Although the writer on Chinese philosophy who looked up first ‘China’ and then ‘philosophy’ in the encyclopaedia and proceeded to combine the information thus obtained can hardly be said to have followed an adequate method, there is something to be said, when one is investigating dialectical materialism and its antecedents, for considering materialism and dialectics separately and then seeing what happened when they came together. Materialism is a recurrent mood of human thinking on the pre-philosophical as well as on the philosophcal level. When our existentialist contemporaries point out that a denial of God is more than a failure to work out a metaphysical syllogism, they are uttering what is in one sense a truism but in another may be grossly misleading. For the atheist or agnostic is blind precisely to the necessity by which any instance of being entails as its ultimate source the fullness of being} and this is a metaphysical inference, although it can be made inarticulately and needs in any case to be lived at the instinctive, as well as elaborated at the logical, level.

The mind which is, for whatever reason, thus metaphysically defective is confined in its search for explanation to factual correlations and temporal sequences within the world of experience. Instead of the world as a whole being seen as an overflow of infinite fullness, it becomes merely a pattern of material fragments building themselves up into such systems as we call organisms and collapsing again on the wheel of time. The spirit of materialism is essentially a contentment with proximate and partial explanations which leave the whole finally unexplained. The materialist cannot ask or answer the question why things should exist at all.

Fruitful discussion between persons who accept different philosophic systems postulates a point of contact, an area of agreement in terms of which one system can translate the terms of another system. This is so because any highly developed system has its own terminology.

So far as Marxism goes, we are like the spectators of a strange and complicated game, whose players speak a foreign language. For the Marxist philosophy is not a contemplative activity, it is not a system in the sense that Hegelianism is a system; it is simply the deduction of positive knowledge from the world through our minds. Any philosophic statement is simply the best approximate account of a given situation which is valid relative to this or that point in the historical process. The situation is constituted by matter and its laws translated into the human head. This is not an ‘insight into’, but a mirroring of, environmental conditionment.

The difficulty is that words like ‘peace’, ‘justice’, and so on, have the same sound for Marxists and ourselves but mean quite different things. For the Marxist there is no meaning about the word ‘justice’ save as it receives definition in relation to one or other stage in the historical process. Indeed, only statements formulated in terms of matter in motion can be true. Hence the philosophic opinions of others are interpreted by him in relation to their exponents’ social conditionment and only affect him as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’.

For Lenin, all ‘abstractions must be taken back into the concrete, for they are only true in so far as they reject the history of developing production’. He saw his philosophic task as that of a guardian of the Marx-Engels theory in its purity.

Any discussion on the economic aspects of Communism has to refer to Russian experience since Russia was the first (and for some time the only) example of the application of Marxist economic philosophy. And it is perhaps only poetic justice that Russia should have contradicted Marx in almost every aspect of his economic teaching. Russia according to Marxist doctrine should never have become Communist—at least not when it did—for it had not experienced the full development of capitalist society. Russia also found it necessary, contrary to Marxist tenets, to operate a normal pricing mechanism and to pay money wages, not according to need, but according to the type of output that the state wished to foster. In other words, the Soviet planners discovered that the acquisitive motive— and original sin—still existed in a Communist state.

But before the significance of this contradiction can be discussed, its existence must be proved. Marx did not study economic problems as an end in themselves but merely because in his day current political controversy had an economic content. To him economics was nothing more than a means of discovering the laws of social development. He argued that the social productive relationships entered into by man formed the anatomy of a society. They enabled a society not only to make the fullest use of its productive powers but also to increase them, and through this increase the productive powers were brought into conflict with the social relationships. In more concrete terms, Marx claimed that the basic contradiction in capitalism is the increasingly social co-operative nature of production, because the means of production are individually owned, and it shows itself in the development of two classes which are inevitably antagonistic since their interests are incompatible.

The scope of this paper is the relationship between Marxism and science, and I shall deal principally with biology, both because it is the science that has been most affected by the impact of Communism, and because it is the one with which I am best acquainted.

To begin, we must go back to the writings of Marx and more particularly of Engels, who was, much preoccupied with scientific questions. It is convenient to distinguish three groups of ideas in these writings, which may be described as materialistic, dialectical and ethical. In common with those whom Marxists call vulgar materialists, people like Büchner and Moleschott, Marx and Engels affirmed that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter—the Marxists say a reflection of matter; they are therefore realists asserting that matter exists independently of human cognition; they believe in strict causal determinacy operating according to physical law; and they deny that God exists. The dialectics comes from Hegel but most of the fundamental notions occur in the Greeks. The most important dialectical principles are firstly, the unity of opposites, which asserts the fundamental interrelatedness of all the objects composing the physical universe, secondly, the idea that change and development follow from the conflict of dialectical opposites, and thirdly, the notion that qualitative change supervenes upon the accumulation of quantitative, changes. The relation of the preceding notions to the ethical tenets of Marxism has always been obscure. For the present purpose two only of the latter need be considered, the notion that knowledge should be utilised for social well-being, and the notion, seldom explicitly stated but constantly implied, of equality in rights between all sorts of human beings. These two notions have obvious religious affiliations, which however need not be discussed here.

One is always tempted to view the Communist order, as it exists in Russia today, as something essentially static. But Communism does not differ from other orders: it is subject to the same eroding process of time.

The Communists themselves firmly believe that the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the capitalist order are insoluble, and that, sooner or later, they are bound to bring about the downfall and disintegration of the bourgeois society. They admit the existence of certain conflicts in their own society, but claim that these conflicts are merely the natural outcome of the eternal struggle between old and new elements. A closer scrutiny of these conflicts reveals, I think, that their character is far more serious than the Communists would be prepared to admit. Indeed they constitute a grave danger to the continuation of the regime as we know it. Four of these conflicts—one in the sphere of foreign policy and three in that of domestic affairs—may be usefully considered.

The contradiction which exists in the field of foreign policy is a comparatively simple one. The Soviet Union tries to pursue two contradictory aims at one and the same time, that of expansion and that of isolation.

The expansion is an essential element of the Communist doctrine of the world revolution. This expansion requires a great number of Soviet citizens to be stationed abroad. Their stay abroad implies close acquaintance with the outside world} the penetration of certain ideas and attitudes alien to their original Communist attitudes. At the same time, ever since 1948 at least, perhaps even earlier, there has been the doctrine of isolationism, the doctrine that the bourgeois world, the non-Soviet world, is an evil thing against which the citizens of the Soviet Empire ought to be guarded.

He Communist Party in Britain has at this moment only some 35,000 members. This makes it sound small by comparison with such Communist Parties as those of, say, France or Italy, which are millions strong. But if such a comparison is to be of any real significance we need to observe the different roles and the different circumstances within which they function.

In France and Italy there are no mass Socialist movements. The result is that the biggest mass working-class party there is the Communist Party. Under such circumstances the party consists of a hard core of well-indoctrinated, highly disciplined members, who know what they want, where they are going and exactly how they are going to get there, and a great mass of less well instructed members who follow the party ‘line’ most of the time but cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as well-instructed Marxists. The role of the hard core within such a party is to try to leaven the entire lump, to raise its ‘Marxist-theoretical understanding’ (to use the Communists’ own jargon) and to keep it constantly active on behalf of Communist policies.

In Britain, the workers’ mass movement is Labour-led and the Communist Party is small. Its role in such circumstances is precisely that of the hard core in the continental-type Communist Party, i.e. to make the great working-class mass as Marxist as possible and to activise it on behalf of Communism. Had the Labour Party been prepared to admit the Communist Party as an affiliated body (as it once hoped would be the case, and for which it runs campaigns from time to time), the job would have been made much easier for it. But early in its life it was disaffiliated and so, whilst seeing itself as the Marxist hard core of the wider Labour movement, it must do its leavening from outside, so far as the political wing of the movement is concerned, although it can work from within in the case of most of the trades unions and the co-operative movement.

It has lately been complained that Catholic publicity in England lies in the hands of middle-aged adolescents; our continental brethren, on the other hand, seem to grow in youthful generosity as they come to maturity. At least that is true of the authors contributing to the Christe Heute series edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar and admirably produced by Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln. Perhaps the most salutary of the new volumes for English readers—who so readily equate the Faith with medievalism—is Das Experiment Europas by the Viennese historian Friedrich Heer. Heer courses over European history like a spring gale, blowing aside Catholic, Protestant and Liberal prejudices in order to reveal the diversity of gifts and beliefs in the rich European tradition; he says, for instance: ‘without the Enlightenment our scientific sobriety, freedom of conscience and civic rights would be inconceivable’. That is but one instance of the refreshing judgments which one encounters on every page. A similar élan characterises Balthasar’s Schleifung der Bastionen, the crumbling bastions are, of course, those of the medieval city, and Balthasar sees their fall as providential, the impetus towards the catholic mission. His reflections on ‘tradition’ are particularly interesting and valuable, as showing that it means almost the opposite in the Christian tradition from what conservative social theorists mean by it. And it is in the light of this principle that he ventures to assert: ‘The future of the Church depends on whether lay people are to be found who are prepared to live directly from the Gospel teachings and transform the world in the light of them’. One layman who seems to be prepared to do this is Francois Mauriac, whose Der Stein des Anstosses also appears in this series. Although this collection of discursive observations has little shape, it leaves us feeling that we know Mauriac personally—and, more important, says many things which are always being mentioned in conversation amongst Catholics but are scarcely ever breathed in public. It is for the health of the Catholic community that these opinions should be expressed, since our very salvation depends on our not meriting the taunt of André Gide: ‘Catholics do not love the truth’. (Two other recent volumes in the Christe Heute series are Hugo Rahner’s Der spielende Mensch—a revised version of his Eranos lecture—and a collection of de Lubac’s essays on the spiritual sense of Scripture.)