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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Catholic Marxism was deeply involved with the December Group which met annually for some years at Spode House. In most ways the December Group was the institutional form of Catholic Marxism. I was not a founding member of the group—its immediate ancestor was a magazine called Slant run by some young graduates, but I attended regularly for the last ten years of its existence. It was not called after any great event in socialist history but because it was simply convenient to meet in December. As most of its members were academics of one sort or another this is easy to understand. Since I am going to be critical in retrospect it is only fair to point out how good many of the sessions were. There was a memorable paper by Denys Turner (New Blackfriars, 1973), and for those of us who were present, there was the staggering all-day session on the Pinochet coup d’etat with Gonzalez Arroyo—recently evicted from his chair in his Chilean university—and Jacques Chamsun, Allende’s minister of Agriculture. There were some of the best, and best informed, lectures on Ireland, of which Irene Brennan’s contributions were outstanding. But what there was not was any attempt to compare and contrast as Finals papers used to say (and perhaps still do) the substance of Catholicism and the substance of Marxism.
The presiding genius over Catholic Marxism wasn’t Marx, whose name was as infrequently mentioned as that of God. It was the French philosophe, Louis Althusser. He seems to me to have been a fraud from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
1 Politics and History, London, 1972Google Scholar, ‘Marx's relation to Hegel’ pp. 161–86. The French edition of this essay was first published separately in 1970. It is remarkably scrappy and superficial. The author's intention to minimise at all costs Marx's debt to Hegel is very evident. Lenin thought otherwise: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital without having thoroughly studied the whole of Hegel's Logic”. Martin Nicolaus, in his foreword to his translation of Marx's Grundrisse, London, 1973Google Scholar has a much more balanced and informed discussion of the relationship.
2 He discusses the dates and circumstances of the essays that compromise For Marx in his preface for English readers to that book.
3 Once the laws of dialectical materialism had been formulated they do sound like Platonic forms. By their light men live their lives and first having created socialism they bring history to an end and create communism. Will, intelligence, purpose now reign supreme directed by a class of educated philosophers – in the Marxist sense of course. Marx always refused to speculate on the nature of communist society although some of his followers did not exercise like restraint. It is clear that communism for Marx was not some form of Utopia. If it were not to be a static Utopia there must be scope for development and this must proceed by some form of application of the laws of dialectical materialism. The one thing we can be sure of is that there could be no conflicts in communist society and Plato would have loved it. There is also the question how do men know when socialism gives way to communism. Marx's own criterion would presumably be the withering away of the State. If it is true as Lenin thought that communism is socialism plus electricity then the electricity supply requires an elaborate and considerable organisation that would be hard to distinguish from a State.
4 Engels' examples are very poor. The best illustrations would come from Darwin's Origin of Species where there are many examples from nature of quantitative changes in a species that result in its transformation over a long timespan. Engels, however, had certainly read Darwin. Professor Alasdair MacIntyre, who very kindly read a draft of this paper, makes an important point about the transformation of quantity into quality in a letter to me. “The ‘transformation of quantity into quality’: my problem with this expression is not that it does not direct our attention to a crucial set of features of both the natural and social worlds, but that it names a set of problems, not a solution, the problems of first how to characterize and then to understand the relationships between different kinds of emergent properties and that from which they emerge. A mistake made by both Hegel and Engels was to suppose that there is a single philosophical problem here, for which some general solution has to be devised, rather than a number of problems of roughly the same kind, each of which has to have its own solution. Marx in volume 1 of Capital tells us how as a matter of history the properties of commodity production and exchange emerged from a number of stages from labour and barter. We do not, I am inclined to think, understand this particular emergence of new properties any better by labelling it ‘transformation of quantity into quality’ and applying the same label to, say, the emergence of molecular properties from those of subatomic particles.
5 Lucio Colletti in his introduction to Karl Marx. Early Writings in the Pelican Marx Library, London, 1975, pp. 10 et seq gives a much more serious account of Marx's relationship to Engels than Althusser. After the theses on Feuerbach that precede the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx abandoned philosophy altogether. Engels produced what was long taken as the Marxist philosophy, notably in Anti‐Duhring and the Dialectics of Nature, where he described what he thought were the central doctrines of the Marxist system, namely the transformation of quantity into quality and the negation of the negation. He dubbed the Marxist method of arguing, dialectic and named the whole system dialectical materialism. Marx never had the chance to comment on any of this. There seems little doubt that Engels' heavily positivistic version of Marxist philosophy would not have been to Marx's taste:his understanding of Hegel was very different. But Marx must have had some idea of what was going on in Engels' mind and he never repudiated his ideas although he never endorsed them either. In the next generation Russian Marxists came into greater prominence. Unlike the Germans, the Russians thought the philosophy of Marxism very important. It was natural though mistaken to suppose that Marx and Engels always spoke with one voice – that is until the early 1930's when Marx's early philosophical writings were first published. Stalin preferred the version of Marxism he was used to and his minions were given the hint to rubbish the early writings as far as they dared. But from then on there were always some Marxist commentators who took them seriously until after the death of Stalin they became a flood. Since then Engels has been very much in eclipse but he did raise important points that cannot be evaded.
6 M. Althusser was the master of the single apostrophe as the typographical sneer. These apostrophes are not called for by the sense. They show with what follows that Althusser was an unrepentant Stalinist.
7 Lucio Colletti in his introduction to his edition of Marx's early writings, p. 15 makes an important point against Althusser and his structuralist version of Marxism: “Nevertheless the sheer rigidity of official doctrine, the rigor mortis which already gripped Marxism under Stalin, contributed in no small way to the cool reception the writings met with when they appeared, to the absence of any debate about them, and to the manner in which they were immediately classified and pigeon‐holed. They became almost at once the ‘early writings’. The description is of course formally unexceptionable:they were composed in fact when Marx was a very young man of twenty‐five or six. Yet this is the age at which David Hume had already composed his philosophical masterpiece, the Treatise on Human Nature, and age was never considered a criterion in evaluating the work of the Scottish philosopher. The adjective ‘early’ served to emphasise their heterogeneity and discontinuity vis a vis the doctrine of the subsequent period.” Althusser's cavalier treatment of the Marxist classics when they did not say what he thought they should have is commented on by E. P Thompson in his Poverty of Theory. Althusser savaged Engels, corrected Lenin and swept any awkward works by Marx under the carpet. He seems to me the archetypal Kleinbürgerlich corrupter of Marx he is always complaining about.
8 A limited edition was published in Moscow in 1939 and 1941 respectively. According to R. Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital. Der Rohentwurf des Kapital, 1857–8, Frankfurt and Vienna, 1968, only three or four copies of this edition reached the West. He doesn't say–he probably doesn't know–how many copies were circulated in the Soviet Union.
9 The war between Argentina and the United Kingdom is relevant here. The fascist junta that governed Argentina through the jackboot and the murder squad tried to embellish their fading appeal by a patriotic war. They lost and the result was something of a revival of a sense of nationhood and a much less oppressive government. It will be interesting to see if these results are permanent results and if the discredited military remain discredited. It is fair to point out that although it is some years since the Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, ‘fell’ he lives on in Chile, by all accounts a power behind the scenes.
10 Althusser borrowed the concept of overdetermination (überdeterminierung) from Freud and devoted chapter 3 of his For Marx to it. To the unbeliever it seems like an escape route for thinkers like Freud and Althusser who wanted to claim the authority of natural science for what they were doing. The procedures of natural science enable one to make predictions about the outcome of certain actions in defined universes of discourse Neither Freudian theory nor whatever you like to call what Althusser was doing were very good on accurate predictions. They could have cited a genuine but imprecise science like meteorology by way of example. (In the case of Freud many of the current criticisms of his theory would be turned by maintaining that Freudianism was a science but an imprecise science.) But what use would the accuracy of a weather forecast have been to a man trying to predict the arrival of a revolutionary situation? (Or in the case of Freud to explain why Little Eyolf obstinately refused to develop an Oedipus complex.) To be fair to Althusser he does in the chapter referred to give a persuasive explanation as to why the first socialist revolution took place in Russia using the concept, outlining the accumulation of factors that led to the breakdown of social equilibrium What he fails to see is that he is doing the very historical thing of explaining what happened, not the natural scientific thing of predicting what must happen. To ordinary people what it all amounts to is seeking the straw that broke the camel's back. Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out to me that Althusser's structuralism “did assist him in grasping about political economy what Kuhn grasped about physics, namely that the data by reference to which the explanatory power of political theories is tested are themselves always identified and characterized, at least partially, in theory‐laden terms. One of the reasons why the protagonists of post‐Marshall economics, whether they stand with Marshall or Keynes or the monetarists, suppose they have refuted Marxism is that they confront Marx's theory with the data characterized in their own terms and then demonstrate triumphantly that Marx's theories can make nothing of the phenomena with which they are concerned. Thereby they miss the point and Althusser saw that.
11 Manchester was an early and important centre of social studies. Its very distinguished professor of Social Anthropology, Max Gluckmann, was a professed member of the scientist school but his work was much less imbued with the ethos of that school than that of many of his colleagues. He was either a pupil or at any rate an associate of Evans‐Pritchard. The University of Manchester in its unwisdom permitted the professor of Chemistry, Michael Polanyi, to convert himself into a professor of Social Studies. His notion of sociology was a total rejection of scientism. So far so good but further on much less good. He also rejected any notion of an empirical social science and patronised ideological and wholly theoretical explanations of social phenomena. It seems to me in retrospect that his influence was disastrous but at any rate it is clear that a crucial time in the history of the subject Manchester was very much at the centre of the debate about the nature of social science.
12 A generation ago seventeenth‐century studies were rent by a controversy as to whether the English Civil War was occasioned by the rise of the new class of gentry, as Tawney with Marx's posthumous blessing maintained or whether Trevor‐Roper, now Lord Dacre of Glanton, was right to argue that the class of gentry was declining not rising and the civil war was the consequence of that class's fight to maintain its position. Lord Dacre of Glanton's name will for ever be linked with his blessing of the Hitler Diaries, although if Channel 4 is to be believed he could not read German but he blessed them just the same. Tawney it is less well‐known was also offered a peerage, a hereditary one in his case, by Attlee and refused it because he said he was too old a dog to go round with a tin can tied to his tail. (My information came from the late V. H. Galbraith who knew Tawney well.) In this case both parties were barking up the wrong tree. Tawney was using the concept of class in the classical Marxist sense, t. e. its members were defined by the way they earned their incomes. (Marx's definition of the proletariat was more complex than this and placed the main weight on the ownership of the means of production:but the point of owning the means of production is to generate income which I use here as a convenient shorthand term.) Trevor‐Roper meant by class what Max Weber called a status group, that is a class defined by what the members of the group spent their incomes on. (Trevor‐Roper in a review of a book on George Herbert in the New Statesman now reprinted in his Historical Essays actually said it is not how men earn their incomes that is interesting but what they spend them on). A little reading in elementary sociology would have made this controversy meaningful and perhaps useful. Likewise the quarrel of a generation earlier about the responsibility or lack of it of Protestantism for the rise of Capitalism might have made sense if the protagonists had actually read Max Weber whom Tawney credited with inventing the thesis. Tawney supposed that Max Weber was arguing that Protestantism caused Capitalism in the crudest possible sense of cause. But Max Weber rejected the notion of cause here. (R. G. Collingwood in his Essay on Metaphysics, had likewise pointed out that cause is an ambiguous and slippery term but historians do not read philosophy at all, with sometimes disastrous results.) What Max Weber said was that there was an elective affinity between the two, echoing the title of Goethe's novel Die Ausgewahlte Verwandtschaften. His demonstration of this seems pretty convincing. rendering Trevor‐Roper's attempt to finally disprove that Protestantism caused Capitalism superogatory. There is an important field of study here as to the elective affinities of Protestantism and Capitalism.
13 A classic example of this is provided by what I think is a quotation from Carl vie though I cannot remember the context. Carlyle was a guest at a dinner party at which a business man, at once pompous, arrogant and ignorant, was holding the floor. ‘Mr Carlyle’, he said, ‘all you write is full of nothing but ideas. How can a sensible man like me have any interest in them?’‘Sir’, said Carlyle, ‘there was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book that was full of nothing but ideas and all the sensible men like you laughed at it. The second edition of the book was bound in the skins of diose who laughed at the first.
14 Samuel Smiles and his lives of the great engineers with its total neglect of the nature of the society the ‘great engineers’ operated in is a fair example here.
15 E. P. Thompson, ibid p. 235 makes the point very well. “… we might call this the dialectics of historical knowledge. Or we might have done so before ‘dialectics’ was rudely snatched out of our grasp and made into the plaything of scholasticism.
16 In The Independent 21. v. 96 Julian Critchley made some relevant remarks on the attacks of the British popular press on the European Union. He points out that the papers concerned are all owned by non‐Britons. (He makes the surely immortal remark about Rupert Murdoch:that he changes his nationality as easily as he changes his shirt.) His point is that the EU is the only possible defence against the multinationals and that the hatred the multi‐national barons feel for the EU is directly connected with this. Murdoch's Sun is the epitome of the little Englander, the wogs begin at Calais approach. The fact that Mr Murdoch has no secure nationality, that he has no roots, no secure base except on the Internet, that he will do anything for money provided the sums are astronomical, escapes Sun readers.
17 From Rousseau to Lenin, New York and London, 1972.
18 op. cit. p. 10 ef seq.
19 The late Peter Hebblethwaite in his obituary of Archbishop Warlock (The Independent 9. ii. 96) remarked that Justice and Peace is the Catholic euphemism for politics.
19 One piece of evidence for this is the pre‐war thesis widely popular in progressive circles that Plato was a fascist. The classic expositor of this view was the late R. H. S. Crossman (his book was called, by a contributor to a New Statesman and Nation competition, Plato Alluptodateo.) The thesis was killed a few years ago by Alasdair Maclntyre in his Short History of Ethics. He said he didn't know whether Plato was a fascist but he did know that if all fascists were like Plato the world would have been safe for social democracy years ago.
21 Che Guevara was an archetypal figure of a Platonic philosopher, a curious example of a point made by A. N. Whitehead, that all subsequent Western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato.
22 A friend of mine, a former senior civil servant, once said to me the Home Office was fascist but they were so old‐fashioned they didn't know what it meant. They have since learnt.
23 A parish priest of my acquaintance, nurtured on The Universe and The Sun, on being offered the entry announcing the Justice and Peace collection for the Parish Newsletter, remarked ‘Not landmines again, how boring, we had them three months ago’. Princess Diana's much publicised visit to Angola has given a real boost to the anti‐landmine campaign. There seems real hope that they will be subject to a total ban.
24 Liberation theology belongs to special world of Latin America. I cannot see what I have called the CAFOD approach working here. When the Pope visited Latin America a few years ago he appealed for clemency for some radical agitators: the news of their execution greeted his arrival. But he didn't react in the obvious ways. Many of the Liberation theologians seem to feel that something in the nature of a full‐blooded Marxist approach is necessary. They should know. But recalling Lenin's definition of a revolutionary situation one cannot help but doubt that there can be such a situation until the armies split and quarrel amongst themselves. So far there is no sign of this. The ideologues of the Right have read their Lenin too. There is an excellent and illuminating appreciation of Liberation theology in Christopher Hill, The English Bible pp. 447 et seq.
25 We need a much more thorough enquiry into the relationship of the Marxist notion of social class to the Weberian notion of status group than we have so far had. It seems to me that a shift of consciousness from status to class is likely to be of importance in the future development of political thinking and behaviour.
26 In the course of writing this paper I became aware that my own income (I am a retired University teacher) is largely derived from the dividends earned by a vast block of shares in BP, Shell and BAT.
27 The consequences of the way pension funds are constituted are soon illustrated. What are called pension holidays are a popular form of corporate life at the moment. This means that a pension fund has accumulated a sum of money surplus to requirements. The managers of the fund, usually at the behest of the employers, declare a holiday until the surplus is dispersed. This means the employees do not have to pay contributions:nor, of course, do the employers. But the third option of increasing the pensions of the retired employees is almost never brought up. Although, as a result of the Maxwell case die power of companies to raid pension funds has been restricted, it is far from clear how strong the safeguards really are.
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