 245.

 J

of an authoritarian complexion. Actually, what is usually meant in

such a context is a certain superficial similarity between the ethno-

centricity of the inclusive tribal cult and. the closed, moral worlds of

the modern totalitarian movements. That the similarity may be more

than superficial is indicated by the ease with which the terms of tribal

anthropology, such as "magical allusion", "mystical intuition", "ritual

solidarity"', "moral cohesion", "group attitudes", "metamorphosis",

"transmutation", "substances and essences", and "group soul", are used

in describing phenomena in the closed irrational societies. Yet even

with the addition of a terminology that obviously fits easily into the

universe of the closed world of tribal unity there is still little incli

nation to consider the analogy as being more than a passing manner of

speech. After all, it is obvious to even the most casual observer that

Nazi Germany, for example, was not a "primitive tribe", but a modern

nation state in the grip of a somewhat more than usual fanatic demagogue.

Also there are all kinds of tribalism: political tribalism, social

tribalism, economic tribalism, religious tribalism, mi1itary tribalism,

cultural tribalism, aesthetic tribalism and, one is almost tempted to

say, anthropological and archeological tribalism. And within these gen

eral kinds of tribalism there is an infinite variety in tribalism with

all manner of variations in modes of dress, ritual, architecture, goods,

gods, language, food, artifacts, warfare, and so on. Still the people

who have used these terms of "tribalism", "magic", "mysticism", and

"solidarity" to indicate various manifestations of the closed society as

3
opposed to the open society have been somewhat more than casual observers

3 K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1949), 152; cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York:
I, p.
and. for all its outward complexity there are certain basic similarities

of tribalism in general that may be utilized in investigating the modern

forms of political irrationalism. "Irrationalism" as here used is in

tended to mean the dogmatic assertion of a particular system of truth

as the only truth with consequent failure to realize the validity of

alternate sources of information. A closed tribal universe where those

outside the tribe "are not regarded as full human beings"4 is such an

irrationalism as is any closed deductive system of logic, grammar, posi

tive law or political ideology when asserted dogmatically. The "rational"

as here used would be prediction by systematic calculation when more

than one alternative is allowed. Such being the case I propose to take

the concept of tribalism seriously and to extract its three salient

characteristics for use in investigating the closed moral world of

Marxist irrationalism.

Tribalism is an ancient wisdom and for all its lack by many of our

present standards has nevertheless preserved man through an interminable

period of time, something that rational man with his rationally calculated

engines of destruction gives no promise of doing. But though our civili

zation may have grown out of tribalism it has long since left this way

of thinking and when we find modern nations and states reverting to

tribalistic modes of thought, to the myth and ritual of the totem society,

it is of the utmost importance that we give serious consideration to the

3
(continued) Oxford, 1942), pp. 92-6; Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic,
Science and Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), p. 301; Ernst
Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale, 1944), PP. 82-3; Hans Kohn,
Prophets and Peoples (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 149.

Malinowski, Freedom and Civilization, op. cit., p. 253.

meaning of tribalism and. what it has to say to us today. In what follows

I shall attempt to explore in some detail the thesis expounded by K. R.

Popper that collectivist society is tribal society and that collectivist

5
thought is magical thought. In making this analysis of the myth and

magic in the Marxist ethic I shall subsume each of the three salient

characteristics of totemic tribalism previously outlined under a more

general heading. Thus (1) its "inclusive and comprehensive ideology"

becomes a "universe of discourse", (2) its "belief in success based on

solidarity and a magical act of group will" becomes "confidence in a

collective means of action", and (3) its "exclusive, charismatic leader

ship" becomes "the embodiment of that means of action".

It is said that a tribe is a closed society. This is merely

another way of saying that each tribe is a closed universe socially and

morally. Let us familiarize ourselves with the language of this universe

of discourse, turning first to Ignazio Silone and his comments on life in

the Italian Communist Party.

The Party became family, school, church, barracks; the

world that lay beyond it was to be destroyed and built anew.
The psychological mechanism whereby each single militant be
comes progressively identified with the collective organiza
tion is the same as that used in certain religious orders and
military colleges, with almost identical results. Every sacri
fice was welcomed as a personal contribution to the ’price of
collective redemption’ . . .6

Now let us turn back the clock and refer to F. M. Cornford’s remarks on

a very similar situation in antique Greece. Speaking of the tribal magical

5 Popper, op. cit., I, pp. 206-7.

6
Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1949), p. 99.
 6

societies he says

A group of this type has its existence as a whole;

its 'nature,’ . . . consists of its collective functions.
The individual, when he is initiated, into the order, be
comes just a Koures ... an undistinguished part of the
whole. . . . The only 'soul' a Koures has is the group-
soul of his order, and this consists of nothing beside
the group-functions, the behavior expected of the group.
. . . The 'soul' is the collective 'nature.' Rites of
initiation are regularly regarded as new births . . .7

The parallel is nominally very close. Converts to Marxist Communism are

in a sense initiated into a new life, given a new birth of social respon

sibility, and admitted to a closed social order. Translate "Koures" as

"Communist" and the psychological parallel is complete, but before we do

this let us turn to the anthropologists again for a few comments on this

phenomenon. Bronislaw Malinowski has this to say while analyzing the

structure and functions of various totalitarian mysticisms:

The whole doctrine of Aryan superiority in race, and

of the right to world domination by the master race, is
essentially mystical. So is the belief in the infallibility,
mystical omnipotence, and ubiquitous power of the Fuehrer,
the Duce, or the Head of the Soviet State. Those who have
studied the techniques of real propaganda, as this has been
developed in the totalitarian countries, will realize that
the thrilling promises, the affirmations of power and
efficiency, as well as the canalizing of hatreds and pas
sions, are built up essentially on the technique of a magical
spell.8

And again Margaret Mead, speaking specifically to the point in regards to

the Marxist ethic, says

World History as it is presented to the young citizen

of the Soviet Union is divided in two: before 1917 and
after 1917. After 1917, the picture is of an all-embracing

F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1912),

7
p. 94.

inowski,
8 Ma Freedom and Civilization, op. cit., p. 213.
 7

way of life, with a Truth, a form of organization (the

Party), the embodiment of that organizational form in a
leader (Lenin and Stalin), and a way of life--difficult,
all demanding--to which every Soviet citizen should feel
called, to at least some degree, as a vocation. In these
respects it is far closer to the familiar picture of a
religious movement in its early, all-inclusive form than
to the sort of political picture presented by contemporary
Western democracies.9

The basis of the argument is thus outlined. It will be my contention

that the modern phenomenon of the "closed society" finds its prototype

in the "closed mind" of the magical society of totemic tribalism.

To speak of mind in this context is to introduce the psychologi

cal element into politics. Some years ago Graham Wallas was laying stress

on the contention that

. . . politics is only in a slight degree the product of

conscious reason ... it is largely a matter of subcon­
scious processes, of habit and instinct, of suggestion and
imitation. . . . the importance of names and symbols, of
party shibboleths ... of the emotional connotations of
political devices . . . the art of politics consists largely
in the creation of opinion by a deliberate appeal to non-
rational inference and to emotional suggestion . . . great
political decisions do not represent a general will, re­
sulting from clear thought and reason. They are more likely
to result from a confusion of impulses, inferences, habits,
and prejudices.10

Here we are speaking of politics in general, politics with a leavening

of moral rational control but not yet a politics that is a product of an

organized irrational mythology. Marxist Communism provides just such a

myth in its ideology of the dialectic and, as Ernst Cassirer says

9 Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1951), P. 60.

10
Raymond G. Gettell, History of Political Thought (New York: Century,
1924), p. 446.
 8

The fundamental social character of myth is uncontroverted.

. . . The real substratum of myth is not a substratum of
thought but of feeling. ... By a sudden metamorphosis
everything may be turned into everything. If there is any
characteristic and outstanding feature of the mythical
world, any law by which it is governed--it is this law of
metamorphosis. . . . What is characteristic of primitive
mentality is not its logic but its general sentiment of
life. . . Primitive man ... his view of nature is
neither merely theoretical nor merely practical; it is
sympathetic. . . . Myth is an offspring of emotion . . .11

Myth, emotion, metamorphosis, sympathetic magic--this is the terminology

we apply to the world of the primitive ritual magician; it is also the

terminology we apply to the rationally contrived irrationalism of the

"closed society", whether Communist or otherwise. Or as Popper says

Marx replaced Hegel’s 'Spirit' by matter, and by

material and economic interests. In the same way,
racialism substitutes for Hegel’s ’Spirit’ something
material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or
Race. Instead of ’Spirit,’ Blood is the self-developing
essence. ... The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into
racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter
the main tendency of Hegelianism. . . The outcome is a
materialistic and at the same time mystical religion of a
self-developing biological essence, very closely reminis
cent of the religion of creative evolution (whose prophet
was the Hegelian Bergson) . . . 12

To identify Bergson as a disciple of Hegel is perhaps an error of enthusi

asm, but they both stand in the forefront of modern irrationalist

thought.

Hegel is the godfather of Marxist metaphysics; Bergson is the

creator of a complete irrational universe of discourse which has in

fluenced the totalitarian systems of both Right and Left. Hegel is

perhaps the more prominent of the two as the continuity of his influence

Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 80-2.

11

Popper, op. cit., II, p. 58.

12
 9

on Marx is both obvious and well documented, but it is to Henri Bergson

that we must turn for the clearest and most precise enunciation of the

language, the terminology, the universe of discourse of systematically

irrational thought. For what we are confronted with when we speak of

a millennial glow, of myth and of magic, is a universe of discourse, a

way of thinking, that is completely alien to the rational and objective

approach of the mind conditioned by the open society, but is as old as

man’s belief in the efficacy of the tribal soothsayer and his ability

to coerce the forces of nature. Stated simply this is the basic assump

tion of the primitive mind that "like produces like" and that if the

charismatically endowed ritual-magician will only wave the emblems of

fertility in just the proper sequence or pour the beer on the rain

stones in just the correct manner then by some homeopathy of sympathetic

magic the forces of nature will somehow be coerced into producing the

desired result. The sophistication of this basic assumption into vast

and complicated epistemologies has been the task; of the metaphysicians

among whom Bergson is our best modern example. As Cornford says, speak

ing of the Greeks and their heritage of irrationalism

The early philosophers ... assumed the maxim that

’like knows like,’ which is a special case of the more gen
eral axiom: ’Like can only act on like.’ Here ... we
encounter a by no means obvious principle . . . accepted
from collective representation. The formula which states
that this action can only take place between ‘like’ objects,
is derived from that old magical doctrine which grouped
things into classes of kindred, united by a sympathetic
continuum. This continuum is ... a pervasive ’soul’ run
ning through all the class. It is the vehicle and medium
of motion and interaction of all kinds, and so of that
special kind of action called ’knowing’ or ’perceiving,’
which is an attribute of Soul.13

13
Cornford, op. cit., p. 132
 10

And again

Sympathetic magic consists in the representation of

the object of passionate desire. Primarily, this represen
tation is mimetic . . . the realisation of the desired end
in dramatic action. The emotion is satisfied by actually
doing the thing which is willed. Besides this, there is
also the verbal expression of the same emotion and desire--
the element of myth, which at first is simply the statement
of what is being done and willed.14

And finally

As late as Anaxagoras we shall find that Mind masters

the world because it knows it; 'for knowing defines and
determines what is known.’ For this conception of the work
of the intellect, see Bergson's Evolution Creatrice.15

Here we have all of the elements of mythology and magic that have made

Bergson such a fertile source of inspiration for those who would think

with their Instinct, Blood or Class; "like produces like",16 divination

17
by sympathy, the future determined by a pervasive sympathetic continuum

as an inner directing principle, 18 creation by an act of will,19 and the

omnipotent act as irrational and anti-intellectual,20 but this is com

prehensible only within the universe of discourse that is the world of

magic.

Having established that there is such a thing as a way of thinking

that can be intelligibly referred to as a universe of magic, and having

Comford, op. cit. , p. 139

14

15 Ibid., p. l4l, Note 1.

16 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Holt, 1911), P. 29.

17Ibid., p. l64.

l8Ibid., pp. 76, 87.

19Ibid., p. 239.

20Ibid., pp. 248, 165.

 11

further established a consensus that this magical universe of discourse

can be legitimately utilized in describing tribalism both old and new,

we must now outline the theory of magic and test it with an analysis of

the Marxist ethic.

The epistemology of the world of magic is based on a dichotomy

between a substance known, designated as "matter”, and an equally material

essence that knows,21 the "inner directing principle" (Bergson), Spirit

(Hegel), or sympathetic continuum of early Greek philosophy (Cornford),

which gives matter its vitality, life or energy. As Cornford says

Through the dry and obscure argumentation of Aristotle

shines the primitive conception of soul-substance, as a
material continuum charged with vital force, interfused
through all things or ’cut off and enclosed’ in various
living creatures. 'Soul' and physis are not merely analo
gous, but identical. The two conceptions—Soul, and
ultimate matter—are as yet fused in one, just as we found
that at a certain stage mana and the blood-soul were fused
in the magical continuum.22

In the same way he explains the collectivist social origin of this con

cept by saying

. . . the possibility alike of motion and of knowledge Is

explained by the Greek philosophers by means of a concep
tion of physis as soul-substance, in which all the chief
characteristics of the sympathetic continuum of magic are
reproduced. . . . the sympathetic continuum was originally
the substrate of kinship ... it was the vehicle of inter
action only within a group of the same kin ... kinship
is the primitive form of all ’likeness.’23

The significance of this in the present context is that Marx is a collec

tivist with a Hegelian metaphysics and a materialistic epistemology as

21
Cornford, op. cit., pp. 132-3.

22
Ibid., p. 130.

23
Ibid., p. I34.
 12

primitive as that of the antique Greeks before they began to distinguish

the properties of life from those of inanimate matter in their material

substrate. This same lack of precise distinction causes considerable

confusion when the Marxist attempts to explain the world in terms of

his system as, for example, when he attempts to explain consciousness

as a "reflection" of matter or to explain how matter can be both the

substrate and that which changes the substrate. After all if every

thing that exists is material, if matter is eternal and unchanging and

yet is always changing because everything is in a continual process of

becoming, then we are confronted with a universe which is governed, as

Cassirer says, by a law of metamorphosis where anything may be trans

muted into anything else by a magical act of will. It is only when we

view the history of Marxism in the relevance of this universe of dis

course that we can understand such recent manifestations as the Soviet

claims of invention (mutability of history) or the claim that Lysenko

can transmute wheat Into rye (mutability of matter) and realize that

both of these stem from the same epistemology.24 Other characteristics

of the world of magic, besides the substance-essence dichotomy, are

that it is completely plastic or protean,25 that it is a world of defi

nition where change is effected by an act of will,26 and that it is a

world of harmony or identity of opposites where contradictions or incon

sistencies that result from the arbitrary and a priori use of definition

P. S. Hudson and R. H. Richens, The New Genetics in the Soviet Union

24
(Imperial Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics, School of Agriculture,
Cambridge, England), pp. 53-5.
25
Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 80-2.
26
Cornford, op. cit., p. 139.
 13

and metamorphosis can he and are resolved by merging thesis and antithe­

sis into a resultant synthesis of developmental essence.

There is nothing really very mysterious about this universe of

discourse. After all this is the way people have thought for millennia

and still do in many parts of the world today. Nor is it necessary for

the person who thinks in such terms to be aware of these critical dis

tinctions any more than it is necessary for an illiterate person to be

aware of the grammar of a language in order to be able to use that

language. And while it is true that this world of protean substance and

operative principles is completely alien to the open-ended empiricisms

of our rational mechanistic field theories it is equally true that on

any statistical basis magic can be proven to be the normal manner of

thought for the human being.28 Understanding and appreciation of this

fact is of vital importance if we are to understand the Marxist world.

After ail, why a Marxist? How do they get that way? What are the over-

powering motivations of morality and conscience that have impelled so

many of our idealistic young into this closed world of tribal magic?

These are questions of import if we are to understand the Marxist world,

its actions and the people who are motivated by it. And to understand

this world we must understand it as a world, as a way of thinking, as

the social soul of a tribe, as a universe of discourse within which the

mechanistically impossible is qualitatively possible, where change can

be effected by an act of will, where wishes and reality lie close

Popper, op. cit., II, pp. 38-9.

27
28
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale, 1946 ),
p. 294.
 u

together. Until we have understood, this we have not understood the

Marxist mind, its ethic or its myth.

The prescriptive nature of the Marxist ethic results from its

concept of Revolution as a giant act of collective will whereby the

social world is created anew and the secular millennium is realized on

Earth. Here we have both myth and magic, myth as the fabulous story of

a prodigy to come, magic as the creation of a new world by the alchemi

cal transmutation of the old into a new and more glorious future. And

it is belief in this myth and this magic that has given a sense of pur

pose, of dedication and rectitude not only to the convinced Communist,

but to all that section of political opinion that finds meaning and sig

nificance in what has been called "the ’mystique' of the Left". Once

having accepted this belief and thereby established themselves as morally

correct they are able to pull around themselves the comprehensive intel

lectual world view of Marxism and so close themselves off from the rest

of the moral and intellectual world. This ability to submerge themselves

into a myth, to become a part of a closed and totalitarian social order,

to perceive nothing except that which can be comprehended within the

enveloping membrane of tribal magic is the salient characteristic of the

group mind of the doctrinaire Marxist.

In order to understand this activist aspect of Marxist collectiv

ism we must turn to Georges Sorel for the clearest enunciation of the

principle of the salvation or regeneration of the world through violence,

i.e., revolution as a giant ecstatic-orgiastic act of group will whereby

the world is created anew in the social millennium of utopian chiliasm.29

29 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949),
PP. 192-3, 196, 202-3, 223.
 15

Here again we have all of the necessary elements of the mythology and

magic in the Marxist ethic: the apocalyptic vision,30 the messianic com

the millennial glow,32 the orgiastic metamorphosis of the world

plex,31

into a Golden Age by a magical act of will,33 and then within this world

we have an intellectual rationale hy means of which the rational element

of the intellect attempts to convince itself that this is, somehow, the

only real scientific approach,34 even though placing all truth in the

irrational act makes it methodologically incapable of predicting the

future and fundamentally anti-intellectual.35 The irrational act of the

dialectic is methodologically incapable of predicting the future because

it is "now”, and it is "now" because it is the change, the process,

the becoming, the developing principle of organic essentialism within

which we are encapsuled. There can be "no past, no future"37 when we are

"installed within change", for if we are being borne forward by the

irresistible act of History, if we are merely particles of matter caught

up in the developing essence of life,39 then we are being rolled along in

Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950),

30
p. 278.
31 Ibid., p. 48.

32Ibid., p. 145.

33Ibid., p. 187.

34 Ibid., p. 170.

Ibid., p. 142.
35
36 Popper, op. cit., II, p. 46; cf. Mannheim, op. cit., pp. 118, 198,
202-3, 193-5, 212, 185.
37
Popper, loc. cit.
38 Bergson, op. cit., p. 308.

39Ibid., pp. 238, 269.

 l6

the closed, world of an eternal present, and past and future are merely

our reflections seen on the mirrored surface inside our "wave of the

future". This fusion of the philosophies of Hegel and Bergson in the

writings of Sorel is illustrative of the ease with which the thought of

all three fits into the same magical universe of discourse. In this

manner Henri Bergson exerted considerable influence on European Marxism

during the years when Sorel "shared with Antonio Labriola the reputa
tion of being the leading philosophic spirit among Marxists",40 a leader

ship which Lenin later found it expedient to repudiate.

We have delved into the myth and magic of the Marxist universe of

discourse and discussed the collective means by which it acts to regen

erate the "mundane" world. We have left to consider the culture hero who

will direct the act of regeneration. Sorel has provided us with a clearly

enunciated concept of worldly salvation by means of the Marxist Revolu

tion. Max Weber delineates for us the concept of the charismatic hero

who can, by exercising the power of his divinity, prophesy the future in

order that the future may be made to come to pass. To direct an act

Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (London: Gollancz,

40
1933), p. 48; cf. Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 138-9; Louis Levine, Syndicalism in
France (New York: Columbia, 1914), pp. 149-150; William M. McGovern,
From Luther to Hitler (New York: Mifflin, 1941), p. 428; M. A. Landau-
Aldanov, Lenin (New York: Dutton, 1922), p. 121; Bernard Bosanquet,
Social and International Ideals (London: Macmillan, 1917), p. 185; Melvin
Rader, No Compromise (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 24.

41 Richard Humphrey, Georges Sorel (Cambridge: Harvard, 1951), p. 24;

cf. Feliks Gross, ed., European Ideologies (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1948), p. 777; V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
(New York: International Publishers, 1927), Collected Works, Vol. XIII,
p. 249.

42 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills,

eds., From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology (New York: Oxford, 1946), p, 249.
 17

of regeneration is to coerce the forces of nature by an act of will.43

This is the function of the tribal magician. In the Marxist ethic

the original prophet is, of course, Marx himself, but in the myth of

the Marxist culture he has to a large extent been replaced, by Lenin,

the man who directed, the primary act of regeneration and made the Revolu

tion, the Future As Foretold, an accomplished fact. And as Cornford

says

The tribal hero may reach the final stage of individu

alisation, if the empty persona happens to be filled by an
historic personality. This may occur if some actual chief
tain of great renown, who renders exceptional services to
his tribe, is looked upon as the incarnation, par excellence,
of the tribal genius. Thus a real man may, after his death,
become a patron saint; but only because the empty frame in
which he steps is already provided in the representation of
the 'hero.'45

That this hero is Lenin in the Marxist myth is attested by Sidney Hook

who says, "without him there would have been no October Revolution",46

and further specifies

The hero in history is the individual to whom we can

justifiably attribute preponderant influence in determin
ing an issue or event whose consequences would have been
profoundly different if he had not acted as he did.

The persona, the mask, the genius of Marxist tribalism is to be found in

the vocation of leadership as epitomized by Lenin and his successors and

this is the "empty frame" into which he has stepped. The Hegelian

43 Paul Radin, Primitive Religion (New York: Viking, 1937), p. 59.

44 Lord Raglan, The Hero (London: Methuen, 1936), p. 2l6.

45 Cornford, op. cit., p. 106.

46 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (New York: John Day, 1943), p. 203

Ibid., p. 153.
47
 18

Dialectic cannot be complete without the Hegelian Hero to intuit its

transformations for the masses. After all Lenin did. not seek approval

from his hand of dedicated Bolshevik adventurers for his program of

action in his successful drive to capture control of the social upheaval

in Russia, he demanded approval and got it.48 That this is within the

classic tradition of charismatic leadership is made obvious when we turn

to Weber’s comments on this subject. As he says

The holder of charisma . . . demands obedience and a

following by virtue of his mission ... he does not derive
his ’right’ from their will, in the manner of an election.
Rather . . . it is the duty of those to whom he addresses
his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualifielader.49

And again

Charisma . . . [is] qualitatively particularized. This

is an internal rather than an external affair, and results
in the qualitative barrier of the charisma holder’s mission
and power. In meaning and in content the mission may be
addressed to a group of men who are delimited locally,
ethnically, socially, politically, occupationally, or in
some other way. If the mission is thus addressed to a
limited group of men, as is the rule, it finds its limits
within their circle.50

Such has been the role of magical leadership from time immemorial, from

the war chief of an Indian tribe to the high mandarins of China who were

considered to be magically qualified,51 from the tribal magician of

antique Greece to the thaumaturgic prophets of the Marxian dialectic.

That the rational may exist within the irrational and that the

irrational may be generated by the rational may seem strange to those who

48 Hook, ibid., pp. 203-9.

49 Gerth and Mills, op. cit., pp. 216-7.

50. Ibid, p. 247

51 Ibid., p. 439.
 19

have been excessively impressed, by the ease with which the methodology

of symbol structure has clarified the routines of the physical universe.

That this is really not so strange, however, should become apparent

when we remember that

Nothing is more removed from actual events than the

closed rational system. Under certain circumstances,
nothing contains more irrational drive than a fully self-
contained, intellectualistic world-view.52

China had a long tradition of bureaucracy and rationalism, yet its

highest administrators were "magically endowed". Nazi Germany was a

bureaucratic state and rationally routinized to a high degree, yet it

had a charismatic leadership.53 In the same way the Marxist ethic, when

applied to a practical political situation, results in a monolithic

bureaucracy ruled by a vocational elite whose claims of exclusive knowl

edge as to the working of the historical dialectic is to be understood

only within the irrational world of the magical universe of discourse.

Magic is the art of changing the world by a direct act of will.

In this instance the will is the collective desire of the "masses",

or tribe, as directed by the hero or tribal magician. In this way the

millennium is to be brought to birth. Acceptance of this point of view

prescribes that the world so created, created both by the general "will"

of the "masses" of people and the "act" or "will" of History, is the

only right, just or moral world and therefore any device or means used

52 Mannheim, op. cit.

, p. 197.

eumann,
53 N op. cit.,p. 81
54
Mannheim, op. cit. , p. 118.
 20

to facilitate its inauguration is morally justified. This is the gate

hy which the idealist enters the closed moral world of Marxist tribalism.

For if he can accept the belief that the world can be completely changed

by a collective act of will, a belief which is rendered rational1y

plausible by the concept of the dialectic, and if he can identify him

self with those who supposedly generate this mass movement then he can,

as Silone says, participate in the process of "collective redemption".

He becomes a tribalist, a Koures, a member of a holistic group. He has

cut himself off from the rest of the universe. He has pulled around

himself the cloak of his collectivity and entered a closed system of

rationality. And in this closed system he has a myth, his Marxist

ideology, by which to rationalize its contradictions, for a myth is the

rationale by which the world of magic is made morally justifiable and

intellectually plausible.

We have discussed the act, or collective means of magical action

that is confused and identified by the Marxists with the historical "act"

of the dialectic, the man, or the embodiment of that means of action in

a tribal hero or prophet of the dialectic, and tribalism, the antique

manner of thinking in the ideological terms of myth that is the magical

universe of discourse within which both of these operate. All three are

necessary to produce the millennium of the Marxist ethic: the revolu

tionary act of the masses by which the world is transformed into the

glow of a millennial dawn, the charismatic prophet who can divine the

course of History and help bring it about by enunciating the doctrine

of the future, and the comprehensive universe of discourse within which

it can be made morally justifiable and intellectually plausible. In

 21

succeeding chapters we will deal with these seriatim under the following

titles: The Marxist Ethic, The Marxist Mind, and The Universe of the

New Tribalism.
 Chapter II

THE MARXIST ETHIC

Dialectical materialism is . . . the remoulding

of the universe in the pattern of desire . . .

Harold Lasswell

In the preceding chapter we have discussed the act, the performer

and the universe of discourse within which both are comprehensible. In

this chapter we will be primarily concerned with the act and its conse­

quence, the millennium. Expanding upon our discussion of the world of

magic we return to Malinowski and take a closer look at the nature of

the magic art.

Magic, in all its forms, is composed of three essen

tial ingredients. In its performance there always enter
certain words, spoken or chanted; certain ceremonial actions
are always carried out; and there is always an officiating
minister of the ceremony. In analyzing ... the nature of
magic, we have to distinguish the formula, the rite, and the
condition of the performer.1

We have in these few sentences a complete resume of Chapter I of this

paper. The formula is the universe of discourse, the rite is the act,

remembering that the rite is not complete without the projected will of

the magician alone or with his assistants, and the performer is, of

course, the magician. However there is a certain metaphysical presuppo

sition concerning the validity of magic as a way of life that has not

been touched on. Malinowski continues:

Magic never 'originated'; it never was created or in

vented. All magic simply was from the beginning, as an

Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York:

1
Norton, 1926), p. 82.

22
 23

essential adjunct to all those things and processes which

vitally interest man and yet elude his normal rational
efforts. The spell, the rite, and the object which they
govern are coeval.

Thus the essence of all magic is its traditional in

tegrity. Magic can only he efficient if it has been trans
mitted without loss and without flaw from one generation
to the other, till it has come down from primeval times to
the present performer. Magic, therefore, requires a pedi
gree, a sort of traditional passport in its travel across
time. This is supplied by the myth of magic . . . myth
endows the performance of magic with worth and validity
. . . myth blends with the belief in magical efficiency . . .2

Thus the magician presupposes an historical validity and neces

for his universe of discourse, as indeed it seems that most sity

of us

automatically presume that whatever milieu we chance to have been born

into is the universe of discourse complete with a manner of acting, a

way of knowing and a history of its own, so we might assume that a pre

occupation with history would be one of the major concerns of the

architects of Marxism. In this respect Toynbee has some very interes

ing things to say concerning the role of history in the Marxist ethic.

Marx has taken the goddess ’Historical Necessity' in

place of Yahweh for his deity, and the internal proletariat
of the Western World in place of Jewry for his chosen
people, and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived of as a
Dictatorship of the Proletariat; but the salient features
of the Jewish Apocalypse protrude through this threadbare
disguise.3

And again

The German Jew Karl Marx (1818-83) has painted, in

colours borrowed from the apocalyptic visions of a re
pudiated religious tradition, a tremendous picture of the

2 Malinowski, op. cit., pp. 83-4.

3
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History Abridgement of Volumes I-VI
by D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 400.
 24

secession of a proletariat and. the ensuing class war . . .

his formula conforms to the traditional Zoroastrain and
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic pattern in unveiling, be
yond a violent climax, the vision of a gentle finale.

According to the Communist prophet’s intuition of the

operations of his familiar spirit, Historical Materialism
or Determinism, the class war is bound to issue in a vic
torious proletarian revolution . . .

We may take it, then, that the Marxist ideology with its emphasis

on a postulated history of class struggle serves as the Marxist claim

for the legitimacy of the Revolution and for the power of those who

guide it. One clue to the basic instability in the Marxist character

is his need for asserting the legitimacy of this claim to world domina

tion. The criterion of legitimacy is continuity and Marx provides this

continuity as follows:

At a certain stage of their development, the material

forces of production in society come in conflict with the
existing relations of production. ... From forms of de
velopment of the forces of production these relations turn
into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolu
tion. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.
In considering such transformations the distinction should
always be made between the material transformation of the
economic conditions of production which can be determined
with the precision of natural science, and the legal,
political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out.5

And he provides a truly mythical historical pedigree:

In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the

ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of
production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic
formation of society.6

Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 368-9.

4
5
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 12.

6 Ibid., p. 13.
 25

This is, of course, merely a restatement of Hegel’s evolution of the

Spirit of History in its progress from its origin in the Orient through

the Greco-Roman world and on to its ultimate completion in the Germanic

nations.7 Illustrative of this is the concern demonstrated in the

Soviet Union to validate the historical mission of a self-appointed

clique to guide the revolutionary destiny by a formal Constitution con

taining many words but little substance. This same concern with con

tinuity can also he found in the necessity felt hy the Red Chinese to

intervene in Korea. “Red China” fights for the legitimacy of its politi

cal control of China. Consequently when certain of the Western powers

refused to recognize the validity of this assertion, refused to acknowl

edge a transfer of legitimacy from the government of the Chinese

Nationalists to the government of the Chinese Communists, it was neces

sary for the Red Chinese to assert this claim by force of arms externally

as well as internally. The approach of the United Nations army to the

Yalu thus presented a welcome pretext for forcing an international

acknowledgment, however reluctant, of the existence of a Communist gov

ernment in China. Whittaker Chambers provides us with an excellent

insight into the compulsive nature of the Marxist need for historical

continuity.

Revolutionists have a respect, amounting to awe, for

the signed document. They have broken, or are trying to
break, the continuity of the order of society. By that act,
they repudiate tradition, and the chaos they thereby un
loose also threatens them, for they can no longer count on
the inertia or authority of tradition to act as a brake or
a bond on chaos. Hence that fussy attention which revolu
tionists pay to mere legalistic forms that puzzles outsiders
both in the case of the Nazis and the Communists—their
meticulous regard for protocol and official papers. Hence
the tiresome detail and massive fictions of their legal and
constitutional procedures, and the formal pettifoggery, with

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Introduction to the Philosophy of

7
History", in Kuno Francke, ed., The German Classics, Volume VII (New
York: The German Publication Society 1914) pp. 35-6.
 26

all the i’s dotted, of a secret police that works entirely

beyond the law. For in breaking the continuity of tradi
tion, the revolutionist, for his own sake, must seek a
cementing substitute. All he has left to fall back on, the
mark of his blighting touch upon life’s tissues, are those
dead papers, interminable procedures, formidable quiddi
ties—and his incongruous regard for them.

This again demonstrates the magical attitude of the Communist, for magic

depends for its efficacy on the right ordering of ritual.9 The world

of magic is held together by an act of will and the slightest deviation10

from the established rules of the ritual will destroy the spell

and cause it to fall apart.

But what justifies this Marxist world of magic? What makes people

accept this way of thinking? Why a Marxist? Again we return to the

problem of motivation in the Marxist ethic. One of the best and most

comprehensive expositions of this is to be found in the book Witness.

. . . educated men become Communists chiefly for moral

reasons . . . Communism makes some profound appeal to
the human mind . . . Why?11

The revolutionary heart of Communism is ... a

simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.
Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world,
because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost
that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act
on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is
also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that
part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or

Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York:

8 Random House, 1952), p. 233.

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press,

9.
1944), p. 92; cf. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), p. 65.

10 V. I. Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", Collected Works (New York:

International Publishers, 1929), Volume IV, Book II, p. 123; cf. Michel
Bakunin, The Policy of the International (London: Bakunin Press, 1919 ),
p. 3.
11 Chambers, op. cit., p. 8.
 27

die—to bear witness—for its faith. . . . It is . . . man's

second, oldest faith . . . whispered in the first days of the
Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:
"Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of
mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a
simple vision . . . the vision of Man without God . . . the
vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intel
ligence of the world.12

... the vision of materialism ... is the Communist

revolution ... Communism's moral sanction ... is two-
fold. Its vision points the way to the future; its faith
labors to turn the future into present reality. . . . The
Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propa
gandist. They are the crisis. . . . The vision inspires.
The crisis impels. The workingman is chiefly moved by the
crisis. The educated man is chiefly moved by the vision.13

... man without God is just what Communism said he was:

the most intelligent of the animals ... a beast, never more
beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastli
ness.14

The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree

in which the Western world actually shares Communism's
materialist vision. . . . Faith is the central problem of
this age. 15

. . . every Communist Party in the world is led and staffed

chiefly by middle-class intellectuals. ... I had entered
the Communist Party ... with somewhat the same feeling
with which another man might enter a religious order. ...
I wished to serve. I did not particularly care how.l6

With this Chambers brings us to consideration of the force that impels

men into Communism, and when we give consideration to the motivation

that changes a man from a non-Communist into a Communist we find it to

12
Chambers, op. cit, p.9

13Ibid.,
PP . 10-11.
14 Ibid.,
P. 13.
15Ibid.,
P. 17.
16
Ibid., P. 209.
 28

be strongly charged with the Christian conscience that has had. such a
17
profound, influence on the tradition of middle-class radicalism. It

is not without significance that the three primary figures in the

history of Marxism, Marx, Engels, and hereditary noble Lenin, were

all middle-class intellectuals who had received a thorough grounding

in the Western concept of justice to the individual. There is nothing

in the social conscience that was not put there in the first place by

the Christian conscience. This faith that calls for the best in men--

courage, self-sacrifice, devotion to the highest ideals—stands at the

threshold of the Marxist world. As Silone says in The God That Failed:

... it should be emphasized that the links which bound

us to the Party grew steadily firmer, not in spite of the
dangers and sacrifices involved, but because of them.
This explains the attraction exercised by Communism on
certain categories of young men and of women, on intel­
lectuals, and on the highly sensitive and generous people
who suffer most from the wastefulness of bourgeois
society. Anyone who thinks he can wean the best and most
serious-minded young people away from Communism by entic­
ing them into a well-warmed hall to play billiards, starts
from an extremely limited and unintelligent conception of
mankind.

And as Crossman affirms In his Introduction to the same book, speaking

of "the journey into Communism" as "a vision of the Kingdom of God on

Earth":

If despair and loneliness were the main motives for

conversion to Communism, they were greatly strengthened
by the Christian conscience. ... The emotional appeal of

17 George Catlin, The Story of the Political Philosophers (New York:

Tudor, 19^7), P« 812.

l8Ibid., p. 609.

19
Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (New York: Harper 8s
Bros., 19^9), P- 99*
 29

Communism lay precisely in the sacrifices—both material

and spiritual—which it demanded of the convert. You can
call the response masochistic, or describe it as a sincere
desire to serve mankind. But, whatever name you use, the
idea of an active comradeship of struggle—involying per
sonal sacrifice and abolishing differences of class and
race—has had a compulsive power in Western democracy.20

This is equally true of the revolt against the West in Asia where

Western ideas of Justice were imported and then used to Justify the

aspirations of nationalism and the equality of race and color.

And Just as it is a Christian conscience that impels men, Western

men, to seek a nostrum for the ills of the world, so it is belief, not

reason, that stands as the gate by which the idealist enters the closed

moral world of Marxist tribalism. The belief is that man alone, rational

man, can usurp the Throne of the Most High and speak the Word of Power

that brings order out of chaos, that creates the millennium by an act

of his own will, that utterly transforms society, that changes the world.

It is around this magical act of will that the whole of the Marxist

ethic is constructed. The act is the goal, the Revolution, for which

the historical myth has been designed to provide the legitimacy of con

tinuity, and it is from this act that the millennium is to eventuate.

Kenneth Burke, speaking in his own dramatistic terminology, put it very

succinctly as follows:

... the whole philosophy is essentially ethical rather

than scientist, in that its entire logic is centered about
an act, a social or political act, the act of revolution,
an act so critical and momentous as to produce a ’rupture'
of cultural traditions . . .21

20
Crossman, op. cit., p. 3.

21
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945),
p. 209.
 30

Another writer, who has contributed, a great deal to the corpus of

Marxist literature, puts it this way:

When strikes begin to grow in scope and. intensity,

spreading from one place to another, it means that events
are ripening for a general strike, and. a general strike
coming off at the present time, now that the proletariat
is deeply permeated with ideas of emancipation, can only
lead to a great cataclysm, which will regenerate society.

That sounds like Sorel but it is really Bakunin,22 the same Bakunin who

was so bold as to aggravate his more "scientific" colleagues by openly

proclaiming his belief that "Socialism is justice . . . based solely

upon human conscience",23 and who was so unorthodox as to suggest that

if the members of the German Communist school should ever capture State

power they would "divide the mass of the people into two armies—indus

trial and agricultural armies under the direct command of the State

engineers who will constitute the new privileged scientific-political

class."24 Regardless of what we may think of the rest of Bakunin’s

writings this last, at least, has proved to be prophetic while the

derivation of an ethical system from an act of violence also accurately

portrays the spirit of Marxism.

The desire for material gain plays very little part in the making
25
of Communists.

Nor do Marxist dialectics or Marxian economic theories

have much to do with the reason why men become and remain
Communists. I have met few Communists who were more than

G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific

22
Anarchism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953)? P. 383.

23Ibid., p. 295.

24 Ibid., p. 289.

25
Chambers, op. cit., pp. 191-2.
 31

fiddlers with the dialectic (the intellectual tool whereby

Marxist theoreticians probe and. gauge history’s laws of
motion). I have met few Communists whom I thought knew
more than the bare rudiments of Marxian economics, or cared
to. But I have never known a Communist who was not acutely
aware of the crisis of history whose solution he found, in
Communism’s practical program, its vision and. its faith.

Few Communists have ever been made simply by reading

the works of Marx or Lenin. The crisis of history makes
Communists; Marx and Lenin merely offer them an explanation
of the crisis and what to do about it. . . Under pressure
of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to
the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is
dying and a world that is coming to birth. . . . Communism
is never stronger than the failure of other faiths.26

The Communist lives in permanent revolt and anger

against the injustice of the world around him. But he
will suffer almost any degree of injustice, stupidity and
personal outrage from the party that he serves ... he will
not act openly against the authority of the party. For to
do so would be to breach discipline. And discipline is not
only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an
army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist,
a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy.
Only an intolerable situation can make it possible or even
imaginable.27

The Communist can live in "permanent revolt and anger against the in

justice of the world" only if he is morally sensitive to injustice, i.e.,

if he has a strong and active conscience, and in the West that means

that initially, before he became a Communist, he had a Christian con

science. This Christian conscience is a powerful motivating force. It

impelled men to win Pagan Europe for Christianity, to launch the Crusades,

and to fight the Reformation, on one side or the other, and without it

the dynamism that has spread the influence of Western civilization

around the globe would not be intelligible. It is not surprising, then,

Chambers, op. cit., pp. 192-3.

26

27
Ibid., p. 231
 32

that the rigors of the Industrial Revolution should have called forth an

ethical response, nor that the crises of today, economic, spiritual or

political, should also tap this deep spring of activism. What is sur

prising is that the man who becomes a Marxist should abandon the

Christian world-view for the Marxist way of violence. This is where

the intellectual world-view of Marxism is introduced. Having been im

pelled to seek a solution, and not being satisfied with the evolutionary

solutions offered, he abandons one world for another. He enters the

closed world of Marxist tribalism. But when he does so he takes his

conscience with him. He no longer calls it a Christian conscience, it

is now a "social conscience", but it is there, and that is why Russian

Communists automatically classify all foreign Communists as deviationists

and "a menace to the Soviet Union".28 It is because we fail to under

stand that this burning sense of moral indignation is often the Christian

conscience in travail that we fail to understand the powerful appeal,

hold and strength of Communism. Knowing it to be pernicious we auto

matically assume that it cannot be supported by men of good conscience.

The eloquent testimony of Chambers, Silone, Wright and others who have

made the journey to and the return from this far land shows us how wrong

we are when we make this assumption. This is immediately obvious to

anyone who has ever watched a Marxist orator in operation. First there

is the appeal to conscience, "it isn’t right that such-and-such should

be", then the quick switch to the militant threat based on the intellec

tual rationale, "but it will and/or can be changed by such-and-such",

28
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 195l), p. 428.
 33

then the moral/ethical appeal again followed by the intellectual justi

fication. Back and forth, back and forth, using the ethical appeal-

intellectual justification as a one-two punch in the attack on the minds

of the potential converts. But this conscience to which he is appeal

ing, this conscience derived from Christianity and “bourgeois morality”

in general that the Communist takes into the Marxist world with him,

is a flaw in his character as a Communist. As a Communist. his ethic

must he completely goal-oriented. That which advances the Revolution

is good.

The Bolshevik ideal personality ... must be goal-

oriented; all acts must he seen as instrumental in reach
ing the final goal—the triumph of Communism—and no act
must he valued only in and for itself or he judged without
reference to a goal ... the Bolshevik is expected to
develop a strong internal conscience, an ability to pro
duce the highest level of activity without external prod
ding or stimulation. . . . There must he no diffuseness in
his behavior, it must he continually focused and purpose
ful, measured, calculated, planned, and appropriate.
Within his behavior there must he a rigid subordination of
personal, and private feeling to the demands of the final
goals of the Party.29

There is no justification here for those oriented to individual judge

ment of the means used in achieving the goal and so there is always the

possibility that sooner or later a man converted on the basis of con

science may encounter one enormity too many and revert to his former

state. Or as Mead puts it, “by Bolshevik doctrine, the backslider

. . . will become transformed almost instantaneously into an active

enemy.”30 The parallel between the discipline of the Communist and

29 ,
Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 28.

30
Ibid., p. 23.
 3^

the discipline of the Koures has already been remarked in Chapter I of

this paper.

The world, of magic is the world of mind. As Malinowski says:

Magic is based on specific experience of emotional

states in which man observes not nature but himself, in
which the truth is revealed not by reason but by the
play of emotions upon the human organism. Science is
founded upon the conviction that experience, effort, and
reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot
fail nor desire deceive. The theories of knowledge are
dictated by logic, those of magic by the association of
ideas under the influence of desire.31

That is why the world of magic is so "fluid", mutable, plastic, or

protean, why it is possible to create entire worlds of deductive articu

lation by definition, i.e., by a creative-coercive act of will, why its

shapes shift so easily as they phase in and out of focus, why opposites

can interpenetrate and quantities become qualities, why it flows in the

ordered sequence of habit, ritual and tradition and why a change can be

made and maintained only by the most rigorous concentration of will.

And because it is the world of mind it is a dramatic world full of

fantasy, terror, omnipotence and the stuff of dreams. And myth is the

validation of magic.

The magician unconsciously assumes the fusion of power,

quality, and object. But besides being a compulsive tech
nique magic is in and of itself an aesthetic activity.
Magic is immediately available to art, and art to magic ...
any narrative or poem which reaffirms the dynamism and
vibrancy of the world, which fortifies the ego with the
impression that there is a magically potent brilliancy or
dramatic force in the world, may be called a myth ...
the whole groundwork of myth is magical; for the storyt
eller can compose myths about wonderfully potent animals
and men who defy the laws of time and space, as well as

31
Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, op. cit., p. 67.
 35

the laws which limit the mutability of species, and. still

remain close to the confines of the psychology of magic.
Magic ... emphasizes the power of men as opposed, to the
power of the gods ...32

In this context de Man has a fitting comment on Marxism:

Although Marxist eschatology differs greatly in form

from that of the utopias which the classical utopists con
structed . . . Marxism itself is none the less utopian, for
the Marxist criticism of extant society is based upon the
vision of a future society which is to be the outcome of
definite legal and moral principles. . . . The Lage der
arbeitenden Klassen in England (Condition of the Working
Classes in England) and the Communist Manifesto were
written long before Capital. ... Marx’s moral sentiment
had made him pronounce a death sentence on capitalism, long
before his study of the laws of economic evolution led him
to infer that capitalism was dying . . . all desire creates
the idea of its satisfaction.33

This is illustrative of the magical practice of fore-casting the future

that it might be made to come to pass. Or as Laski points out, Marx’s

formula is more of an overly long incantation than a remedy.34 And as

for drama:

The pattern of communion, sacrifice, and transcendence

involved in party loyalty give Marxism, on the Symbolic
level, the great value of a profound social drama . . .35

Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer
32
sity Press, 1949), pp. 80-1; cf. Raymond Royce Willoughby, “Magic and
Cognate Phenomena: An Hypothesis”, Chapter 12, A Handbook of Social
Psychology, Carl Murchison (ed.) (Worcester, Massachusetts: Clark Univer
sity Press, 1935), passim.

33 Henry de Man, The Psychology of Socialism (New York: Holt, 1927),

pp. 169-70; cf. V. Adoratsky, Dialectical Materialism (New York: Inter
national Publishers, 1934), p. 82; Eden and Cedar Paul, Creative Revolu
tion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 217; Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
The Truth About Soviet Russia (London: Longmans, Green, 1942), p. 37.

34 Harold J. Laski, Karl Marx (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 45.

Burke, op. cit., p. 209.

35
 36

because "the world of myth is a dramatic world”36 where “dreams come

true".37

Concerning the fluidity of a personality that has to he held

together by continuous acts of will, Margaret Mead says:

. . . there is an indomitable belief in the power of the

leadership to make Russians into a new kind of people, to
hold in a firm mold that Russian character which they
simultaneously see as so fluid, so likely to transform
itself before their eyes. To the present possibility of
recurrent transformation of good into evil which it is
beyond their power to prevent, except by extraordinary
and unremitting acts of will, they oppose the picture of
a future in which all will be transformed purposefully and
irreversibly.38

And Benjamin Gitlow, speaking of Communism in America, says:

American radicals . . . who became communists, went

through a personal metamorphosis so complete that they
were mentally and morally changed into different human
beings. The men and women who took the road to communism
became the voluntary victims of a conditioning process
which subjugated the will of the individual to the will
of the organization. Converts had to prostrate themselves
before the supreme revolutionary authority of the communist
organization ... the communists are caught in the mesh
of their own Mephistophelian system . . .39

But this psychological instability can be overcome by becoming goal-

oriented40
and finding a functional activity in a holistic group.

... above all other forms of political association, it

is the totalitarian Communist party that most successfully
exploits the craving for moral certainty and communal mem
bership. In it we find states of mind and intensities of

35
Cassirer, op. cit., p. 76.
37
Mead, op. cit., p. 19.
38
Ibid., pp. 50-1.

39
Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives (New York: Scribner's,
1946), p. 4.
40
Mead, op. cit., p. 28.
 37

fanaticisism heretofore known only in certain types of religious

cult. . . . If we wish to understand, the appeal of Marxism
we should do well to pay less attention to its purely intel
lectual qualities than to the social and moral values that
inhere in it. To a large number of human beings Marxism
offers status, belonging, membership, and a coherent moral
perspective . . . the typical convert to communism is a per
son for whom the processes of ordinary existence are morally
empty and spiritually insupportable. ... Consciously or
unconsciously he is in quest for secure belief and solid
membership in an associative order. Of what avail are proofs
of the classroom, semantic analyses, and logical exhortations
to this kind of human being? So long as he find belief and
membership in his Marxism he will no more be dissuaded by
simple adjuration than would the primitive totemist.41

A word concerning the millennium itself.

In the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin the

eventual Golden Age towards which history has been progres
sing is enveloped in a kind of mystical haze, bright and
inviting but vague and elusive. Perhaps the very lack of
detail about this promised world makes it all the more
appealing. The promises of the ideal society and the dis
appearances of age-old human conflicts at the end of the
long earthly struggle are reminiscent of the paradise en
visaged by many of the world’s religions. This is a strange
and fantastic conclusion to a system of thought founded upon
grim materialism.42

This "mystical haze, bright and inviting but vague and elusive" is the

millennial "glow" of Marxism, but it is not unique with Marxism.

Marxism is a child of violence, but it is also the child of Western

civilization and there is very little in it that is new under the sun,

and when it appropriated the concept of the millennium it necessarily

took chiliasm along with it.

Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York:

41 Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1953), pp. 33-34.

42 Marguerite J. Fisher, Communist Doctrine and the Free World

(Syracuse University Press, 1952), p. 193.

Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 203-4.

43
 33

From Christian Chiliasm, which runs through the cen

turies constantly renewing its strength, a single step
leads to the philosophic Chiliasm which in the eighteenth
century was the rationalist reinterpretation of Christian
ity; and thence, through Saint Simon, Hegel, and Weitling
to Marx and Lenin.44

But Marxism is not merely chiliasm. It is sufficiently

influenced by the scientific spirit of the nineteenth cen
tury to attempt to justify its doctrine rationally.45

And again:

Marx and Engels lived under the spell of the great

French Revolution and were always expecting it to come
again, with vengeance upon the upper classes and emancip
ation for the lower, even as the Hebrew prophets foretold
the doom of Babylon and the restoration of Jerusalem, and
the early Christians looked for the second coming of the
Lord and the day of judgment

That the founders of Marxism were well aware of this can be seen by even

a cursory examination of Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany in which

47

class struggle and Christian chiliasm are interwoven and used as a part

of the Marxist claim for historical continuity. Or as Marx told a meet

ing at Amsterdam in 1872:

Some day the workers must conquer political supremacy

in order to establish the new organisation of labour. They
must overthrow the old political system whereby the old
institutions are sustained. If they fail to do this they

-----------
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
44
1951), p. 285; cf. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1949)> p. 223; H. S. Crossman, Government and the
Governed (London: Christophers, 1939), p. 276.

45 von Mises, op. cit., p. 288.

46James Edward LeRossignol, From Marx to Stalin (New York: Crowell,

1940), p. 23.
47
Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1927), passim.
 39

will suffer the fate of the early Christians, who neglected,

to overthrow the old system, and who for that reason never
had a kingdom in this world.48

There is a curious resemblance here to another baffled attempt to cope

with the advent of machine technology by a wish-fulfillment return to

a happier time. Marx might have been interested to know that many of

the Indian tribes on our Western Plains, as well as many Negro tribes

in South Africa, attempted to solve their difficulties in the same way.

Thus in the 1890’s:

The Ghost Dance doctrine . . . promised the coming of

a new and restored Indian earth, on which the white man
would be no more, on which the buffalo would roam again,
and the Indian peoples live in peace and plenty. Accord
ing to the prophecy of the doctrine the change was des
tined, and did not depend on the voluntary intervention
of the Indian. Faith in the doctrine and message of the
new religion was, however, an essential condition to par
ticipation in the benefits of the new order.49

We have discussed many aspects of the Marxist ethic. Primarily

the Marxist ethic is created by an act, the act of will whereby the new

world, the millennium, is brought into existence, but the new world is

itself a continuity of the act and so a part of it. So is the histori

cal pedigree that comes before the act and lends it legitimacy, while

group and drama and chiliasm each help to round out the perspective.

As to whether or not Marxism was wholly ethical in its origin there is

some debate. Catlin has no doubts on the subject.

Kapital, despite its mathematical paraphernalia, was

not so much science, as polemic; and ethical polemic. . . .

T. A. Jackson, Dialectics (London:

48 Lawrence and Wishart, 1936),
p. 469.
49
Alexander Lesser, The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game (New York:
Columbia, 1933), p. 105; cf. Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New
York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), pp. 251-3.
 40

It was political through and through. . . . Its basic argu

ment was that of the men whom Engels admired, but later dis
missed as utopian . . .50

51
The system stands or falls as ethical . . .

And Popper agrees, saying:

Marx’s . . . criticism of capitalism was effective

mainly as a moral criticism.52

Mead warns against applying our standards of morality to a goal-oriented

ethic.

As consistency and sincerity are regarded by Americans

as essential to integrity, and as both are lacking in the
behavior of the Soviet leadership, there is a temptation to
continue to apply American standards of judgment and to re
gard Soviet behavior as insincere, cynical, in the American
sense, and so without integrity. . . . But from the
Bolshevik point of view the essential virtue consists in
being so goal-oriented (tseleustremenyi) that no contradic
tion can arise between behavior demanded by changes in the
Line and the individual behavior. . . . When, in attempting
to interpret abrupt changes ... we invoke ideas which
attempt to distinguish between when they are sincere or when
they are insincere ... we lose sight of the Bolshevik
ethic. In this ethic, all acts commanded by the Party are
ethical because of the long-term ethical goal of a good
society.53

But what do the principals themselves say concerning their ethic?

Marx was preoccupied with proving the "scientific correctness" of his

solution and expressed himself mostly in negative terms by castigating

the bourgeois "swine".54 Nevertheless, when Marx does speak of the

50 Catlin, op. cit., p. 585.

51 Ibid., p. 587.
52. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1949), I, p. 152.
53Mead, op. cit., p. 38.

54 carl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (New York:

International Publishers, 1942), p. 221.
 41

Marxist ethic it is in terms of the act and. the new society. Thus, in

The German Ideology, he says

... the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,

an alteration which can only take place in a practical
movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary,
therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overthrown in any other way, but also because the class
overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in
ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted
to found society anew.55

Lenin also based his view of the Marxist ethic on the act and its con

sequences.

But is there such a thing as Communist ethics? Is

there such a thing as Communist morality? Of course
there is. . . .We deny all morality taken from super-
human or non-class conceptions . . . our morality is
wholly subordinated to the interests of the class-struggle
of the proletariat. We deduce our morality from the facts
and needs of the class-struggle of the proletariat . . .
Only this class can help the tolling masses to unite their
forces, to close ranks, to establish and build up a defi
nitely Communist society and finally to complete it.56

But it is Engels who provides the clearest judgement of just what con

stitutes the ethical ideal of Marxism as he quotes with enthusiastic

approval another author and makes the following words his own. The

underscoring is by Engels.

. . . the next higher plane of society . . . will be a

revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and
fraternity of the ancient gentes.57

55 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York:
International Publishers, 1939), P. 69; cf. Marx and Engels, Selected
Correspondence, op. cit., pp. 4l6-7.

56 V. I. Lenin, Religion (New York: International Publishers, 1933),

pp. 47-8.

57 Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society (London: Macmillan & Co., l877),

p. 562, as quoted by Frederick Engels in The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers,
1942), p. 163.
 42

For this we are to set the world in flame. Because we are baffled by

the prodigy of the Industrial Revolution we are to regress to the in

fancy of civilization. In our frustration and childish anger we are to

take the world apart that we might retreat to the primitive democracy

of totemic tribalism. This is the goal towards which History has been

evolving, this is the Communist kingdom of heaven-on-earth, this is the

millennial ideal of the Marxist ethic.

 Chapter III

THE MARXIST MIND

Ancient civilizations were destroyed,

by imported barbarians; we breed our own.

W. R. Inge

In Chapter II we have elaborated on the ethic of the magical act

and its consequence, the millennium. Here we will be concerned with the

genesis of this act and the psychological world, or mind, of those who

are supposed to bring it about. But how is it brought about? Is it

the result of inevitable laws of materialism working themselves out in

history? Or is it caused by the proximate agent of a great culture-hero

leading his people through an act of violence to the promised land?

Actually both traditions are present and intertwined in the history of

Marxism with now one, now the other, in the ascendancy, but Marxism

rides in tank armies today because that faction which emphasizes leader

ship achieved state power in Russia in 1917 and, more recently, in China.

Nevertheless Marxism is supposed to possess a "scientific" means of

prediction and much of its appeal has been in the postulated inevitability

of the Coming Event that casts its shadow before it.1 Consideration of

the Marxist "act” would, therefore, not be complete without considering

its deterministic as well as its volitional aspect.

Ambiguity concerning the inevitable-volitional dichotomy in

Marxism can be traced from the Manifesto itself. Thus in one place Marx

1 George Catlin, The Story of the Political Philosophers (New York:

Tudor, 1947)> p. 606.

43
 44

and. Engels say:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to

wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to
centralise all instruments of production in the hands of
the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the rul
ing class . . .2

This certainly can be interpreted to suggest a policy of gradualism in

achieving the benefits of the Revolution. Later on, however, the fangs

are bared and they continue:

The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends

can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all
existing social conditions.3

If, then, there is ambiguity in the Marxist position, we may certainly

say that it stems from the earliest writings. Our present consideration

however, is with the text which says

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,

are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Marxist history is supposed to proceed with the power of a loco

motive,5 but the track has some curious breaks. Progress along the

track of history is supposed to be inevitable because it is materialisti

cally determined, but the tracks are broken at the intersection between

epochs as the quantitative accumulation of social ills and new economic

techniques results in a qualitative transformation of society. Thus in

Capital Marx says, speaking of the transformation from Capitalism to

2
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
(New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 30.

3 Ibid., p. 44.

4 Ibid., p. 21.

Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France (New York:

5 Labor News,
1921), p. 165.
 45

Socialism:

Centralisation of the means of production and social

isation of labour at last reach a point where they become
incompatible with their capitalist integument. This in
tegument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private
property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of

the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist
private property. This is the first negation of indivi
dual private property, as founded on the labour of the pro
prietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inex
orability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the
negation of negation.

This is in agreement with his previous statement that

A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates

that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time
during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personi
fied capital, to the appropriation and therefore control of
the labour of others, and to the selling of the products of
this labour. . . . The possessor of money or commodities
actually turns into a capitalist in such cases only where
the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the
maximum of the middle ages. Here, as in natural science,
is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel
(in his 'Logic'), that merely quantitative differences be
yond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.7

And in a note to this in the third edition he says

The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scien

tifically worked out by Laurent and Gerhardt rests on no
other law.

The doubt will persist, however, as to whether the economic laws

of Marxist history are to have the same rigidity of application as the

laws of natural science. Marx very conveniently decides the issue for

us in a letter to Engels.

Karl Marx, Capital (New York:

6 Modern Library, 1906), p. 837.

7 ibid., pp. 337-8.

8 Ibid., p. 338.
 46

You are quite right about Hofmann. You will also see
from the conclusion of my chapter III, [Capital] where the
transformation of the handicraft-master into a capitalist—
as a result of purely quantitative changes—is touched, upon,
that in the text I refer to the law Hegel discovered., of
purely quantitative changes turning into qualitative changes,
as holding good alike in history and natural science. In a
note to the text ... I mention the molecular theory . . .9

Certainly this would appear to be decisive, especially when taken in

conjunction with a statement Marx makes in his Preface to the first

edition of Capital where he says

it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the

economic law of motion of modern society . . .10

That it is not decisive for Marxism, however, becomes obvious when we

refer to a letter from Engels to Bloch written in 1890 near the end of

a long life of disappointment in the nonappearance of the "inevitable”

Revolution.

According to the materialist conception of history the

determining element In history is ultimately the production
and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx
nor I have ever asserted. ... Marx and I are ourselves
partly to blame for the fact that younger writers sometimes
lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We
had to emphasise this main principle in opposition to our
adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time,
the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements
involved in the interaction to come into their rights. . . .
And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from
this reproach, for the most wonderful rubbish has been pro
duced from this quarter too.11

Apparently those who accept the Hegelian dialectic must also accept the

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1899

9
(New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 221.

10 Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. l4.

11
Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, op. cit., PP. 475-7.
 47

Hegelian Owl of Minerva12 along with the Hegelian Hero as a part of the

intellectual baggage of Hegelianism.

It is well to remember here that the Manifesto, as a moral in

dictment of the Industrial Revolution and assertion of faith in its

forcible overthrow, was published as early as 1848, while Capital, the

rationale by which this assertion of belief was intellectually justified,

was not published until twenty-three years later in 1871. Nevertheless

in 1890, some nineteen years after Marx had attempted, in Capital, to

"lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” as a justifica

tion for his prophecy of l848 concerning the "inevitable" victory of

the proletariat, Engels finds himself as a baffled Owl of Minerva cry

ing mea culpa as the shades of night are gathering and he is looking

back over a long life of frustration, in which the confident predictions

of youth have not been fulfilled, and suggesting that, just perhaps,

that which is inevitable is subject to being not quite inevitable.

The Marxian laws of historical and economic determinism proceed

by means of the Hegelian quantitative-qualitative shift. 13

As a conse

quence Marx denies that there are abstract universal laws that govern

history,14 but suggests rather that such laws are immanent to each epoch

of history so that every historical period has laws of its own and when

a given society has outlived a given period of development and is passing

over into another period of development, it begins to be subject to

12 T. m. Knox, Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1945), P. 13.

13 Marx, Capital, op. cit., pp. 37-8.

14 Ibid., p. 23.
 48

another set of laws. When we turn to what Hegel actually said, how

ever, then the dependence of this Hegelian "law" on the Pythagorian

harmonic progression16 of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy becomes only

too obvious.

In musical relations a harmonic relation in the scale

of quantitative progression is introduced by a Quantum.
... While succeeding notes appear progressively to move
further from the key-note, and numbers through arithmeti
cal progression to become more and more other, suddenly a
return or surprising concord emerges, which was not quali
tatively led up to by what immediately preceded, but
appears as an actio in distans, as a relation to a dis
tant entity. . . . Among chemical combinations, when
mixture-proportions are progressively altered, certain
qualitative nodes and jumps occur, such that two materials
form products at particular points of the scale of mixture,
which then show particular qualities. . . . All birth and
death, instead of being a continued graduality, are rather
an interruption of this and are the jump from quantitative
into qualitative change.17

That the inevitability of the Revolution depends upon the harmonic pro

gression he runs off on his bourgeois produced piano may come as a

slight shock to many an ardent Marxist, but Marx is quite positive in

the identification of his source. Nor is this fundamentally magical

concept of "like progression producing like events" and the metamorphosis

of "quantity into quality" confined to the beginnings of Marxism. Lenin

affirms the "stages" theory of progression in State and Revolution when

he says

15 Marx, Capital, op. cit., pp. 23-4.

16 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon

and Schuster, I945), p. 35.

17
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, W. H. Johnston and L. G.
Johnston, trans. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929), Vol. I, pp. 388-9.
 49

democracy ... is only one of the stages in the course of

development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capital
ism to Communism.18

And he continues:

Here "quantity turns into quality": such a degree of

democracy is hound up with the abandonment of the frame
work of bourgeois society, and the beginning of its Social
ist reconstruction.19

Stalin affirms that dialectics regards the process of development as one

in which

the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly

and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to
another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural
result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual
quantitative changes.20

But it was the dream, not economic determinism, that inspired men

to resort to the force of arms in order to win the world for Communism

and lead the "slaves" into a brighter day. What kind of leadership prin

ciple is involved here? Is it a democratic principle where leaders are

elected as representatives of the people? Or is it a "Fuehrer" principle

where an alien ideology is brought to an unsuspecting people who are

coerced into accepting leadership from above by a charismatic leader and

group? That it is a magical charismatic leadership principle that is

involved here there seems little doubt, but the legend that Lenin and/or

Stalin "betrayed" the Revolution has greatly obscured the issue. There

fore it will be necessary to begin with the leadership doctrines of the

I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York:

18 International Pub­
lishers, 1932), p. 62.
19Ibid., p. 83.

20
Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York:
International Publishers, 1940), p. 8.
 50

present and compare them with the ideas of Marx and Engels.

Marxist leadership is a vocation. Considering Lenin’s empha

sis on the role of the professional revolutionary this is hardly sur

prising, but the Marxists’ concern for legitimacy, the need to identify

themselves as the true leaders of the postulated, i.e., completely

theoretical, "masses" of History, which in turn are identified with

whatever population happens to he under present or potential control,

has led to a considerable amount of propaganda in which it is alleged

that the Marxist leadership expresses the "real” or “genuine" interests

of the people. There is also the matter of the Soviets by means of

which the fiction of the committee system was introduced into the Marxist

leadership principle. Lenin may have used the Soviets as an expedient

device, hut the function of command was his and the recent magnification

of Stalin Magus to the rank of Hero indicates that the power was suc

cessfully
transmitted to his successor.22 Stalin himself certainly

never had any doubts concerning the role of leadership in Marxism.

From the first, Stalin accepted, perhaps with even less

reservation than Lenin himself, the obligation of the party
to lead, to organize and to fight. ’Our Party,’ he says in
one of . . . [his] early articles, ’is not a collection of
individual chatterers, hut an organization of leaders.’ And
again: ’Only unity of opinion can unite the members of the
party into one centralized party. If unity of opinion
collapses, the party collapses.’23

21
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
(New York: Scribner’s, 1936), p. 339.
22
Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1951), p. 6l; Julian Towster, Political Power in the U.S.S.R.,
1917-1947 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 365.

23
Edward H. Carr, Studies in Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1950),
p. 203.
 51

The Stalinist type of leadership is thus seen as a continuation of

Leninist leadership, and Lenin, as we have seen in Chapter I, was the

charismatic Hero of the Revolution.

Lenin suffered an almost complete identification of his own per

sonality with the mythical proletariat supposed by the Marxist dialectic,

i.e., with the proletariat-as-it-ought-to-be. As such it became an

extension of his own ego in the gigantic act of history that was to

turn the world upside down and allowed him to assume the leadership

role in dictating to this putative proletariat exactly how it should go

about achieving the Revolution. But of course the proletariat as a

definitional ideal and the real flesh and blood workingmen who composed

the actual "proletariat” are considerably different. Therefore, since

he believed that the unsophisticated workers could not possibly evolve

for themselves the vast and complicated Marxist-Hegelian myth of

historical destiny it became his duty, his calling as a revolutionary,

to take this theory to them and, should they prove recalcitrant, to

coerce them into accepting it. Thus, speaking of the strikes that

followed the St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896, he says

the workers were not and could not be conscious of the

irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole
of the modern political and social system, i.e., it was not
yet Social-Democratic consciousness. ... This conscious
ness could only be brought to them from without.24

In this Lenin is merely following Engels who had said:

The time is past for revolutions carried through by

small, minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When
it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of

V. I. Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", in Collected Works, Volume IV,

24
Book II (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. ll4.
 the social organization, the masses themselves must partici­
pate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to
act. ... But so that the masses may understand what is to
he done, long and persistent work is required. ... The slow
work of propaganda . . .25

It was presumably from this passage that Lenin took his title for the

pamphlet, "What Is To Be Done?" And again, speaking of the vanguard

of the proletarian struggle, Engels states

It is the specific duty of the leaders to gain an ever

clearer understanding of the theoretical problems, to free
themselves more and more from the influence of traditional
phrases inherited from the old conception of the world, and
constantly to keep in mind that Socialism, having become a
science, demands the same treatment as every other science--
it must be studied. The task of the leaders will be to
bring understanding, thus acquired and clarified, to the
working masses, to spread it with increased enthusiasm, to
close the ranks of the party organisations and of the
labour unions with ever greater energy.

Thus it is the leaders who understand, who bring theory to the headless

masses, who act as transformers for charging the amorphous masses with

the energy of History. But surely this is Hegel speaking.

. . . it is a dangerous and false prejudice that the people

alone have reason and insight, and know what justice is;
for each popular faction may represent itself as the people,
and the question as to what constitutes the State is one of
advanced science and not of popular decision.27

Thus we again return to the leadership principle of the Hegelian Hero in

Marxism, the Hero, or Leader, or "Fuehrer", who alone can intuit the

Frederick Engels, "Introduction" to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles

25
in France, 1848-1850 (New York: Labor News, 1924), pp. 24-5.

26
Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1927), p. 29.
27
G. W. F. Hegel, "Introduction to the Philosophy of History", The
German Classics, Kuno Francke, ed., Volume VII (New York: The German
Publication Society, 1914), P. 65.
 53

transformations of the dialectic in History. And. just what is Hegel's

idea of a Hero? Speaking.of the historical principle, he says:

This principle is an essential phase in the develop

ment of the creating Idea, of Truth striving and urging
toward (consciousness of) itself. Historical men—world-
famous individuals--are those in whose aims such a general
principle lies ... whose own particular aims involve
those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit.
They may he called heroes . . . they have derived their
purposes and their vocation . . . from a concealed fount—
one which has not attained to phenomenal, present exist
ence—from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the
surface. . . . World-historical men—the heroes of an
epoch—must ... he recognized as its clear-sighted ones.
. . . Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves,
not others. . . . For that Spirit which had taken this
fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals,
hut in a state of unconsciousness which the great men in
question aroused .... these soul-leaders ... the fate
of these world-historical persons, whose vocation it was to
he the agents of the World-Spirit [was] ... no happy one.
. . . When their object is attained they fall off like
empty husks from the kernel. [Witness] ... Alexander
. . . Caesar ... Napoleon . . . 28

Substitute Marx, Lenin and Stalin and Class for State and the Hegelian

world becomes the Marxist world.

Marxist leadership is thus seen to he fitted into a context of

theory, hut a very special kind of theory. To return to Lenin—

the role of the vanguard can he fulfilled only by a party

that is guided by an advanced theory. ... We shall
quote what Engels said in 1874 concerning the significance
of theory in the Social-Democratic movement ... from his
Introduction to the Peasant War in Germany . . .
'Without German philosophy, particularly that
of Hegel, German scientific Socialism (the only
scientific Socialism extant) would never have come
into existence.'29

Hegel, "Introduction to the Philosophy of History", op. cit., pp.

28
48-50.
29 Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", Op. cit., pp. 110-11; cf. Engels,
The Peasant War in Germany, op. cit., p. 27.
 54

And. he further specifies:

The history of all countries shows that the working

class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop
only trade-union consciousness. . . . The theory of Social
ism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and
economic theories that were elaborated by the educated
representatives of the propertied classes, the intellec
tuals. The founders of modern scientific Socialism, Marx
and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intel
ligentsia.30

And are these intellectual leaders to cringe slavishly before the spon

taneity generated by economic determinism, according to their own theory,

in the masses, or are they to seize control of this spontaneity and

guide it because they know best?

Instead of frankly admitting our, the ideologists’,

the leaders’, lack of sufficient training—the Economists
try to throw the blame entirely upon "the absence of con
ditions,” upon the influence of material environment which
determined the road from which it was impossible to divert
the movement by any kind of ideology. What is this but
slavish cringing before spontaneity ... 31

Lenin has no intention of cringing before this spontaneity of the workers

for what the people want is of no interest to him; it is what History

wants that is decisive. And if the will of the people runs contrary to

the will of History, then the will of the people must be coerced into

accepting the dictate of History as intuited by the ideologist. As he

says:

All those who talk about 'exaggerating the importance

of ideology, about exaggerating the role of the conscious
elements,' etc., imagine that the pure and simple labour
movement can work out an independent ideology for itself,
if only the workers 'take their fate out of the hands of
the leaders.' But in this they are profoundly mistaken.

30 Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., pp. 114-5.

31Ibid., p. 117.
 55

. . . Since there can he no talk of an independent ideology

being developed by the masses of the workers in the process
of their movement then the only choice is: Either hourgeois,
or Socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for
humanity has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover,
in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never he
a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle
Socialist ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the
slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology.
. . . our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat
spontaneity, to divert the labour movement, with its spon
taneous trade-unionist striving, from under the wing of the
bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary
Social-Democracy.32

What is the ethic of all this? Why is it necessary, and justified,

to coerce the spontaneous development of the labor union movement out of

its natural line of growth? Because the acceptance of the goal, of

revolution, as an end in itself33 has completely vitiated the argument

of economic determinism, but it does so in a peculiarly ironic manner.

To continue the quotation above:

The phrases employed by the authors of the ‘Economic’

letter in Iskra, No. 12, about the efforts of the most in
spired ideologists not being able to divert the labour
movement from the path that is determined by the interac
tion of the material elements and the material environment
are tantamount to the abandonment of Socialism . . .34

Thus the whole deterministic argument is brushed aside and Marxism re

turns to the source of its inspiration. Capitalism is bad, Socialism

is good, therefore any means used to achieve this goal are acceptable.

The fact that Marx spent twenty years in the British Museum thinking up

enough reasons to compose a rationale proving that the goal is

32Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., pp. 121-3.

33
Harold J. Laski, Karl Marx (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), PP. 45,
42-3; cf. Carr, op. cit., p. 204.

33 Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., p. 123.

 56

deterministically inevitable and scientifically predictable is ultimately

not important because in a goal-oriented ethic any device that helps to

achieve the goal is morally justified. Lenin’s goal is Socialism; the

means he uses to achieve that goal are entirely incidental.

Marxist leadership is a vocation, but what kind of vocation? Is

it a job that one may take or leave like any other job, or does it have

special qualifications? What must one do to be a Marxist leader? First

of all, one must have an organization of professional revolutionists .

As early as the Iskra period, circa 1902, Lenin was saying:

’Give us an organisation of revolutionists, and we

shall overturn the whole of Russia!‘35

But an activist organization must have its ideology, and Marx had said

that

the distinction should always be made between the material

transformation of the economic conditions of production
. . . and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or
philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become
conscious of this conflict and fight it out.36

Therefore Lenin had precedent in authority for believing, as Hook says

he believed, that

only the presuppositions of socialism are automatically

generated by the processes of capitalistic production.
The active seizure of power, however . . . depended pri
marily upon political intelligence, will and organisation. 37

Much of Lenin’s work is to be understood, then, as "the beginning of the

Marxian reformation. The texts of Marx and Engels were to be read in

35 Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., p. 201.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

36
(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904}, p. 12.

37
Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (London:
Gollancz, 1933), PP. 57-8.
 57

the light of the original spirit behind, them.”38 And. the original spirit

of Marxism was one of leadership in a moral struggle, not economic,

"scientific”, determinism. It was the desire to change the world by the

power of moral indignation, and to effect change the leader must have an

organization, or charisma group, or magical society. In this manner the

"orthodox” Marxist determinists, represented by Plekhanov, became

pitted against the "reform" element, represented by Lenin.

According to present interpretations, Lenin’s and

Stalin’s main contribution to the theory of dialectical
materialism has been 'to reveal the active role of con
sciousness.’ . . . Before the end of 1903 Lenin resigned
from the editorial board of Iskra. . . . 'The next twelve
months saw a series of scathing articles from Plekhanov’s
pen against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. . . . Lenin was de
clared guilty of fostering a ‘sectarian spirit of exclu
sion,' of claiming to act ’in obedience to an infallible
class instinct,’ of ’confusing the dictatorship of the
proletariat with the dictatorship over the proletariat.’
Plekhanov was a learned controversialist. With a wealth
of quotation he proved that Lenin, by his insistence on
‘consciousness,’ was reviving the idealistic heresy of the
Bauer brothers which Marx had denounced in the eighteen-
forties, and that, by his advocacy of an army of profes
sional revolutionaries, he was a disciple not of Marx but
of Bakunin.39

But of course the "consciousness” of leadership, of the Hegelian Hero,

was hardly new to Marxism, and by his approval of the Vehmgericht Marx

gave his explicit sanction to the concept of a conspiratorial army.

For that matter, his suggestion to the General Council of the Inter

national Workingmen’s Association in January of 1870 that, "we can

initiate measures which later, in the public execution of their tasks,

appear as spontaneous movements of the English working class",40 indicates

38 Hook, op. cit., p. 59.

39 Carr, op. cit., pp. 111, 116-17.

Harold Rosenberg, "The Pathos of the Proletariat", in The Kenyon

40
Review, Vol. XI, No. 4, Autumn, 1919, P. 622.
 ..42
.

58

just how shallow his faith in economic determinism really was and how

strong was his desire to lead, to motivate, the Revolution in a per

sonal capacity.

Lenin’s revolutionists were to be professionals. For them the

Revolution was the ultimate good, the end in itself, and it was Lenin’s

"original” Marxism that finally succeeded in producing a revolution,

for as Crossman says, "Lenin was the one revolutionary who really under

stood
Marx’s theories and developed them on revolutionary lines."41 Let

us take a look at the prescription Lenin was to use in picking his

leaders.
... we must have a committee of professional revolutionists

We professional revolutionists must continue . . .

’pushing on from outside’ . . .43

I assert that it is far more difficult to catch ten

wise men than it is to catch a hundred fools. And this
premise I shall defend no matter how much you instigate
the crowd against me for my 'anti-democratic' views, etc.
As I have already said, by 'wise men,' in connection with
organisation, I mean professional revolutionists . . . .
no movement can he durable without a stable organisation
of leaders to maintain continuity . . . . the organisation
must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolution as
a profession . . . 45

. . . pseudo-Social-Democrats whose teachings bring dis

grace on the calling of a revolutionist, who fail to under
stand that our task is not to degrade the revolutionist to
the level of an amateur, but to exalt the amateur to the
level of a revolutionist. 4
5

H. S. Crossman, Government and the Governed (London: Christophers,

41
1939), p. 239.

42 Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., p. 196.

43
Ibid., p. 197.
44
Ibid., p. 198.

45 Ibid., p. 201.
 59

When we shall have detachments of specially trained,

working-class revolutionists who have gone through long
years of preparation (and, of course, revolutionists 'of
all arms') no political police in the world will he able
to contend against them, for these detachments will con
sist of men absolutely devoted and loyal to the revolu
tion, and will themselves enjoy the absolute confidence
and devotion of the broad masses of the workers. The sin
we commit is that we do not sufficiently "stimulate" the
. 46
workers to take this path . .

It is notable that it is Lenin who puts the word "sin" in italics, for

one cannot sin unless there is a state of grace from which one may fall.

It is also notable that the vocation of revolutionary leadership is

exalted as a "calling", i.e., as a magical commitment whereby the

rational calculation of craftsmanship is wedded to the irrational drive

of faith. On any consideration this is a formidable alliance of motives

and energy. Who leads these detachments of dedicated subversives? Not

just any leader, but the Leader; not just anyone, but the One.

... on the significance of individual dictatorial power

from the standpoint of the specific problems of the pres
ent period, we must say that every large machine industry—
which is the material productive source and basis of
Socialism—requires an absolute and strict unity of the
will which directs the joint work of hundreds, thousands
and tens of thousands of people. . . . But how can we
secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of
thousands to the will of one .... complete submission
to a single will . . . 47

And how do we determine which one is the One? By success, of course.

Knowledge ... is useful only when it reflects an

objective truth, independent of man. For a materialist,
the 'success' of human practice proves the correspondence

Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", op. cit., p. 206.

46
47 Nikolai Lenin, The Soviets at Work (New York: Rand School of
Social Science, 1919), P. 35; cf. Mead, op. cit., p. 55.
 60

of our representations to the objective nature of the things

we perceive.48

With this we return to the universe of discourse of the magician, for

this is the "success” of the charismatic leader who cannot fail,49 and

as Cornford says

to the magician knowledge is power; the impulse which drives

him is still the desire to extend the influence of his mana
(or the mana of the group, for the whole process is collec
tive) to its utmost bounds.50

And Malinowski adds;

Sociologically speaking, magic adds to the force of

solidarity and to the power of leadership. In primitive
communities the magician . . . always inspires the com
munity with a consciousness of discipline and with the
faith in leadership.51

Very well, but is this the type of leadership that is found in a fully

developed Marxist society? Mead affirms that it is.

The Party leadership is held, in Bolshevik political

dogma, to owe its right to rule and its relation to Truth
to its ability to foresee the future, to "hear the grass
growing under the ground." The rightness of the Line is
a sanction for the exercise of power, and the successful
maintenance of power is a sign that the Line was true.
This has meant in practice that the success of any policy
assumed enormous importance in passing judgment upon it.52

Yet this is not the whole of the story. This is what one does if

48. V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (New York; Inter

national Publishers, 1927), Vol. XIII, Collected Works, p. 111.
49 Bronislaw Malinowski, Freedom and Civilization (New York; Roy,
1944), p. 245; cf. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max
Weber; Essays in Sociology (New York; Oxford University Press, 1946),
p. 249.

50 F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London; Arnold, 1912),

p. 141.

51 <alinowski, op.
cit., p. 213.

52 Mead,
op. cit., p. 19.
 61

one is a Leader, but what must one be if one is to be a Leader? When

Lenin is speaking as One, as Leader per se, we might think that the

masses are to be energized with a synthetic spontaneity transmitted to

them from an extraneous source, i.e., History. Thus, in one of his

speeches, he says,

... we have faith in the creative energy and the social

zeal of the vanguard of the revolution . . .53

But when bourgeois intellectual Lenin took his alien ideology54 to the

"masses", he had first to coerce to his own way of thinking a sponta

neity already present, so in another place we find him saying:

We must learn to combine the stormy, energetic break

ing of all restraint on the part of the toiling masses,
with iron discipline during work, with absolute submission
to the will of one person, the Soviet director, during work.

This concept of a stormy energy in the masses, which is perhaps more

reminiscent of Bakunin’s wild peasant Pugachevchina56 or of Marx’s

magma metaphor of "masses"57 than of the conventional consciousness-

determined-by-material-conditions, is retained in present-day Marxism.

The people themselves, the masses and the children,

are supposed to contribute a spontaneous energy which
nevertheless must always be manipulated, directed, and
kept within bounds.58

53
V. I. Lenin, Speeches of V. I. Lenin, Voices of Revolt Series,
Volume VTII (New York: International Publishers, 1928), p. 62.
54 Max Eastman, “Introduction", to Capital, The Communist Manifesto,
and Other Writings by Karl Marx (New York: The Modern Library, 1932),
p. vii.
55 Lenin, The Soviets at Work, op. cit., p. 38; cf. Mead, op. cit.,
p. 56
55.
P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific
Anarchism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1953), P. 13.

57 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, op. cit., p. 90; cf.

Engels, p. 450, same reference.
58 Mead, op. cit., p. 89.
 c2

And again, remembering that in Chapter I we have cited Cornford as de

fining sympathetic magic as "the representation of the object of pas

sionate desire."59

Where the leader is supposed to be, above all things,

controlled, reserved, unimpassioned, the people are to
have a 'passionate Bolshevik desire' (strastnoye zhelaniye);
'if a thing is passionately desired, everything can be
achieved, everything can be overcome.'60

What we actually have here is "the combination of two omnipotence

fantasies, the old Social Revolutionary fantasy of the overpowering

energy of the masses combined with the Bolshevik fantasy of omnipotence

by conscious control.”61 "Omnipotence" is a big word, but Lenin is

fully equal to the possibilities. Having been accused by the more

orthodox Marxists of acting ’like a spirit hovering over the formless

,
chaos,'62 he replies with his usual asperity:

But what else is the function of Social-Democracy if

not to be a 'spirit,' not only hovering over the spontane
ous movement but also raising the movement to the level
of 'its programme'?63

This development is hardly surprising as Lenin is here caught in "the

sociological problem of the ’Intelligentsia’."64 If he believes, with

Marx, that each class generates its own ideology,65 then when he left

59
Cornford, op. cit., p. 139.60

Mead, op. cit., p. 83.

61 Ibid., p. 84.

62
Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", p. 134.

63Loc. cit.

64Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1949), P. 136.

65 Ibid., p. 278.
 63

the universe of discourse of the bourgeois world, to float across the

void, to the proletarian world, he must have retained, some of the leader

ship characteristics of the Intellectual Watchhird even after he had

landed. But of course as an extraworldly observer, or "Wise Man" as

he puts it, he is able to see the whole of History in operation from

the outside. One difficulty with the sociology of knowledge is that

it leaves very little purchase for the observer aspect of the observer-

participant dichotomy, while the stubborn fact remains that speculative

observation is possible. So while the technics of Lenin's theory may

have placed him between the worlds, in fact he was suffering an almost

complete organismic involvement with the fate of the "proletariat" as

postulated by Marx. We are not here attempting a psychoanalysis of

Lenin, but are merely discussing the effect of ideas on his motivations.

Three aspects of this motivation may be defined:

(1) he suffers an almost complete identification of self and

the idea of a proletariat;

(2) as such that which affects this "proletariat” affects him

and vice versa;

(3) as a student of Marx he has discovered the laws of History

and can therefore enunciate for the proletariat, the proletariat as an

idea being merely an extension of his self, what it should do to ful

fill its historic destiny.

Lenin was a normally sensitive individual who had been greatly

affected by the execution of his brother, along with a lot of other

"injustices", and he had found the "real" world in the historical perspective

of Marx. Here was the way the world operated, here was the
 64

true reality, and here was a promise that injustice would be overthrown

by the very laws of history. But as Willoughby points out:

. . . the processes of shamanistic divination are much like

those of the obsessional neurotic; and day-by-day observa
tion of the latter has revealed that the burdened but essen
tially normal person may evolve out of his attempts to re
solve his tensions a magical system in all respects similar
to that of the primitive, but "pure" from . . . cultural
contagion and social transmission . . .66

And again

. . . many children and some adults individually evolve

systems of true magic in the absence of supporting cul
tural patterns, or even in the face of sophisticated pres
sure . . .67

Lenin may have been a normal human being in many respects, but

in the matter of his organismic involvement in the role of Leader of the

Proletariat there is little doubt that his stable self and rigid role

enactment resulted in behavior that can only be described as that of a

compulsive neurotic.68 This is his world. And how does he hold it

together when it threatens to fly apart? By "extraordinary and unremit

ting
acts of will."69 Take, for example, the period in the 1920’s when

it became necessary to formulate a New Economic Policy because the

Revolution was about to fail. Never for a moment does it occur to him

Raymond R. Willoughby, "Magic and Cognate Phenomena: An Hypothesis",

66
Chapter 12, A Handbook of Social Psychology, Carl Murchison, ed.,
(Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1935), P. 462.

67 Ibid., p. 514.

68
Theodore R. Sarbin, "Role Theory", Chapter VI in Handbook of
Social Psychology, G. Lindzey, ed., in press; cf. Mead, op. cit., pp.
56-9.
69
Mead, op. cit., p. 51.
that the noncoincidence of theory and practice suggests that there is

something wrong with the theory. On the contrary, since he takes it

for granted that this theory accounts for the only reality, that which

is ostensive must be changed to fit the theory, if not immediately

then as soon as possible. His world, the world of Marxism, is falling

apart. Great gaps are opening between theory and practice. How ex

plain this peculiar period in History when nothing is going right?

Somehow reasons can be found, justifications can be made, that will

satisfy his subordinates, but when the magic of the spell is broken

there is only one way to keep the world it holds together from disinte

grating, and that is by a tremendous act of will on the part of the

magician. As we read down the following selection of quotations note

how desperately Lenin strives to will order and sanity back into his

world, because of course the will of one, the single iron will that is

to be obeyed absolutely, is his own will and above all he is desperately

trying to rationalize a skew universe back into alignment.

This is a peculiar stage of development ... we

should be able to adapt the forms of our struggle to the
peculiar conditions of such a period.70

We must study the peculiarities of the highly diffi

cult and new road to Socialism . . .71

... it would be the greatest stupidity and the most

absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from
capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion
and dictatorship.72

70 Lenin, The Soviets at Work, op. cit., p. l4.

71 Ibid., p. 15.

72 Ibid., p. 29.
 66

If we are not anarchists, we must admit the necessity

of a state; that is, of compulsion, for the transition from
capitalism to Socialism.73

... on the significance of individual dictatorial power

from the standpoint of the specific problems of the present
period, we must say that every large machine industry . . .
requires an absolute and strict unity of the will which
directs the joint work of hundreds, thousands and tens of
thousands of people ... by subjecting the will of
thousands to the will of one . . . complete submission to
a single will . . . 74

There seems little doubt that this single will to which the world must

bow is the will of Lenin as Leader, as One, as Magician, for as Chase

puts it in Quest for Myth:

Psychologically . . . magic is the envelopment and

coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a
dynamic subjectivism.75

This is the world of the Marxist mind, the magma metaphor of

Marx and Engels, the magical universe where change can be effected by

an act of will, and as Bauer says:

One of the premises of Soviet Ideology ... is that

. . . Soviet man is infinitely capable of controlling the
universe. 76

I submit that it is not possible fully to understand this mind, this

way of thinking, without an understanding of- its magical universe of

discourse.

Lenin, The Soviets at Work, op. cit., p. 34.

73
74
Ibid., p. 35.

75 Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer
sity Press, 1949 ), p. 84.
76 Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 192.
 Chapter IV

THE UNIVERSE OF THE NEW TRIBALISM

The savage lives in a world of his own . . .

Ernst Cassirer

In his Introduction to Capital and other writings of Marx, Max

Eastman makes the following statement.

Marx was educated in the atmosphere of German meta-

physics. He began life as a follower of Hegel, and he
never recovered from that German philosophical way of go
ing at things which is totally alien to our minds.1

It has been my suggestion throughout that Marxism as a way of thinking

is totally alien to our modern Western forms of empiricism because it

is a reversion to the primitive way of thought that is found in the

animistic magic of prescientific totemic tribalism. I have also sug

gested, however, that magical thinking per se is not alien to the human

mind but, rather, is man’s oldest, easiest, and most natural way of

thinking. Or as Malinowski says:

Magic is . . . akin to science in that it always has

a definite aim intimately associated with human instincts,
needs, and pursuits. The magic art is directed towards
the attainment of practical ends; like any other art or
craft it is also governed by theory, and by a system of
principles which dictate the manner in which the act has
to be performed in order to be effective.2

Thus we may say that magic as a way of thinking does make sense, and

very good sense, to the people who find a coherent explanation of the

1 Max Eastmann, ed., Capital, The Communist Manifesto, and Other1

Writings by Karl Marx (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), P. vii.

2Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York:

Norton, 1926), p. 82.

67
 68

world, in the terms of its universe of discourse. As a practical way of

thinking it is definitely not nonsense, as we too often assume, or it

could not have been, as Cassirer says, "the first school through which

primitive man had to pass."3 Tak1ng the long view of historical per

spective it is rather we, with our emphasis on the impersonal relation

ship of man and nature, who appear as exceptions to the rule and the

question very readily presents itself as to whether or not we shall

continue, in any measure large or small, to wield rational control of

our destinies. Cassirer puts it this way:

The belief that man by the skilful use of magic

formulae and rites can change the course of nature has
prevailed for hundreds and thousands of years in human
history. In spite of all, the inevitable frustrations
and disappointments mankind still clung stubbornly,
forcibly, and desperately to this belief. It is, there
fore, not to be wondered at that in our political actions
and our political thoughts magic still holds its ground.

In Chapter I we spoke of rationally contrived irrationalisms and

of how closed rational systems can become the bearers of irrationality.

I think it well to supplement this here with an illustration of how

easily a perfectly sound scientific observation can be used as the basis

for a system of magical divination so persuasive as to have occupied

some of the greatest minds of the ages. Speaking of the origin of

astrology in the eighth century B.C., Toynbee says:

In this age Babylonic men of science discovered that

the rhythm of cyclic recurrence, which had been patent
from time immemorial in the alternations of day and night,

3 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1944), p. 92.
4 Ernest Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1946), p. 295.
 69

in the waxing and. waning of the Moon, and. in the solar

cycle of the year, was also discernible on a vaster scale
in the motions of the planets . . . and this exciting
Babylonic discovery had. much the same effect as our recent
Western scientific discoveries have had. upon the discover
ers’ conception of the Universe.

The never broken and never varying order that had thus
been found to reign in all the known movements of the
stellar cosmos was now assumed to govern the Universe as
a whole: material and spiritual, inanimate and animate.
. . . And since the cosmic discipline implied that all
these members of the Universe that moved in so perfect a
unison were 'in sympathy'--en rapport--with each other,
was it unreasonable to assume that the newly revealed
pattern of the movements of the stars was a key to the
riddle of human fortunes, so that the observer who held
this astronomical clue in his hands would be able to fore
cast his neighbour’s destinies if once he knew the date and
moment of his birth? Reasonable or not, these assumptions
were eagerly made; and thus a sensational scientific dis
covery gave birth to a fallacious philosophy of determinism
which has captivated the imagination of one society after
another and is not quite discredited yet after a run of
nearly 2,700 years.5

And Cassirer adds:

We are proud of our natural science; but we should not

forget that natural science is a very late achievement of
the human mind. Even in the seventeenth century, in the
great century of Galileo and Kepler, of Descartes and New
ton, it was by no means firmly established. . . . During
the Renaissance the so-called occult sciences, magic,
alchemy, and astrology, were still predominant . . .

Kepler . . . the first great empirical astronomer who

was able to describe the movements of the planets in exact
mathematical terms ... was appointed as an astrologer at
the Imperial Court of Prague. . . . Prior to the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries of our modern era, it is impossible
to draw a line between empirical and mystical thought.6

With this I think we must agree.

5 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University

Press, 1947), PP. 374-5.
6 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, op. cit., pp. 293-4.
 7O

Not all the rationality of the Greek academicians can alter the

fact that, speaking in terms of ontology, rationality as we know it is

an intellectual discipline maintaining a precarious existence in a

world where it is more natural to assume a homeopathic connection be

tween man and nature than it is to separate man and nature for objec

tive study. Therefore when we find a supposedly responsible publica

tion such as the Literary Gazette, published in the Soviet Union, call

ing on geographers to develop "militant party science" and to avoid

the errors of "politicism and objectivity",7 we may be sure that we

are again confronted with a resurgence of the mythopoeic mind.

In what follows we will discuss, first, mythology in the Soviet

Union and how it arose and, second, the epistemology, i.e., the universe

of discourse, of this new tribalism.

Myth

The first function of myth is to justify magic.

George Santayana

The Moscow newspaper Pravda today used a

new title for Premier Josef Stalin—commander-
in-chief of genius—according to Moscow radio.

San Francisco Chronicle

As was pointed out in Chapters I and III, it was Lenin who assumed

the mask, the persona, of the tribal genius and became the charismatic

Hero, or Leader, of the Revolution. Modern totalitarianism, however,

7 San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 28, 1949, P. 4.

 71

maintains propaganda machines for the express purpose of manufacturing

new political mythologies designed to "stir up the animals” and thereby

keep the people in a continual state of crisis as new enemies, internal

as well as external, are discovered and old dragons are magically

slain again and again by means of the printed word. Thus while it may

come to pass at some future date that Soviet Communism may find it

expedient to replace specific individual leaders by some abstract en

tity such as Orwell's "Big Brother” as the ideal and idealized Leader,

at the present it would appear that Lenin has been made to share his

magical power with Stalin. In Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority,

Margaret Mead speaks of this manufactured mythology as follows:

... in the official folklore ... Lenin is represented

with his wife, but Stalin holds the sun in one hand and
the moon—a feminine symbol in the old folklore—in the
other and is credited with a long list of fructifying deeds:
“Where he stepped, a trace remained, each step a new town,
a bridge, a railroad ... towns, houses, like cliffs; over
the entire earth he sowed things that are stronger than
granite.”8

And again:

In the approved poetry of the new folklore . . . the

halo around the figure of Lenin is made to embrace Stalin
also, and he . . . sharing Lenin’s knowledge of the Truth,
leads the people. . . . But at the same time the relation
ship of every Soviet citizen to the leader is stressed.
'All have in their blood a drop of Lenin’s blood,' says a
long poem, written sometime in the early thirties. ...
This same theme appears in a postwar novel, The Stozharovs,
in which a young army officer, still in his teens, says:
'. . . Stalin, he knows, and that is why he is so sure of
the people, of our victory and of everything. ... It
seems to me . . . that in each Communist there is a kind of
particle of Stalin. . . . And this helps him to be sure and
calm, to know what to do, to what everything will lead if

Margaret
8 Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1951), p. 65.
 72

he acts as the Party commands ... a Communist ... he is

a leader in everything and everywhere, a teacher of life for
the people.'9

This "particle of Stalin" or "drop of Lenin’s blood" that is supposedly

in each Soviet citizen, and for that matter in each Communist through

out the Marxist world, is that "material substrate or continuum, co-

extensive with the group, and the medium of sympathetic interaction

within it"10 in which all, the chief characteristics of the sympathetic

continuum of magic are reproduced."11 We also find here that curious

12
coincidence with the blood myth previously remarked by Popper.

But of course a myth would not be a myth if it did not want "to

bring about the truth it proclaims,"13 and for this there must be a

Leader. To continue with Mead:

Throughout the folklore, as in the Party histories,

the plot is the search for the Truth, for the power which
in the folklore is represented as the ring which, when
grasped, will turn the whole world over. Lenin found it
and Stalin carries on the tradition. In a recent Soviet
poem in the form of a lullaby, in which a father bids his
baby daughter sleep safely now that atomic energy has been
found, this figure recurs--of a granite mountain, 'which
is barring our way. Long, long ago it should have been
forced to give up its ore, and now at the prearranged hour
... the old mountain disappeared.'

So we have an emphasis on the ideal leader’s unde

viating, absolute following of the Truth which Lenin found

9 Mead, op. cit., p. 6l.

10Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London: Arnold,

1912), p. l40. -

11 Ibid., p. 134.

12K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1949), I , P. 58.

13 Henri Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient

Man (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1946), P. 8.
 73

and. from this Truth obtaining his power. Application of

the Truth is expressed, in foresight and. long sight, and,
in the folklore, this wide yet focused view is symbolized,
by placing in Stalin’s hand a spyglass as he stands on the
walls of the Kremlin, as he 'looks and rules the country
solicitously, he looks and looks without ever getting
tired. His sensitive ear hears everything, his sharp
glance sees everything; how the people live, how they
work.' This combination of wide perspective and power
to direct is expressed of Lenin as follows: 'Lifting his
head higher than the stars, Lenin could see at once the
entire world and he could direct the entire world at one
time.' 14

He can "direct the entire world at one time” because, as Bauer has re

marked, “Soviet man is infinitely capable of control1ing the universe.

We will enquire more closely into this idea that it is possible for

one man to control the entire universe in the section on the protean

epistemology of Marxism, but at the moment we are more interested in

the fact of the myth itself and why it has achieved its present place

in the world.

Returning to the suggestion that rationality as we know it is

now confronted with a resurgence of the mythopoeic mind, I think it

instructive to turn to the section on biographical material in Schilpp’s

The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer where Dimitry Gawronsky says:

World War I brought a deep spiritual crisis in Europe.

One belief especially had been shattered to its very founda
tion: the idea that human reason was a decisive power in
the social life of man. When, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, Georges Sorel advanced his theory that
not reason but social myth was the driving power of human
history, that the actions of human societies were deter
mined not by objective truth and cool deliberation but by
peculiar images, mostly born out of hatred, revulsion,

14
Mead, op. cit., pp. 61-2.
15Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 192.
 74

contempt, and filled with strong impulses and emotions,

images, which have nothing to do with truth and often
represent the greatest possible falsehood—the scholars
only laughed at him and paid no attention at all to his
“queer" ideas. Yet the progress of the war and the sub
sequent years which saw the birth of several totalitarian
ideologies and their victorious march to power in the
largest countries of Europe, ruined and disarrayed by
the war, clearly showed the extent of truth contained in
Sorel’s social theories. The stormy pace of historical
events demanded a new approach to the problems o£ reality,
different ways and means for its understanding.16

It becomes apparent, then, that we must delve more deeply into the

historical genesis of these "peculiar images". Whence does Marxism re

ceive its sense of reality? For this we need a somewhat wider perspec

tive of the history of ideas. Let us turn to Randall's The Making of

the Modern Mind.

The ideas that have formed the scientific world-view

of our generation are the product of two major intellectual
revolutions, two significant reorientations in scientific
thought. The first, associated with the names of Darwin,
Wallace, Huxley, and Haeckel, spread the notion of evolu
tion, of change, growth, and development, from its focus
in biological investigation to swift domination of the
entire climate of opinion of the age. The second, carried
through by the genius of Einstein, Planck, de Broglie,
Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, introduced a novel set of
fundamental concepts and principles into mathematical
physics, and has puzzled our generation with the theory of
relativity, quantum and wave mechanics, and the triumphs
and mysteries of the structure of the atom ... the idea
of evolution came as a godsend to Romanticists seeking a
new cosmic faith sanctioning their optimistic confidence in
human progress.17

In this mention of the evolutionary philosophers Randall touches briefly

upon Bergson, but to continue and now consider the historical school,

Dimitry Gawronsky, “Ernst Cassirer: His Life and His Work", in

16
Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill.:
Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), PP. 24-5.

17
J. H. Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 458.
 75

as influenced by Germany and. romanticism.

Born of Hegelian idealism and the traditionalist reac

tion to the scientific views of the Enlightenment, the
historical school turned to the record of the past, and
sought to trace the slow and inevitable development of
human society and institutions from immemorial antiquity.
. . . The romantic parentage of this historical method
betrays itself in the ease with which history was itself
deified and made into a sacred force with which mortal
hands must not meddle. ... It was the prevalence of this
teleological view of history that made it easy to assimi
late the new evolutionary philosophy when it pressed in
from biology; Darwin seemed only to have furnished an exact
scientific confirmation of the presence of this cosmic
power ... In fact, the historical method, as applied to
social institutions, means the abandonment of science, in
the sense of experimentally verified causal principles, and
the reliance instead for explanation upon a chronological
survey of successive facts. ... To take an analogy from
astronomy, it is as though men were to rest content with
the careful record of the positions of the planets, and to
feel no need of going on to celestial mechanics.18

In other words, we wind up back with the analogy to astrology again.

But is this applicable to Marxism? May we say, granted its

Hegelian metaphysics, that Marxism finds its sense of reality in the

Darwinian evolutionary-historical frame of reference? Engels replies

in the affirmative.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said

for modern science that it has furnished this proof with
very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown
that, in the last resort, nature works dialectically and
not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal
oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through
a real historical evolution. In this connection Darwin
must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical
conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that
all organic beings, plants, animals and man himself, are
the products of a process of evolution going on through
millions of years . . .

An exact representation of the universe, of its evolu

tion, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection

Randall
18 , op. cit., pp. 501-2.
 76

of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only

he obtained by the methods of dialectics, with its constant
regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and
death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in
this spirit the new German philosophy has worked. . . .
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian sys
tem. In this system—and herein is its great merit—for
the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intel­
lectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant
motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt
is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a
continuous whole of all this movement and development. From
this point of view the history of mankind . . . appeared
... as the process of evolution of man himself. It was
now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual, march
of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace
out the inner law running through all its apparently acci
dental phenomena.19

From the references just cited I think that it Is apparent that

we may place the Marxist world-view in a superseded scientific tradition

in which the world was seen as meaningful only in terms of an animistic

hypothesis borrowed from biology. This, I take it, is what Eastman had

in mind when he criticized Marxism as "animistic”.

The history of philosophy shows ... a confusing

interplay of the two attitudes, the attempt to generalize
science, and the metaphysicians‘s art of implanting
animism within the assumptions of science. But there is
one place in the history of philosophy where the meta-
physician’s art prevailed absolutely, and became ... a
national institution, dominating the entire culture of a
people. ... That is modern Germany. . German philosophy
is the ultimate grandiose convulsion of animistic thought,
expiring under the encroachments of the scientific point
of view. And the philosophy of Hegel is the ultimate
flower of German philosophy . . .20

Commenting, then, that Marx and Engels had developed their intellectual

Frederick Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (New York:

19
International Publishers, 1935), PP. 48-9.

20
Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 34-5.
 77

powers and formed, their habits of thought, as young Hegelians, in the

animistic attitude of their time, he continues:

Their thinking consisted, up to the age of about

twenty-five and twenty-three respectively, in imputing
their aspirations to the Ultimate Spirit of the world,
and then proceeding fervently to co-operate with that
Spirit. And this animistic habit—so native to all
human minds—became too strong upon them ever to over
come. 21

The mere use of the word "animistic” here should not, however, cause us

to underestimate the magnitude of the achievement. Catlin gives the

following summation:

Together Marx and Engels . . . built up a philosophy

which in its involved consistency has no compeer since
St. Thomas laid down his pen. For it the Communist Mani
festo provided the Prophecy and Das Kapital provided the
Torah, the Law. Here is 'the Book.' Since then commen
tators have added line to line and precept to precept.
This Marxian philosophy is a coherent whole. It is massive
because revolutionary action is built upon class-war
theory; the class war upon the economic theory of sur
plus value; this economic theory upon the economic inter
pretation of history; this interpretation upon the Marxo-
Hegelian logic or dialectic; and this upon a materialistic
metaphysic.22

Myth was defined in Chapter I as "the rationale by which the world of

magic is made morally justifiable and intellectually plausible" because,

as Cornford had been cited as saying, myth is "the statement of what is

being done and willed",23 i.e., "the verbal expression of the same

emotion and desire" by which the magician seeks "the realisation of the

desired end in dramatic action" because "sympathetic magic consists in

21 Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution, op. cit., p. 37.

22George Catlin, The Story of the Political Philosophers (New York:

Tudor, 1947), p. 569.

23,Cornford, op. cit., p. 139.

 78

the representation of the object of passionate desire.” It should be

noted, however, that any field of study has its verbal expression of

the subject of consideration and that a scientific hypothesis, for ex

ample, is often mythical in that not all of its speculations may be

immediately verifiable and, further, because it is a deliberate attempt

to simplify the complexities of reality to make them amenable to the

understanding. As a scientific hypothesis it is cast in the terms of

the descriptive universe of discourse and does not try to compel the

universe to do its bidding. The myth of the magical universe of dis

course or, more properly, the magical myth, is cast in compulsive terms

because it is the function of the magician to compel, to coerce, the

will or wills confronting him, and in order for there to be wills to

compel the universe of magic must be animistic. We will now attempt to

analyze the epistemology of Marxism as a magical universe.

Magic

The country of socialism cannot, by definition,

practice a policy of aggression and war . . .

Maurice Thorez

The word of Marduk is eternal; his command is

unchangeable, no god can alter what proceeds from
his mouth.

Babylonian Creation Epic

In my preliminary discussion of the epistemology of the world of

magic in Chapter I of this paper, I said, "Other characteristics of the

world of magic, besides the substance-essence dichotomy, are that it is

 79

completely plastic or protean, and. that it is a world, of harmony or ident

ity of opposites where contradictions or inconsistencies that result

from the arbitrary and. a priori use of definition and metamorphosis can

be and are resolved by merging thesis and antithesis into a resultant

synthesis of developmental essence." By this I mean that the protean,

definitional and developmental essential aspects of the world of magic

are ail merely special instances of the substance-essence dichotomy.

In the monistic materialism24 of the pre-Socratic Greek type

of epistemology affected in the Marxist universe of discourse, the world

is protean because quantities may be and are transformed into qualities,

the world is definitional because these quantity-quality transforma

tions can be and are caused by an act of will, and the world has a

developmental essence because its source of movement is the negativity25

of the opposites monad. Further clarification will be made under these

three subheadings, but first we must turn to Engels and his Dialectics

of Nature for a primary reference as to their place in Marxism. Ac

cording to Engels

It is . . . from the history of nature and human

society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For
they are nothing but the most general laws of these two
aspects of historical development, as well as of thought
itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to
three:
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;

24 Catlin, op. cit., p. 419; cf. Cornford, op. cit., p. 129.

25 Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York: Reynald & Hitchcock,
1936), p. 67.
 26
The law of the negation of negation

Since the "laws” of the interpenetration of opposites and the negation

of negation are both concerned with the negativity of the opposites

monad they will both be comprehended under the heading of Developmental

Essence in this paper. Engels continues the above quotation as follows:

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion

as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of
his Logic, in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the
whole of the second and by far the most important part of
his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally the third
figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the
whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws
are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and
not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole
forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-
nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a
system of thought which itself is only the product of a
definite stage of evolution of human thought. If we turn
the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the
dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in
idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as
noon-day ... the dialectical laws are really laws of de
velopment of nature, and therefore are valid also for
theoretical natural science.27

But of course the question immediately arises as to whether Marx and

Engels, when they “turn the thing round”, are not doing exactly that

of which they accuse Hegel, i.e., reading these laws into nature and

history as laws of thought. Stalin is of the opinion that they are. In

Dialectical and Historical Materialism he says:

Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse,

to debate. In ancient times dialectics was the art of
arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in
the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradic
tions. There were philosophers in ancient times who

26
Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International
Publishers, 1940), p. 26.

Ibid., pp. 26-7

27
 81

believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought

and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of
arriving at the truth. This dialectical method of thought,
later extended to the phenomena of nature, developed into
the dialectical method of apprehending nature, which re
gards the phenomena of nature as being in constant movement
and undergoing constant change, and the development of
nature as the result of the development of the contradic
tions in nature, as the result of the interaction of opposed
forces in nature.28

Or as Burke says, speaking in terms of monistic substance:

Idealism had decided that knowledge was possible

because Nature is the same substance as Thought, hence
Thought is able to think it. Dialectical materialism
reverses the relation by saying that thought is of the same
substance as nature, hence can be a reflection of nature.29

It would therefore follow, if this is a correct estimate of the situa

tion, that when thought reflects nature it is also reflecting Thought,

for how can there be a reflection if there is not an original to be

reflected? There would appear to be unexpected pitfalls of Platonism

in the Marxist epistemology, but just exactly what is meant by "reflec

tion" and "nature", i.e., "matter”, in Marxism, will be worked out in

the section on Protean epistemology. We will begin here with

Developmental Essence

... the fluidity of the savage concept of

personality ... is not confined within the bounds
of one stable and relatively unchangeable body.
You may quite easily be transformed, like the hero
of Apuleius' tale, into an ass.

E. S. Hartland

Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York:

28
International Publishers, 1940), pp. 6-7.
29 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall,
1945), p. 201.
 82

The developmental essence of Marxism is the power generated by

the spontaneous dialectical process. As Sidney Hook, says:

The driving force in the development of a dialectical

situation is derived from the conflict and opposition of
the elements within it. . . . It is the opposition which
Hegel calls the principle of Negativität. It is the self-
moving soul of all physical and spiritual life. Nothing
is sacred to it, nothing immune to its negations. It is
"der Geist der stets verneint." . . . Dialectical resolu
tion of conflict and opposition is the motor-power of all
development.30

And in a footnote he quotes Hegel as saying

'The Negative in general contains the ground of

Becoming, the unrest of self-movement.'31

This is the "autogenetic movement" of each system of events cited by

Bauer in The New Man in Soviet Psychology,32 of Stalin's "moving

and of Lenin’s reciprocating opposites.34

matter",33 Or as Catlin says

The Marxist argument of Class War . . . turns upon

the
existence of sharply defined classes to be stirred to
revolt and to engage, on one side or the other, in this
war—units corresponding to the requirements of the
dialectic. There must be substantially only these two
classes, capitalists and proletariat, exploiters and ex
ploited, thesis and antithesis. Let Marx explain . . .
in The Holy Family (1844):
Proletariat and wealth are opposites. As
such they form a whole . . .35

This whole that consists of two sharply defined opposites, whether in

30
Hook, op. cit., p. 67.
31 Loc. cit.

32
Bauer, op. cit., p. 94.

33
Stalin, op. cit., p. 15.
34 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (New York: Inter
national Publishers, 1927), Collected Works, Vol. XIII, p. 323.

35 Catlin, op. cit., p. 593.

 83

nature, history, or intellect, is what I have referred to as the "oppo

sites monad.” that produces the dialectical movement or developmental

essence "working in matter and in human society"36 moving in

history" as the "inner law running through all its apparently acci

dental phenomena." 38

The dialectic progresses hy means of the quantitative-qualita

tive shift, hut this is only its external manifestation. The power for

this shift is generated internally, in the negativity of the opposites

monad, and it is the negativity that causes this power to he generated

because it is the antithesis that stimulates the thesis into combining

with it to produce the synthesis. Here we have another illustration of

the Marxist practice of reading the "laws of thought", which are really

only a set of informal rules by which ideas are developed in a conver

sational debate or "bull session", into nature and history, hut this is

important to Marxism because the Revolution itself depends on the

quantitative-qualitative shift.

It is easy to understand how immensely important is

the extension of the principles of the dialectical method
to the study of social life and the history of society,
and how immensely important is the application of these
principles to the history of society and to the practical
activities of the party of the proletariat.39

... if the passing of slow quantitative changes into

rapid and abrupt qualitative changes is a law of develop
ment, then it is clear that revolutions made by oppressed

36 Catlin, op. cit., p. 577.

37 Ibid., p. 623.

38 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, op. cit., p. 49.

39 Stalin, op. cit., p. 12.

 84

classes are a quite natural and. inevitable phenomenon.

Hence the transition from capitalism to socialism and

the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capi
talism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but
only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by
revolution.40

In all this Lenin and Stalin have good ground in the writings of the

founders of Marxism. Thus as Engels says:

. . . every organised being is every moment the same and

not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied
from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment
some cells of its body die and others build themselves
anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body
is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules
of matter, so that every organised being is always itself,
and yet something other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the

two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e,g.,
are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite
all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate.41

An extremely valuable insight into the continuing influence

of Hegel on Marxism through the agency of Lenin is given in this set of

notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic found among Lenin’s notebooks.

ELEMENTS OF DIALECTICS

(1) Objectivity of observation. Not 'examples,' not un

representative forms. The thing in itself.

(2) Totality of the manifold relations of the things to

others.

(3) The Development of the thing (or of the phenomenon).

(4) The inner contradictory tendencies (and sides) in the

thing.

(5) The thing (appearance) as sum and unity of opposites.

40 Stalin, op. cit., p. 14.

41 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, op. cit., p. 47.
 85

(6) The struggle or unfolding of the opposites.

(7) The union of analysis and. synthesis. The splitting up

into the separate parts and. the totality, summation of
these parts together.

(8) The relations (of the thing or appearance) not only

manifold but general, universal. Everything (appear
ance, process, etc.) is connected, by every other.

[no item 9 is given]

(10) An infinite process of revealing of new sides, relations,

etc.

(11) An infinite process of deepening of knowledge of the

thing, appearance, process, etc., by men; from appear
ance to essence and from less deep to deeper essence.

(12) From co-existence to causality and from one form of

connection and reciprocal dependence to another deeper
and more general.

(13) The repetition of certain features, properties, etc.,

of the lower stage in the higher.

(l4) Apparent return to the old (negation of the negation).

(15) The struggle of content with form and vice versa. The
throwing off of the form, transformation of the content.

(16) Passing of quantity into quality and vice versa.42

Elsewhere Lenin supplements this hy saying, "dialectics is the study of

the contradiction within the very essence of things",43 and also,

"Development is the 'struggle' of opposites."44

The development of the life, i.e., movement or essence, of a

thing, or phenomenon, by its inner contradictory tendencies (“All things

come into being by conflict of opposites",45 Heraclitus the Obscure),

T. A. Jackson, Dialectics (London:

42 Lawrence and Wishart, 1936),
pp. 635-6.

43 Stalin, op. cit., p. 11.

44 Loc. cit.
45 Milton C. Nahm, ed., Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (New
York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1945), p. 96.
 86

the knowing of the thing, appearance, process, by going from appearance

to essence, and from less deep to deeper essence, the repetition of the

lower (microcosm) in the higher (macrocosm), the negation of negation

as an “apparent return to the old.” (“the wheel of Nature revolveth

constantly”), the struggle of content with form (shape-shifting and.

the fluid, personality of mythology), everything is connected with every

other (substance is extended.), and the passing of quantity into quality

(metamorphosis). The use of this language, this terminology, this

universe of discourse so familiar to the student of myth in the Meta

morphoses of Ovid, to the student of the esoteric in the Tao Teh King

of Lao-tse, and to the student of the “occult" in the Tabula Smaragdina

of Hermes Trismegistos, re-emphasizes the myth and magic in Marxism.

It also serves as a suitable introduction, for example, to the strange

world of the new genetics in the Soviet Union as reported by Hudson and

Richens.

To begin:

The various issues underlying the recent history of

genetics in the Soviet Union have been clarified to a cer
tain extent by the genetical congresses that have been held
to elucidate them. ... The first important congress re
quiring mention is the All-Union Conference on the Planning
of Genetics and Selection, which was held at Leningrad in
1932. At this meeting the note of urgency was sounded.
... The need of improving varieties and raising the standard
of seed production was emphasized, a subject that had pro
voked Stalin to demand from plant breeders a significant
improvement within a period of four to five years. Practi
cal results were laid down as the first desideratum of
Russian geneticists. A resolution was also passed that
genetics and plant breeding were to conform with dialectical
materialism, a point which proved to Lysenko’s advantage
later.46

46 P. S. Hudson
Richens, The Newand R. H. in the Soviet
Genetics
Cambridge
(
Union
:
England
,
S chool of Agriculture, May, 1946), P. 18.
 87

This is a prime example of primitive fertility magic as discussed, by

Malinowski.47 Soviet agriculture had not been fulfilling its mission.

Mendelian genetic theories were suspect as "foreign” and. "bourgeois".

A crisis had been reached that demanded decisive action. Therefore,

by a magical decree, the world of nature must be compelled to respond

to a practical need, but, true to the tradition of magic, it must re

spond by conforming to the decree of the magician. It is not allowed

that some alternate theory should share in any portion of the Truth.

Malinowski puts it this way:

The integral cultural function of magic ... con

sists in the bridging-over of gaps and inadequacies in
highly important activities not yet completely mastered
by man.48

To continue with Hudson and Richens.

In 1936, the year of the second important genetical

congress, Lysenko ... denounced the chromosome theory
of heredity, denying the importance either of chromosomes
or genes in determining hereditary behavior .... it was
claimed that the winter wheat Kooperatorka had been con
verted into a spring wheat by a suitable vernalization
technique. The Mendelian laws of heredity were next sub
jected to attack. ... At the 1939 genetical congress,
Lysenko maintained his theory of the possibility of direc
tional modification of the genotype and reiterated his
attacks on Mendelism. ... In the following year, Lysenko
attacked the whole notion of applying mathematics in
biology . . . 49

Strange as this may sound to us, there is nothing surprising here so

1944), pp. 248-9; cf. Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology, op.

cit., p. 79.

, Myth in Primitive Psychology, op. cit., p. 8l.

49 Hudson and Richens, op. cit., p. 17.

 88

far as Marxism is concerned. If quantity can change into quality then

wheat can change into rye, if the universe is fluid, then the genotype

must be plastic.50 Also note the rejection of mathematics that is so

familiar from the Bergsonian universe of discourse.51

In the following passage we will he concerned with how the

"developmental stages” of dialectics becomes a sort of astrology of

biology as an attempt is made to adapt biology to the Marxist world.

view.

. . . plant development, as understood by Lysenko, is essen

tially a dynamic cyclical process. He insists that from a
materialistic standpoint, nothing remains unchanged ...
even the nuclei undergo continual change, so that it would
contradict the essentials of dialectical materialism to
introduce into the observed developmental flux some formal
immutability . . . such as is represented by the genotype.
'The organism,' Lysenko remarks, 'beginning with the fer
tilized egg, as it takes nutrient, is changing, is being
transformed and is continually developing new characters,
organs, properties and qualities. We say “new" because in
the particular individual a few days before, these char
acters, organs and properties could not even have existed
in any form.' The organism for Lysenko does not endure as
an immutable entity. It is regarded as a stream of stages,
each but a momentary reality and engendering from its
assimilative union with the environmental nutrients the
following stage. The whole flux of stages is the concrete
reality, not a hypothetical static entity, the genotype.52

But of course with this we return to the Darwinian influence on Marxism

From an historical point of view, it is unnecessary to

trace the basic concepts of Soviet Darwinism any further
back than to Lamarck. In the Philosophie Zoologique is to
be found a clear exposition of theory that ... 'every new
need necessitating new actions for its satisfaction, re
quires of the animal which experiences it, either the more

50 Hudson and Richens, op. cit., p. 29.

51 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911),

P. 39.

52 Hudson and Richens, op. cit., pp. 57-8.

 89

frequent use of such of its parts which it formerly used

less ... or else the use of new parts which the needs
cause to come into existence in it through the strivings
of its inner consciousness. ' . . . These speculations did
not win general acceptance at the time and it was only
with Darwin’s publications, that evolutionary theories
became part of general biological theory.53

It is only in terms of such an animistic universe of discourse that we

can appreciate the following news dispatch.

Academician Trofim D. Lysenko, ideological shepherd

of Soviet geneticists, announced last week in Izvestia
that Soviet agrobiologists can turn wheat into rye. All
they have to do is plant wheat in places where the climate
is tough for it. In a spasm of self-preservation, wrote
Lysenko solemnly, the wheat turns into rye.
. . .
Lysenko attributed the latest success of Soviet
genetics to 'Stalinist teaching on gradual, concealed,
unnoticeable, quantitative changes that result in quick,
qualitative basic changes.' He added: 'Comrade Stalin
is the embodiment of folk wisdom. ... He is the happi
ness of all the toilers of the world. Glory and long
years of life and health to the leader and great teacher
of the toilers, the coryphaeus of science: Comrade
Stalin.'54

Lysenko is quite correct in attributing this teaching of “gradual, con

cealed, unnoticeable, quantitative changes that result in quick, quali

tative basic changes” to Stalin, as we have seen in Chapter III, but

it is an embarrassment of riches that “coryphaeus" happens to be de

fined as "the leader of the chorus, especially in Greek drama." For the

chorus of the Greek drama56 is merely the vestigial dance group of the

Koures, and the leader of the chorus was originally the tribal magician

53 Hudson and Richens, op. cit., p. 6.

54 "Teacher of the Toilers", Time, LIV

(Dec. 26, 1949), P. 42.

55 Stalin, op. cit. , p. 8.

56Jane E. Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: University Press, 1912), PP
x-vii.
 90

who could coerce the forces of fertility in nature by bending this

magical essence to his will, and will is

Definitional
Magic ... is briefly this: how can a de
sirable object be coerced?

Paul Radin

All of the concepts of magic revolve around and return to the

substance-essence dichotomy, the substance known that comprises the

material of the universe and the equal1y material active, vital, essence

intelligence that knows because, being of the same material, it can

penetrate, by means of its activity, into the substance and thereby

know it. But this substance is itself in motion, and the motion of

substance generates a "will” or "god" (Thales: "All things are full of

gods.") or "power" or "force of nature" or "elemental force", which is

the "elemental" of demonology, and this "wil1", which is nonvolitional

or "blind", as in the "windowless" monads of Leibniz, can also be pene

trated or grasped and thereby directed or controlled by the active in

telligence of essence. The developmental essence we were discussing in

the last section is exactly this type of nonvolitional force. Or as

Engels says:

... history makes itself in such a way that the final

result always arises from conflicts between many indivi
dual wills, of which each again has been made what it is
by a host of particular conditions of life . . . . the
historical event . . . may itself be viewed as the product
of a power which, taken as a whole, works unconsciously
and without volition. 57

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895

57
(New York: International Publishers, 1942), P. 476.
 91

This, of course, is merely an echo of Hegel.

The only thought which philosophy brings with it to

the contemplation of history, is the simple conception of
Reason; that Reason is the sovereign of the world.; that
the history of the world., therefore, presents us with a
rational process. This conviction and intuition is a
hypothesis in the domain of history as such; in that of
philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by
speculative cognition that Reason ... is substance, as
well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material is that
underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it
originates, as also the Infinite Form—that which sets
this material in motion. On the one hand, Reason is the
substance of the universe. ... On the other hand, it is
the infinite energy of the universe . . .58

And again:

The origin of a State involves imperious lordship on

the one hand, instinctive submission on the other ....
The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifesta
tion of human will and its freedom. It is to the State,
therefore, that change in the aspect of history indissolubly
attaches Itself . . .59

Again we substitute Class for State and the Hegelian world becomes the

world of Marxism. Catlin puts it very succinctly.

So-called Marx-Leninist Materialism is Hegelianism

subject to one superficial reservation, i.e., that Hegel
chooses to call that Reality which rises to self-con
sciousness at a late stage in historical evolution by the
characterless first name of Mind-being, whereas Lenin pre
fers to call that Reality, which rises to sentience as the
'fruit of a long evolution,' by the characterless first
name of Matter-being . . . 60

Following this line of thought, let us consider the nature of a

universe that is a state. Speaking of that Mesopotamian civilization

58 G. W. F. Hegel, "Introduction to the Philosophy of History”, in The

German Classics, Kuno Francke, ed., Volume VII (New York: The German
Publication Society, 19l4), P. 25.

59ibid., pp. 66-9.

60 Catlin, op. cit., p. 620.

 92

that took shape in the Proto-literate period around, the middle of the

fourth millennium B.C., Thorkild Jacobsen says:

While all people tend to humanize nonhuman powers and

frequently visualize them as social types, Mesopotamian
speculative thought seems to have brought out and systema
tized to an unusual degree the implications of social and
political function latent in such typifying . . .

This universe of discourse was certainly not foreign to Marx. In

Capital he had said, combining the concepts of metamorphosis, personi

fication and coercion:

The minimum of the sum of value that the individual

possessor of money or commodities must command, in order
to metamorphose himself into a capitalist, changes with the
different stages of development of capitalist production
.... Personified capital, the capitalist takes care
that the labourer does his work regularly and with the
proper degree of intensity.

Capital further developed into a coercive relation,

which compels the working class to do more work than the
narrow round of its own life-wants prescribes.62

To continue with Jacobsen:

. . . human society was to the Mesopotamian merely a part

of the larger society of the universe. The Mesopotamian
universe—because it did not consist of dead matter, be
cause every stone, every tree, every conceivable thing in
it was a being with a will and character of its own—was
likewise founded on authority; its members, too, willingly
and automatically obeyed orders which made them act as they
should act. These orders we call laws of nature. So the
whole universe showed the influence of the essence peculiar
to Anu.63

Now compare this with the following ideas on child training published

in the Soviet Union in 1948.

61 Thorkild Jacobsen, "Mesopotamia: The Cosmos As A State”, in

Frankfort, op. cit., p. 135.

62 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Modern Library, 1906), p. 338.

63 Jacobsen, op. cit., p. 139.

 93

'The older children become, the more important for

their moral countenance and therefore for their behavior
becomes the Collective of their comrades, its attitudes,
its evaluations. Rules of conduct adopted by the Collec
tive become binding for the one who feels himself a member
of this Collective; the evaluation by the Collective of
various traits of character becomes absolute for each of
its members.'64

Or, as Mead puts it:

Ideologically, Russian Bolshevism demands a complete

subjection of the individual, by an act of individual will,
to the control of the Party. The individual is to have a
strong, internal conscience, yet the perception of the
correct line of action is delegated to a small group of
leaders, and the will of the individual is to be used first
for the voluntary act of initial subjection and then to
execute this Truth perceived by the leadership.65

But of course this is only feasible in a world of magic where the

will of the individual is nonvolitional but must be guided by the

Hegelian "Soul-Leader" who alone can arouse that universal Spirit that

"is the inmost soul of all individuals, but in a state of unconscious

ness."66
It is possible for the Soul-Leader to do this because the
Marxist universe does not, as Jacobsen points out that the Mesopotamian

universe did not, like ours

. . . show a fundamental bipartition into animate and in

animate, living and dead, matter. Nor had it different
levels of reality; anything that could be felt, experienced,
or thought had thereby established its existence, was part
of the cosmos. In the Mesopotamian universe, therefore,
everything, whether living being, thing, or abstract con
cept—every stone, every tree, every notion—had a will and
character of its own.

A. A. Liublinskaya, "On the Misdeeds of Children", Family and

64
School (Sem’ya i Shkola), January, 1948, in Mead, op. cit., p. 75.

65 Mead, op. cit., p. 28.

Hegel, op. cit., p. 50.

66
 94

World order, the regularity and system observable in

the universe, could accordingly—in a universe made up ex
clusively of individuals—be conceived of in only one
fashion: as an order of wills. The universe as an organ
ized whole was a society, a state.

Or, to refer to Marx again:

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its con

trary .... The newfangled sources of wealth, by some
strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want.
. . . All our invention and progress seem to result in
endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in
stultifying human life into a material force .... The
English working men are the firstborn sons of modern
industry. Certainly . . . they will not be the last to
aid the social revolution produced by that industry. . . .
To take vengeance for the misdeeds of the ruling class
there existed in the Middle Ages in Germany a secret
tribunal called the Vehmgericht. If a red cross was seen
marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed
by the Vehm. All the houses of Europe are now marked by
the mysterious red cross. History is the judge; its
executioner, the proletarian.68

Marx does not have to capitalize "proletarian” for us to recognize the

Hegelian man of destiny who will execute, a bloody metaphor, the will

of History, nor for us to recognize that Eastman was right when he said

that Marx was in the habit of thinking in terms of animism.

In the universe we know, the subjective-objective world of

epistemological dualism, rationality is posited in the observing indivi

dual who, no matter how much he may be involved as a participant in a

situation, is nevertheless presumed to be able to take cognizance of his

surroundings and make his own decisions, whether right or wrong. This

is not true of the magical universe of discourse where rationality is

posited, initially, in the elemental force or forces governing that

Jacobsen, op. cit., p. 149.

67
68 Marx and Engels, op. cit., pp. 90-l.
 95

world and, ultimately, in the mind of the seer who, by exercising his

definitional creative-coercive will, is able to master these forces

for his own benefit. It is within this frame of reference that we must

understand leadership based on the charisma group-magical society-

party elite concept. Laski comments as follows:

. . . throughout Marx’s writings there is the assumption

that reliance must be placed upon a class-conscious minor
ity. For in his view there is no place in history for the
majority principle; the record of States is the clash be
tween determined minorities, contending for the seat of
power. To introduce considerations of consent ... is
entirely to ignore reality. The mass of men will always
acquiesce in, or be indifferent to, whatever solutions are
afforded. Communists must proceed upon the assumption
that nothing matters save the enforcement of their will.69

Marguerite Fisher amplifies this by saying:

Rule by a party elite, according to Communist theory,

is inevitable after the revolution, because the proletariat
consist of a vast, loosely organized mass of people with no
experience in government. The new state, the dictatorship,
may represent the rule of the proletariat, but in reality,
as was pointed by the program of the Communist International
in 1928, 'The Proletariat secures unity of will and action,
and exercises this unity through the medium of the Com
munist Party, which plays the leading role in the system of
the proletarian dictatorship.' 70

And E. H. Carr concludes, referring back to Sorel:

... the Bolshevik Party . . . was built up precisely on

the Sorelian premises of an 'audacious minority' leading
the instinctive proletarian mass.71

Discussion of the Marxist concept of definitional will would not

be complete without reference to the force generated by the inner

69 Harold J. Laski, Karl Marx (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), P. 37.

70 Marguerite J. Fisher, Communist Doctrine and the Free World

(Syracuse University Press, 1952), pp. 197-7.

71 E.H. Carr, Studies in Revolution (London: Macmillan, 195O), P. 162.

 96

contradiction of the opposites monad, for although this force is non-

volitional, as Engels says, it is nevertheless directional and so exerts

a definitional influence on its surroundings. We find a most interest

ing example of this in Hudson and Richens.

Lysenko’s terminology is certainly highly metaphori

cal. Each pollen grain in a pollen mixture is referred to
as a 'swain,' and after pollination has been effected
Lysenko instructs his followers to ‘let the stigma take
whatsoever gamete it wishes.' Literally, this is gross
anthropomorphism .... Far more to the point is the
objection that selective fertilization attributes the
plant with foreknowledge of the environmental conditions
under which its offspring will grow. It cannot be denied
that Lysenko’s statement that 'through selective fertiliza
tion the progenies are as it were predestined to become
adapted to their future conditions' has a curious ring.72

And again, speaking of the nutrient theory:

Organisms are regarded, not as enduring entities, but

as streams of stages, each stage arising from the preced
ing through absorption (assimilation), by the preceding stage,
of environmental elements (nutrients) to give a new com
pound, the next stage in development. Each generation is
regarded as a cycle of developmental stages. The similarity
between parents and offspring is attributed to conservatism,
a property of all living matter. Assimilation of nutrients
is not at random but selective, organisms having the power
to select nutrients which will combine with the organism to
produce a biologically advantageous course of development.
. . . Crossing is supposed to result in hybrid vigour through
the combination of dialectically opposite gametes; selfing
is believed to be deleterious through the absence of dialec
tically opposite gametes . . . . These theories, although
exhibiting a certain degree of internal coherence, contain
various inconsistencies and receive only slight support from
the facts.73

Almost exactly the same could be said of astrology, or, if one wished

to concede the beginnings of science, one might compare these ”dialecti

cally opposite gametes” with the Ptolemaic epicycles. The stigma can

72 Hudson and Richens, op. cit., p. 65.

73ibid. p. 76.
 97

take unto itself a gamete because inner contradictions cause activity

in the monad or, as Lenin says, there is a "struggle” of opposites.

But there cannot be a "struggle" of any kind unless one or more vi11s,

no matter how rudimentary or elementary or unconscious, are involved.

Perhaps Catlin is right here when he says:

It may be that Hegel is a profounder interpreter of

Hegelianism than Lenin. Will is assigned by Hegel a new
and consistent role in relation to Environment, such as
eliminates the Marxist contradiction between the al.1 -
importance of Economic or Material Environment (Marx-
Kautsky) and the all-importance of Creative Will (Marx-
Lenin).74

Lenin would certainly have contested the suggestion that his

view of dialects differs from that of Hegel.

The division of the One and the Knowledge of its con

tradictory parts is the essence (one of the 'essential'
aspects of being, its fundamental, if not the fundamental
characteristic) of dialectics. This is exactly how Hegel
puts the question.75

But of course Hegel and Lenin are not the only ones who have so treated

the subject. For example, in the Tabula Smaragdina we read

'This is without doubt, certain and very sure: What

is Below is like that which is Above. And which is Above
is like which is Below. Thereby can the mysterious activ
ity of everything be explained. And just as all things
have been created by One according to the plan of One, thus
all things are derived from this One by way of adoption.

'Its Father is the Sun, its Mother the Moon. The Wind
carried it in its belly, its nurse is the Earth. It is the
origin of all perfectness in the entire World; its power is
complete, if it has become Earth.

’Divide the Earth from the Fire, the fine from the
coarse, without tenseness and with mighty reason. It ascends
from Earth, and gains the strength from the Above as well as

Catlin, op. cit., p. 621.

74
75 Lenin, op. cit., p. 321.
 98

of the Below. In this way you will possess the splendor of

al the world; therefore all darkness will flee from you.
That is the strong, power of all powers, that triumphs over
all subtle things and penetrates all firmness. In this way
the world has been created and those are the miraculous
affinities, whose ways have herewith been shown.

'Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistos, the three

fold Great one, who possesses the threefold wisdom of all
the world. This finishes what I have said about the work
of the Sun . . . .'76

Therefore he is also called Anaximander of Miletus, Heraclitus of Ephesus,

Lao-tse the Paradoxical, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. But to con

tinue with Lenin:

Two fundamental . . . conceptions of development

(evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as
repetition; and development as a unity of opposites (the
division of the One into mutually exclusive opposites and
their reciprocal correlation).

The first conception is dead, poor and dry; the second

is vital. It is only this second conception which offers
the key to understanding the 'self-movement' of everything
in existence; it alone offers the key to understanding
'leaps,' to the 'interruption of gradual succession,' to
the 'transformation into the opposite,' to the destruction
of the old and the appearance of the new.

The unity (the coincidence, identity, resultant force)

of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, and
relative. The struggle of the mutually exclusive opposites
is absolute, as movement and evolution are.77

It is the struggle of opposites in the thesis-antithesis monad

that eventuates in a "will" or “spontaneity” or "development” that may

be coerced into producing rye from wheat or, on the macrocosmic scale,

into producing the Act of the Revolution. The Act of History is sup

posedly brought about by the inner contradictions of economic materialism,

76
Frederic Spiegelberg, Alchemy (San Mateo, California: Greenwood
1945), PP. 1-2.
,Press

Lenin, op. cit., pp. 323-4.

77
J

99

but the Act of Revolution is brought about by the conflict of Bourgeoisie

and Proletariat allowing the Leader and his charisma group-party cadre

to take theory or consciousness to the mindless masses and so, by the

use of this theory as a definitional creative-coercive word, seek to

alter the course of nature. Or as Cassirer says:

. . . the magic word ... does not describe things or rela

tions of things; it tries to produce effects and to change
the course of nature. This cannot be done without an
elaborate magical art. The magician, or sorcerer is alone
able to govern the magic word. But in his hands it becomes
a most powerful weapon. Nothing can resist its force.78

Magic has thus been seen as Developmental Essence and as Defini

tional. We will now view the epistemology of the world of magic as

completely

Protean

. . . the practice of magic requires a human

coercer.

Richard Chase

. . . soul knows and is a cause of motion . . .

Aristotle

We have said that the world of magic is the world of mind, that

magic is the enveloping of the universe by the mind of the magician, and

that magic is the coercion of the world to the will of the magician.

While all of this is true, only the first statement describes the world

of magic per se, because the other two statements make or imply a dis

tinction between the knowing and the known, and in the world of magic

Cassirer, The Myth of the State, op. cit., pp. 282-3.

78
 100

that which knows is that which is known. Consider why this must he

so.

. . . before there were naturalists to explain the mechan

ism of plants and animals, to reason out the chain of cause
and effect in the behavior of other things in our world,
man's only yardstick of normality was humanity: what he
knew in himself and in his own experience was human and
normal; deviations from the normal were extra-human and
thus potentially superhuman. Therefore . . . the human
came to address the extra-human in terms of human inter­
course. 79

And Burke, speaking of the definition of a substance in terms of ances

tral cause, says:

Under the head of ’tribal’ definition would fall any

variant of the idea of biological descent, with the sub
stance of the offspring being derived from the substance
of the parents or family. . . . The Latin word natura,
like its Greek equivalent physis, has a root signifying to
become, to grow, to be born. And the Aristotelian genus
is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept.
We can discern the tribal pattern behind the notion, so
characteristic of Greek nationalism, that like causes like
or that like recognizes like, as with Democritus’ theory
of perception.80

Bergson, who gave the modern era its clearest and most precise enuncia

tion of this universe of discourse, says:

Intellect ... instinctively selects in a given

situation whatever is like something already known; it
seeks this out, in order that it may apply its princi
ple that ’like produces like.’81

With this before us I feel that we are in a position to appreciate

Cornford’s analysis of known and knowing among the early tribal Greeks.

79 John A. Wilson, "Egypt: The Nature of the Universe”, in Frankfort,

op. cit., pp. 40-1.

Burke, op. cit., pp. 26-7.

80

8l
Bergson, op. cit., p. 29.
 101

In reviewing the psychological doctrines of the earlier

schools, Aristotle remarks: 'There are two points especially
wherein that which is animate is held to differ from that
which is inanimate, namely motion and the act of sensation
(or perception): and these are, speaking in general, the
two characteristics of soul handed down to us by our prede
cessors' (de anim. a2, 2).

The two vital functions of moving and knowing were

much less clearly distinguished by the early philosophers
than by Aristotle. With regard to the first of them--
motion—the primitive assumption is that whatever is capable
of moving itself or anything else, is alive—that the only
moving force in the world is Life, or rather soul-substance.
The existence of motion in the universe is thus an immediate
proof of Thales’ doctrine: ’The All has soul in it.’
Aetius describes the doctrine as follows: ’There extends
throughout the elemental moisture (Thales’ physis) a divine
power capable of moving it.’ This divine or magical power
is the same as that ’soul’ which Thales ascribed to the
loadstone, because it moves iron. Aetius, a late writer,
distinguishes more clearly than Thales could have done,
between the ’elemental moisture’ and the divine power per
vading it. For Thales the moving soul was the same as the
ultimate element, recognised in water, which pervades al1
things. The same holds of the ’ever-living fire' of
Heraclitus.

At first ... mechanical motion was not distinguished

from vital activity. ... The second function of Soul—
knowing—was not at first distinguished from motion. ...
Sense-perception, not distinguished from thought, was taken
as the type of all cognition, and this is a form of action
at a distance. All such action, moreover, was held to re
quire a continuous vehicle or medium, uniting the soul which
knows to the object which is known. Further, the soul and
its object must not only be thus linked in physical contact,
but they must be alike or akin.82

Understanding of this is of the utmost importance to us because criticism

of this primeval tribal mind was to result in Greek philosophy, from

which so much of our own rational universe of discourse was ultimately

to derive, as schools of thought developed around the critical distinc

tions that were used to separate the matter of physis into animate and

Cornford, op. cit., pp. 131-2.

82
 102

inanimate and the motion of physis into mechanical and. vital, vital and

divine.

But how does the magician control this universe? Ogden and

Richards are very explicit.

The ingenuity of the modern logician tends to conceal

the verbal foundations of his structure, but in Greek
philosophy these foundations are clearly revealed. The
earlier writers are full of the relics of primitive word-
magic. To classify things is to name them, and for magic
the name of a thing or group of things is its soul; to
know their names is to have power over their souls.
Language itself is a duplicate, a shadow-soul, of the whole
structure of reality. Hence the doctrine of the Logos,
variously conceived as this supreme reality, the divine
soul-substance, as the ’Meaning’ or reason of everything,
and as the ‘Meaning’ or essence of a name. 8
3

Or as Bergson says, “matter is determined by intelligence."84

The question arises, however, as to what all this has to do with

Marxism. We have demonstrated the similarity of the universes of discourse

of magic and of Marxism. We will now demonstrate that the coin

cidence becomes identity, and that the founders of Marxism were aware of

this identity. To begin with Engels;

When we consider and reflect upon nature at large, or

the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity,
at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of
relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in
which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but
everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away.
We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with
its individual parts still more or less kept in the back
ground; we observe the movements, transitions, connections,
rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected.
This primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception
of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was

83 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York:

Harcourt, Brace, 1949)> P. 31.

84 Bergson, op. cit., p. 199.

88. Marx and Engels, op. cit., p. 449.

103

first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and

is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing,
constantly coming into being and passing away.85

Marx and Engels were Hegelians and were quite aware of Hegel’s "recon

ciling” the Greek philosophies in his own, of the fluidity of a world

in process and of their indebtedness to Heraclitus for this "intrinsi

cally correct conception of the world." And what was the contribution

that Heraclitus made that was of such great importance?

With Heraclitus of Ephesus philosophy found its locus

standi. ‘Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought
by which all things are steered through all things.' Here,
for the first time, attention is centered, not on the thing
known, but on the knowing of it. Thought ... (which may
also be translated ’judgment,’ or ’understanding’), con
trols the phenomena as it constitutes the thinker ....
The Milesian school of philosophers . . . claimed the uni
verse to be an intelligible whole. ... Heraclitus calls
this wisdom Logos .... Fire is the symbol for a universe
in flux between tensional opposites .... Heraclitus takes
pains to stress that it is only the total process that is
lasting and, hence, significant .... Heraclitus gives the
sharpest and profoundest expression to the Ionian postulate
that the universe is an intelligible whole. It is intel
ligible, since thought steers all things. It is a whole,
since it is a perpetual flux of change.86

This is why Hegel can say, "Reason directs the world", and Engels can

assert that theory is "a lever which could set the . . . masses in

motion."88

But how does this "steering" take place? How is it possible to

connect thought and matter so that the thinker controls that about which
85.
Socialism,
,
86.
87.
op.
Frankfort,
Hegel,
Engels,
cit. op.
Utopian
p. 45.
op. cit.
cit.,
and
p.Scientific
29.
pp. 380-82.
 1 04

he is thinking? We have seen that the magician can do this because the

mind of the magician is also his world, and when he names something

then, by a creative-coercive act of definition, he is able to order it

as he pleases, but how does a Marxist make this connection? Again we

turn to Engels and find him speaking of this very problem in episte

mology.

. . . the Neo-Kantian agnostics . . . say: We may correctly

perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any
sensible or mental process grasp the thing in itself. This
’thing in itself’ is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long
since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a
thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the
fact that the said thing exists without us; and when your
senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last
remnant of the thing in itself, Kant’s celebrated unknow
able Ding an sich.89

So we know the "external" world by mentally grasping the thing-in-itself,

and if we can grasp a thing then we can handle it, it can be "steered".

With this Lenin is in most emphatic agreement.

. . . that perceptions give us correct impressions of things,

that we directly know objects themselves, that the outer
world acts on our sense-organs. This is materialism . . . 90

. . . for every materialist, sensation is nothing but a

direct connection of the mind with the external world; it
is the transformation of energy of external excitation
into a mental state.91

Or as Bergson says, "the intellect penetrates into the inner nature of

inert matter."92 But of course this is essentialism, the magical doc

trine which states that knowing essence penetrates into, knows, and

Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, op. cit., p. lU.

89

Lenin,
90 op. cit., p. 8l.

91Ibid., p. 31.

92 Bergson, op. cit., p. 195.

 105

controls, directs, or steers, active but nonvolitional substance.

Furthermore it is radical subjectivism as the mind of the magician

expands to swallow up the universe as we would expect if the world of

the magician is merely the mind of the magician in extenso.

The magician lives in the world of solipsism, but even the

solipsist recognizes that in order to direct his world he must discipline

his thought, he must control the "forces” or "elementals" or "demons"

that would distract him and he must coerce them that they may do his

bidding. Thus we have the world of the magician differentiated into

"microcosm" and "macrocosm", with microcosm mirroring or "reflecting"

the macrocosm. Or as Martin Foss says:

Rightly understood every atom is a microcosm, a

symbolic part, representing the whole of the universe.
. . . Whenever symbolism is at work, atomism is at hand
as a device of symbolization. So it was in Stoic times,
when symbolism was powerful and the World appeared to be
full of ’logoi spermaticoi,’ every one of which repre
sented the infinite Logos, the World-Logos. So it was
again in Leibniz’ philosophy two thousand years later,
when monads as immaterial atoms had to build the universe
and every monad as a microcosm ‘mirrored’ the macrocosm
of the universe.93

Is this the world of Marxism? It cannot be otherwise when Stalin says,

citing Lenin as reference, that

The world picture is a picture of how matter moves

and of how ‘matter thinks.'94

"Matter moves" and "matter thinks" in the magico-Marxist world

because, as Lenin says, "mind is the inner function of matter", 95

93 Martin Foss, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1949), PP. 13-14.
94 Stalin, op. cit., p. 17.

95 Lenin, op. cit., p. 62.

 106

thereby agreeing with Cornford who, speaking of the early Greek view

of the mobility of physis, had. said., "Its motion, and its power of

generating things other than itself, are due to its life, an inward,

spontaneous principle of activity”,96 and Bergson who thought that you

could "install yourself within change”97 as a part of that "inner

directing principle”98 because "the essence of life is the movement by

which life is transmitted."99 It is within this context that we understand

Lenin’s assertion of "the 'self-movement' of everything in

existence".100 As Stalin says, "one cannot separate thought from

matter . . . Engels says: "It is impossible to separate thought from

matter that thinks. Matter is the subject of all changes’."101 Marxist

matter is, then, indistinguishable from autogenetic physis where

"physis itself is soul, with a supersensible substance of its own that

minimum of materiality without which nothing could be conceived."102

If one cannot separate thought from matter, then is thought the

same as matter? Can we equate thought and matter? Lenin is very

specific in his denial.

That thought and matter are ’real,’—that they exist,

is true. But to call thought material is to make an
erroneous step, is to confuse materialism and idealism.103

Cornford, op. cit., p. 128.

96
97
Bergson, op. cit., p. 308.

98 Ibid., p. 76.

99 ibid., p. 128.

100 Lenin, op. cit., p. 324.

talin,
101 S op. cit., p. 16.

Cornford, op. cit., p. 129.

102
103 Lenin, op. cit., p. 205.
 107

Very interesting, but what is thought? Unfortunately Lenin does not

avail himself of this strategic moment to tell us so we have to do our

own intellectual detective work. Consciousness, Lenin tells us again

and again, following Marx and Engels, is a "reflection" of the external

world. Commenting on this Hook tells us that, "Consciousness implies

activity",and Carr adds, "According to present interpretations,

Lenin's and Stalin’s main contribution to the theory of dialectical

,
materialism has been ’to reveal the active role of consciousness.’"105

These are useful hints but they do not answer the question as to what

thought or consciousness is in the Marxist universe of discourse. I

prefer to work it out as follows.

Lenin tells us that, "There is absolutely no difference between

the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be none,"106

which would certainly seem to equate the subjective given phenomenon and

the objective thing-in-itself, but he also tells us that "the sole

'property' of matter ... is the property of being objective reality,

of existing outside of our cognition",107 which explicitly separates our

subjective cognition and the world of objective reality. That they are

not really separated for Lenin, however, is spelled out as follows.

. . . the materialist takes sensation, perception, concep

tion and, in general, human consciousness as the copy of
objective reality. The world is the movement of this
objective reality reflected in our consciousness. To the

Hook, op. cit., p. 74

104

105 Carr, op. cit., p. 111.

106 Lenin, op. cit., p. 77 .

107 Ibid., p. 220.

 108

movement of ideas, perceptions, etc., corresponds the move

ment of matter outside of us. The notion of matter ex
presses nothing hut objective reality which is given us in
sensation. Therefore to separate matter from motion would
he the same as separating thought from objective reality,
the same as separating sensation from the external world . . .108

We cannot, then, according to this, separate matter from motion, thought

from objective reality or sensation from the objective world. But we

already know that he equates matter and objective reality, 109 so what

he is saying here is that we cannot separate thought from the motion of

matter, or, to put it another way, for the Marxist, thought is matter

in motion.

It is because of this that Lenin can say:

Social consciousness reflects social being—this is

Marx’s teaching. . . . Consciousness in general reflects
being—this is the general position of all materialism. It
is impossible not to see its direct and inseparable connec
tion with the position of historical materialism, that is,
that social consciousness reflects social being.

And also:

Only one thing is, from Engel’s viewpoint, immutable—

the reflection by the human mind (when the human mind exists)
of a world existing and developing independently of the mind.
No other ’immutability,’ no other ’essence’ or ’absolute
substance’ . . . existed for Marx and Engels. The ’essence’
of things or their ’substance’ is also relative, it expresses
only the degree of man’s power penetrating into and knowing
objects . . .11l

As has already been pointed out, this is essentialism, this is how we

Lenin, op. cit., p. 226; cf. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and

108
Scientific, op. cit., p. 48.

Lenin, op. cit., p. 220.

109

110 Ibid., p. 278.

111 Ibid., p. 222.
 109

are supposed to penetrate into and know objects, but of course if we

can penetrate into and know objects then, as Cornford says, soul is

united with object known,112 and to control the mind is to control mat

ter,
i.e., "soul knows and is a cause of motion"113 in matter.
That Engels and Lenin understand this is obvious from a perusal

of their comments on it. Thus Engels says:

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian

system. In this system . . . for the first time the whole
world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as
a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transforma
tion, development . . . 114

He further clarifies this by saying:

Active social forces work exactly like natural forces;

blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not
understand and reckon with them. But when once we under
stand them, when once we grasp their action, their direc
tion, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to sub
ject them more and more to our own will, and by means of
them to reach our own ends .... when once their nature
is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers
working together, be transformed from master demons into
willing servants.115

Thus we grasp and coerce motion in the world, and the world is matter in

motion, by understanding it and subjecting it to our will, and dialectics

is the tool by which this is done. This is because "Dialectics . . .

comprehends things and ... motion . . ."116 Lenin puts it this way:

The highest task of humanity is to comprehend the

objective logic of the economic evolution (the evolution

112
Cornford, op. cit., p. 132.
113 Ibid., p. I34.

114 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, op. cit. p. 49.

115 Ibid., p. 68.

l16 Ibid., p. 48.

 110

of social existence), to comprehend the most general and

fundamental features with the purposes of adapting its
social consciousness and. the consciousness of the advanced
classes of all capitalist countries to it in clear, exact
and critical fashion.

This is in agreement with Bergson, who says:

When once we have grasped them [life and conscious

ness] in their essence by adopting their movement, we under
stand how the rest of reality is derived from them ....
philosophy is . . . the coincidence of human consciousness
with the living principle . . . 1l8

Having adapted our consciousness to the objective logic of the

economic evolution, we are in the driver’s seat, as Heraclitus might

say, and are in a position to steer this dialectic by which the world

moves. It will be remembered that this dialectic moves by means of the

quantitative-qualitative shift and it is worthy of note that even here

Lenin and Bergson agree. As Bergson says, "I incline to liken quali

ties
to quantities.”119

We can also work this out another way. Engels says:

Motion in the most general sense, conceived as the

mode of existence, the inherent attribute, of matter,
comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the
universe, from mere change of place right up to thinking.

That is, "motion ... is the mode of existence of matter”,121 and he,

Engels, also says:

117
Lenin, op. cit., p. 280.
118 Bergson, op. cit., p. 369.

119Ibid., p. 216.

120 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., p. 35.

121 Catlin, op. cit., p. 619.

 111

But the motion of matter is not merely crude mechani­

cal motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light,
electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dis­
sociation, life and, finally, consciousness.122

That is to say, mind is the motion of matter, and so we return to Corn

ford where we find that "soul knows and is a cause of motion"123 be

cause
it is "linked in physical contact",124 and this is Lenin’s

"direct connection". But of course this has a certain epistemologi

cal consequence concerning the nature of the mind and the world with

which it is connected. As Cornford says, "if Soul is to know the world,

the world must ultimately consist of the same substance as Soul",126

and as Catlin points out, speaking of Lenin,

. . . the reduction of all substance to one substance fits

in well with his dogmatic materialism which is neither
pluralist (many substances) nor dualist (mind and matter
both ultimate substances) but monistic (matter the only
substance).127

The monistic materialism of Marxism is the same as that magical

continuum of Greek philosophy where, as Cornford says,

. . . the principal object of Greek speculation is not

external nature as revealed through the senses, but a
metaphysical representation of reality as a supersensible
extended substance, which is at first both alive (Soul)
and divine (God), and also has a ’matter’ of its own,

Engels, Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., p. 21.

122

123 Cornford, op. cit., p. 134.

Ibid., p. 133.
124

Lenin, op. cit., p. 31.

125

126 Cornford, op. cit., p. 133.

Catlin, op. cit., p. 619.

127
 112

distinct, or distinguishable, from visible and tangible,

'body' with its sensible properties.128

This is also where we find Lenin’s "copy of objective reality”129 and

Engels’ "exact representation of the universe",130 and this is why it

is possible for Lenin "to assume the existence of a property similar to

sensation 'in the foundation-stones of the structure of matter itself.'

Such, for example, is the supposition of the well-known German natural

ist Ernst Haeckel ..."131 It will be remembered that Haeckel is in

the tradition of Darwin. Adoratsky demonstrates just how far one can

go with this idea in his Dialectical Materialism:

The theory that the external world is 'reflected' in

the mind is fundamental to the theory of knowledge of
dialectical materialism. The movement of atoms takes
place both in a cobblestone and in a man's head and both
the cobblestone and the head reflect the action of the
external world . . .132

It will also be remembered that it was Engels who said that some Marxists

write "the most wonderful rubbish".133 But of course we must realize

that this "matter" of Marxist materialism is not really matter at all in

any traditionally accepted sense of the word, or for that matter in any

sense of the word, but is some kind of a beyond-sense-perceptible objec

tive reality into which the idea of "matter" disappears. Fortunately

Cornford, op. cit., pp. 137-8.

128

Lenin, op. cit., p. 226.

129

130 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, op. cit., p. 48.

131 Lenin, op. cit., p. 26.

Adoratsky, Dialectical Materialism (New York: International

132
Publishers, 1934) p. 50.
133 Marx and Engels, op. cit., p. 477.
 113

Lenin has been quite explicit on this point at least.

When the physicists say 'matter disappears,' they

mean by this that, until the present the natural sciences
had reduced their measurements of the physical realm to
three ultimate concepts: matter, electricity and ether;
and that now only the last two remain, for they have
finally succeeded in reducing matter to electricity. . . .
'Matter disappears'--means that matter in the form of the
limit which we have known up to now vanishes, as our
knowledge penetrates deeper; those properties of matter
which before seemed absolute, immutable, and primary
(impenetrability, inertia, mass, etc.) disappear, and
now become relative, belonging only to certain states of
matter. For the sole 'property' of matter—with which
materialism is vital1y connected—is the property of be
ing objective reality, of existing outside of our cogni
tion.l34

There is no doubt that this "matter” of Marxism is a wondrous

material. Engels affirms that "matter remains eternally the same in

all its transformations",135 and Lenin joins by granting "the mutability

of all the forms of matter."136 It would necessitate this kind of

universe for Lenin to be able to assert the miracle of "the transforma

tion of imponderable ether into ponderable matter",137 but of course

this is no more strange than the spectacle of "Great Scientist" Marx

practicing phrenology on his assistants in the British Museum. 138

Once we have understood how it is possible for thought to direct

the world because it has direct control of the material forces of the

world, we can understand how order is brought out of chaos by "the

Lenin, op. cit., p. 220; cf. Catlin, op. cit., p. 620.

134

Engels, Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., p. 25.

135

Lenin, op.
136 cit., p. 240.

137 ., p. 221.
Ibid

Laski, op. cit., p. 19.

138
 114

authority implicit in a command, the magic in a spell."139 For the

epistemology of Marxism has its ultimate ground, in the solipsistic mind

of the tribal magician and so must eventuate, when placed in a practi

cal political situation, in the elevation of the One to omnipotence.

It is for this reason that neither Lenin nor Stalin ever "betrayed"

the Revolution. On the contrary, they were simply working Marxism out

to its ultimate conclusion. But, it will be said, what of the magician’s

group and the rest of reality? Epistemologically all phenomena, includ

ing group and world, are part of the magician’s "objective reality",

for of course he considers his own "self" and "will" to be real and

they are a part of his given phenomena. As a part of himself the "forces"

of nature, the animate masses as well as the inanimate matter that is

in dialectical process, must obey his will, and if it does not, if it

develops a volitional will of its own and the masses become a nightmare,

then by a concentration of iron, implacable will they must be forced,

they must be coerced, back into their proper relation in the order of

the universe. This is why, as Lenin says, It is necessary for him to

combat the spontaneity of the labour unions140 because "instinct is that

unconsciousness (spontaneity) to whose aid the Socialists come",141 why

Marx could look forward to a forcible overthrow of his own world, and

why Engels could suggest that it is necessary to take understanding to

Frankfort,. op. cit., p. 175.

139

V. I. Lenin, "
140 What Is To Be Done?" , in Collected Works, Volume
IV, Book II (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 123.

Ibid., p. 126.
141
 115

the masses142 in order that the mutable masses might be galvanized into

a transformative revolution. This is why Engels, writing about the

German Marxists in America, could say that they "have not understood

how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses

in motion",143 and why Marx could suggest to the General Council of the

International Workingmen’s Association that they should "initiate

measures which later ... appear as spontaneous movements of the

English working class",144 because "Theory becomes a material force as

soon as it has gripped the masses."145 Finally, according to Engels,

"Without a sense of theory, scientific Socialism would have never become

blood and tissue of the workers."146

Nor is this merely commentary. Marx was being quite specific and

thoroughly in accord with the epistemology of his universe of discourse

when he said, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differ

ently,
the point is, to change it."147 As Eastman points out, "It was

Marx and not History, that was determined to produce a social revolution.148

Change it, rejuvenate society, save the world, totally transform all

Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (London:

142 Allen &
Unwin, 1927), p. 29.

Marx and Engels, op. cit., p. 449; cf. Stalin, op. cit., p. 24.
143

Harold Rosenberg, "The Pathos of the Proletariat", in The Kenyon

144
Review, Vol. XI, No. 5, Autumn, 1949, p. 622.

Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, in Stalin,

145
op. cit., p. 23.

Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, op. cit., p. 27.

146

147 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York:
International Publishers, 1939), P. 199.

Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution, op. cit., p. 62,
148
 116

existence and usher in the millennium by a giant act of "collective"

will directed, steered, controlled by the World-Historical Hegelian Hero

This is the "combination of two omnipotence fantasies"149 in the same

mythopoeic world the Egyptian knew where "any human might become so

magically potent that he could consume the greatest of the gods . . .

It may sound childish, like the mighty imaginings of a small boy who

dreams of becoming Superman and conquering the world."150

But perhaps all of this is a mistake. Perhaps Marx and Engels

never had any intention of returning to the elemental world of magical

mythology where gods could change their shape at will and where the

vital and the mechanical in motion had not yet been distinguished.

Unfortunately for any such suggestion, Engels has been quite specific on

the subject.

Thus we have once again returned to the point of view

of the great founders of Greek philosophy, the view that
the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the
greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protista to
men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and
passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and
change, only with the essential difference that what for
the Greeks was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the
result of strictly scientific research in accordance with
experience.151

Conclusion

We have discussed the magical universe of discourse within which

the closed tribalistic society of Marxism functions. We have seen how

149 Mead, op. cit., p. 84.

150 John A. Wilson, "Egypt: The Function of the State", in Frankfort,
op. cit., p. 68.

Engels, Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

151
 117

this universe of discourse, this magical myth of ideology, is cast in

compulsive terms because of the coercive relationship of knower and

known in a closed world of homeopathic magic. Here, in this closed

world of magic, we have found it possible to comprehend such things as

the Myth of the Iron Hand of Lenin that could destroy, create, and con

trol the universe, or the Myth of Stalin Magus, the Magical Hero-King

and Ritual Magician, who, as God of Grape and Grain, could Rule the

People Wisely and Well and Forecast the Future that it might be Fruitful

and Fulfilled. It is not necessary that we should agree that he can

do this, but it is essential that we should be able to comprehend why

the Marxist thinks that it is possible for him to do this. It is essen

tial because we cannot adequately assess the power of Marxism to motivate

men until we recognize that the Marxist is a normal flesh and blood

human being motivated by a normal human conscience and intellectually

grounded in the most ancient, and most common, of all universes of dis

course, that of the closed world of provincial, parochial tribalism.

Too often we have attempted to solve our problems of dealing with the

Marxists by indulging in the cheap luxury of polemic and the comforting

thought that because Marxists do not conform to our ideas of morality

they are amoral and, therefore, are without a conscience. If they have

no conscience to motivate them then they can be safely regarded as

spring-wound mechanisms of some kind that will sooner or later run down

and no longer bother us. Such a conception is a vitiating stereotype

and would be the most fatal error on our part. Marxists have a con

science based on a goal-oriented ethic inclosed in a comprehensive intel

lectual rationale. Their world is complete, they have a purpose, and we

 118

must expect them to act as purposeful human beings. If we would devise

ways and means for breaking the compulsive cycle of Marxist activism

we must first be able to understand them, understand them as purposeful,

if misguided, human beings, and in order to do this we must have a

grasp of the universe of discourse which makes the world intelligible

to them. It has been my purpose in writing this paper to explore the

millennial glow, the myth and magic in the ethic, of this Marxist uni­

verse of discourse.

I
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