Love, Ideas and Historical Materialism — and a different view of Professor Eysenck
A corresondent has taken up a quotation from Frederick Engels in last month’s SOCIALIST STANDARD, asking if it is really true that romantic love is a product of history and not an all-too-natural propensity of human beings. “Why on earth should sex-love be related to the mode of production and economic relationships?” says the writer, and cites a poet of the ancient world — “Let us live and let us love” — in support the point.
What is questioned is the basic statement of historical materialism. In the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote :
“The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that deternftnes their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”
The Communist Manifesto is similarly explicit :
“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?”
Engels reaffirmed in his old age, writing to H. Starkenburg :
“Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development.”
The problem for our correspondent, and many others, is how far this is meant to be taken. The development of political and legal forms in direct response to changing class structures throughout history is clear enough. So are the shapes taken by the major institutions of society: technics, commerce, nation-states — and, inevitably, ideas related directly to them, including ethical and religious “reflexes of the real world” as well as political ones. Art forms, too. But is it true that human relationships and qualities, and truths which appear to exist beyond social organization, must be included in Marx’s description of man as the “assemble of social relations”? Can we take seriously Engels’s assertion (in a letter to Marx) that “the atom itself more than a Relation”?
Construction and Reality
Indeed it is true, and we must. There is a single qualification to be made: the materialist conception of history is of course a generalization, so are its particular applications. In homely illustration, this means that statements like “Not a speck of dust anywhere” and “No apples on the trees this year” are not invalidated by someone’s finding a speck of dust or the odd apple. Similarly, historical materialism cannot be expected to explain all the minutiae of social life or else be adjudged incompetent. Engels himself gave reasons in a letter to Conrad Schmidt:
“In other words, the unity of conception and appearance manifests itself as essentially an infinite process, and that is what it is, in this case as in all others. Did feudalism ever correspond to its concept? … Or are the concepts which prevail in the natural sciences fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end.” (Selected Correspondence, pp.529-30)
Historical materialism sees man as “not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society”, in Marx’s words. Hence, his activities and ideas are part of society too. The language in which we think, the conventions and motives which direct thought, are social constructions. These are taken for granted as if they had existences of their own, yet they are all consequences of the basic human activity of production: the manner of satisfying man’s needs. The same applies to ideas. Two simple examples can be given. First, the idea of exchange which cannot arise except in societies where production surplus to elementary physical needs has been achieved; second, the idea of opportunity which can exist only where access is limited and one man’s meat is another man’s fancy.
Knowledge and Intelligence
The multiplication of these instances leads to the fact that property societies are class-divided societies. Some own the means of living, some do not. Those who own, in whatever form of society, are its ruling class and the dominant ideas of that society are theirs. The outstanding examples are, of course, religious and moral concepts presented as eternal values. However, it only begins there. Knowledge and measurable facts exist not in an objective world from which they must at all times influence society, but in fact exist at all — or are brought into existence — only insofar as they are useful to society.
Thus, the mathematical and scientific knowledge of the Mediterranean civilizations was lost and had no existence at all from the end of .the Roman Empire to the beginnings of capitalism: unrequired and (if this concept too had existed in mediaeval Europe) obsolete. The loss and rediscovery may be put down to historical chance. — but, as Marx says in one of his letters to Kugelmann:
“These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of development and are compensated for, again, by other accidents.”
As well as being buried and dug up again, knowledge may be devised. The word need not imply a lying conspiracy. Ruling needs in a society can give rise to a conceptual answer. The concept is accepted as a fact: x in an equation presented as a real number instead of an exoedient device.
In the past fifty years State education — and in turn, what is thought about ability and equality — has been dominated by the idea of quantitative intelligence. It began with the work of Galton, between 1869 and 1886, on hereditary factors in “man’s natural abilities”, and was applied immediately to schoolchildren and students. Prior to that time, indeed, the word intelligence commonly meant “information” (a meaning it retains in military usage, and the two had better not be confused there). Today every school-child is labelled with his or her intelligence quotient; over 150 means being in “the top 2 per cent.”, and Mensa is the society of the crème de la crème.
Invention at Work
Yet the history of this varying personal endowment synchronizes with that of popular education. Its theory and the methods of testing were produced between 1904 and 1922, and their application has been to the continued process of selecting children and workers. But while intelligence is measured daily, nobody — significantly — has defined it. Spearman, the theorist of the I.Q., called it “a word with so many meanings that finally it has none”. And the fact is that intelligence is not a reality but a concept, a system of measurement for the ruling class to sort sheep from goats regarding the skills and organization of modern capitalism. To be good at what they need is to have high intelligence; to show different abilities is, as well as irrelevant, low-grade. Those concerned over Professor Eysenck (one way or the other) should try considering him in this light for a change.
What is knowledge? The essential facts of one set of circumstances are not merely useless in another; they would be denied. In the present age self-description begins with one’s name and date of birth. Basic information as they are, they did not exist as such before 1837 when Registration started. Names existed, of course, but as variables — an approximate rendering served the purposes of most of society. Births and deaths were not recorded at all; the only dates known were for baptism and burial, and the first might take place at any time or not at all. The important point is not that facts were unrecorded, but that they were not facts at all; except for purposes of succession which concerned few, nobody recognized their existence. Knowledge was declared into existence by law, for administrative purposes.
Marx and Engels pointed out repeatedly that effects become causes in society:
“. . . once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes.” (Engels to Mehring: Selected Correspondence, p.512)
As with intelligence, a concept taken for physical fact can produce physical responses. An interesting example from contemporary social life is that of adolescence, which began as one of the four Roman legal divisions of life-span. In English law there are two main periods only — infancy, i.e. under 18, and adulthood, with a mixture of legal rights and obligations under various headings in infancy. This statutory division reflects the practical one which existed virtually up to modern times: people were children, then they were men and women. The idea of an interim phase having taken root from developments in society, physical and psychological symptoms followed; and in recent years, with adolescence a profitable social mania, it has been discovered to start even earlier than was thought before.
Man’s Nature can be Free
Human relations, then, are inevitably shaped by the form of society. It is not the view of historical materialism, however, that we are but clay in the hands of our own economic organization. Apart from the continual effect-to-cause flow — man makes history, as Marx always insisted — there are what are described in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as man’s “species powers”. These are his drives and needs, the use of his senses. Related to the frame work established by production and social activity, “man’s species powers express the kind of life which man, as distinct from all other beings, carries on inside this framework” (B. Ollman: Alienation).
Is Engel’s claim justified—”Before the middle ages we cannot speak of individual sex-love”? In fact Engels gives the necessary explanations in The Origin of the Family. He compares sexual love in our sense, where the emotions are involved in an exclusive relationship. with the arranged marriages of antiquity. But the keyword is not “love”, but “individual”. By “individual” Engels means the “free citizen”, the knight, or the guild member. In The Communist Manifesto the term is made explicit:
“You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” we mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.”
Indeed, Engels like our correspondent refers to lovers in ancient literature (Daphnis and Chloe, etc.). Either, he says, they were slaves and therefore outside the state, or the objects of male affection were foreigners or hetairai and likewise outside official society: “that sort of thing only happened in romance — or among the oppressed classes, who did not count”.
How much does all this matter? If the bondage of capitalism is to be ended and a human society realized, there must be comprehension of how the fetters are made. The alternative is the view stigmatized by Marx and Engels as sterile in its limitation to “the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical phantasy”. Engels spelled out how consciousness, derived from society, can change society:
“Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends . . . Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product at historical development.” (Anti-Duhring, p.128)
R. BARLTROP.