DOCUMENT 2 The History of a Book [On the Fortieth Anniversary of the Publication of Capital, Vol. ι] (1907)

Otto Bauer

Source: Otto Bauer, ‘Die Geschichte eines Buches’, Die Neue Zeit, 26.1907-8,1. Bd. (1907), H. 1, pp. 23-33.

Introduction by the Editors

In this article Otto Bauer appears to express a sense of fin de siecle, an aware­ness that great theoretical accomplishments were made in the past, but time had taken its toll.

Bauer wrote this article at a time of renascent neo-Kantianism, character­ised by the conviction that the real can never be reconciled with the ideal. If the end could never be reached, Kant said duty still demanded a continuous effort to move towards it. Bernstein captured exactly this sentiment when he fam­ously commented, ‘what is usually termed the final goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything’.^{[348] [349] Since modern events seemed to render classical Marxism redundant - there was no sign of impending revolution or capitalist collapse - Bernstein and his co-thinkers typically regarded social­ism in terms of ‘organised liberalism’,[350] or steady democratic progress towards a rational compromise between rival social classes. In legislation, Bernstein argued,}

the intellect governs emotion in a revolution, emotion governs the intellect.

Bauer does not refer directly to Bernstein, but his summary of Marxism’s cur­rent state of affairs speaks in terms of ‘revisionism’ and ‘dogmatism’ - of those who would abandon classical Marxism and those who rigidly defended it while adding no new ideas. Bauer’s worry is that something must be done by ortho­dox Marxists, although he specifies neither what nor how. What he proposes, therefore, is a reconsideration of Marx’s method, beginning with the problem­atic relation between Marx and Hegel. Was Marxism a ‘science’, in which case return to Marx’s method was the way to respond creatively to new historical cir­cumstances, or was it simply a version of Hegelian philosophy, in which case Kant appeared to many to provide the better practical answers?

Marx’s personal notes on the method of political economy had finally been published in 1903,^[352] but, as Bauer remarked, Marx spoke ‘in a language that is almost incomprehensible to us, i.e., outwardly according to Hegel's teachings'. In the famous postface to the second edition of Capital, published in 1873, Marx had commented that Hegel's dialectic was ‘standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell'.^[353] In this article Bauer argues, quite correctly, that the ‘mystical shell' was Hegel's ontological system, while the rational kernel was his dialectic. To establish Marxism's claim to be a science, and therefore of timeless validity in meth­odological terms, Bauer explained that Marx's categorial language, although borrowed from Hegel, was in fact an expression of objective laws no different from those in the mathematical and natural sciences.

To make this argument, one had to begin with fundamentals, with the Hegel­ian categories of Being, Quality, Quantity and Measure. This was exactly what Marx had done in rethinking political economy. The analogue of indeterminate Being, for Marx, was the commodity, the simplest, undifferentiated category of an economy characterised by production for sale. Quality referred to ‘use­value', or the natural properties distinguishing particular commodities. Quant­ity, which for Hegel involved many units of similar quality, led Marx to labour as the source of all value. And Measure, in turn, led to ‘abstract' socially necessary labour as the synthesis of Quantity and Quality that made universal exchange possible. With these initial categories, borrowed from Hegel and reformulated in terms of political economy, Marx set in motion the dialectic that moved through successive stages of complexity in the three volumes of Capital.

Marx believed that Hegel had found the door to human self-understanding but then had closed it with his metaphysical ontology. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx wrote that Hegel provided only ‘an abstract, logical and speculative ex­pression of the historical process'.^[354] He conceived ‘wealth, the power of the state, etc.... only in their thought form'^[355] ending with ‘the dialectic of pure thought',^[356] ‘a pure, unceasing revolving within itself'.^[357] The problem with Hegel was that he believed that consciousness not merely apprehends the forms of the world, but in fact forms the world through its own activity of thought. Marx and Engels re­opened the door to human self-understanding by re-reading Hegel's dialectic in historical-materialist terms, with the result that Marxist political economy emerged as a ‘social theory' that was simultaneously an ‘exact science'. The theme of Bauer's article is that Marx used Hegelian tools ‘to grasp the con­crete empirical intellectually and to reproduce it in science', in which case Marxism transcended both ‘absolute idealism' and ‘naive empiricism'.

It is worth noting that Bauer wrote this article on the eve of the great Marxist works on imperialism, which only a few years later reconceived capitalism in terms of an entirely new stage of historical development. Three years later, in June 1910, Bauer wrote a review of Rudolf Hilferding's new book, Finance Capital, and welcomed the first signs of the Marxist renaissance he had long been anticipating. In that review he repeated the worries expressed in the document published here and, at the same time, described Hilferding's work, which many considered to be the most important work of Marxist scholarship since Volume iii of Capital, as ‘what we have long needed'. Here are Bauer's opening thoughts in his review of Hilferding's work:

Marxist economics made little progress after Karl Marx's death. Marx­ists rightly considered the popularisation of Marx's doctrines and their defence against the attacks of opponents as their most important task. Little time remained to us for the upgrading and continuation of Karl Marx's economic teachings. Ultimately, the work of popularisation also began to suffer from this situation. The capitalism described in most of our propaganda literature is that of the 1860s and 1870s, not the capitalism of our own day. The newest phenomena in economic life were certainly dealt with in many valuable articles and brochures, but we lacked a sys­tematic theoretical presentation. Even in the most significant and inde­pendent economic work hitherto produced by the Marxist school, apart from those of Marx and Engels themselves, even in Kautsky's Agrarian Question, the immediate political purpose and the needs of popularisa­tion thrust the historic-descriptive exposition into the foreground and the theoretical part into the background.

The History of a Book (Otto Bauer)

Since Karl Marx published the first volume of his major economic work, 40 years of violent upheavals have passed, 40 years that have completely changed the face of the earth. During these four decades, capitalism, whose laws were revealed by that book, has created a new world. It has itself become something different from what it formerly was: what are the mills of Lancashire, which Marx described in the first volume of Capital, compared to the giant enter­prises of our iron industry, which unite collieries and blast furnaces, steel works and rolling mills into a vast well-articulated whole? What are Marx's capitalists, who ruled over a few hundred workers, compared to the owners of modern cartels and trusts, who control entire industrial branches with hundreds of thousands of workers, and to the modern major banks, which hold in bond­age the industry of whole countries? And the circle over which capital rules is constantly expanding. Karl Marx described British capitalism; now German and American capitalism stretch their arms so powerfully that they are pro­gressively narrowing the freedom of movement of their elder British brother. In the Far East, a new capitalist island kingdom, a younger England, [Japan] has arisen. In Russia, capitalism revolutionised the conditions of existence of the old social order; capitalist industry is developing in the middle and lower Danube. Capitalism is again submitting to its power Italy, the country it first mastered and to which it subsequently proved unfaithful. Egypt, Algeria, the Congo are subject to it; rivers of gold flow to its coffers from South Africa; today, it is subjugating Morocco with blood and iron; and it is already preparing to add the ancient cultured lands of the Near East to its kingdom.

But just as capitalism, by continuously expanding its territory, seems to have become different from its former self, shrouded in ever-new and ever-changing forms, the doctrine that Marx bestowed four decades ago upon learning and struggling humanity has also undergone changes due to the steady expansion of its circle of operation. To be sure, it still stands intact in all its monumental size and unity, just as its creator forged it four decades ago, and far-sighted and sagacious men long ago foresaw what we now witness today. What Schweitzer and Dietzgen wrote concerning the first volume of Capital shortly after its pub­lication, what Engels and Kautsky later wrote on Marx's economic doctrines,^[358] is still a source of rich instruction for us today. But the way in which an individual comprehends a new doctrine reflects his individual knowledge and personal maturity; public opinion, however, looks at Marx's book today differently from the way it did 30 or 20, or even 10 years ago. Now the situation is different in the minds of journalists and popularisers, critics and apologists, politicians and scholars.

How we ourselves read Capital as youngsters, when we first ventured into the great master's work! Attempting, with feverish curiosity, to grasp the great overview of the history of mankind, it was only with difficulty that we over­came our impatience at having to linger on the difficult theoretical models, but how deeply shaken we were when Marx's master hand then revealed to us the development of suffering humanity! We saw how capitalism was built on the ruins of a collapsing world, dripping with the sweat and blood of gen­erations; how it had risen over the bodies of children and women, of starved and declining peoples; how it had expanded and organised its power, reveal­ing nature's secrets and putting its forces at the service of an insatiable greed. We saw vividly the class antagonisms; how private property became the means to produce, out of the suffering and hardship of one class, the swelling wealth, the splendid culture of the other. We understood for the first time the workers' terrible suffering, and we accompanied them into battle against the employers; we learned to hate with them the social constitution that turns every achieve­ment of man, in the struggle with nature, into a bulwark of the servitude of man by man; but we also learned that we could hope for the final liberation of humanity from the growth of the always-expanding, gigantic productive forces and from the power of the united working class. Thus, we discovered in Capital not just a science, but also a sweeping historical canvas that moved and seized us, taught us to love and hate, to negate and hope.

And our personal experience was not unique: in this case, too, the devel­opment of the individual repeated the history of the species. At first, Marx's contemporaries read Capital as an historical work, which revealed to them the bloody history of capitalism and showed them the horrors of capitalist exploit­ation, the bitter reality of class antagonisms, and the hard necessity of the class struggle. And this terrible picture sparked moral outrage against capitalism in thousands of readers, awakening in them an ethical resolution to struggle for the liberation of the proletariat. Hermann Cohen must have been think­ing about this effect of the first volume of Capital when he called its author an ‘envoy of the God of history’.^{[359] [360]}

11

The first critics of Marx’s work clung to its historical and descriptive parts. They asked whether exploitation is really as horrible and extensive as Marx described it; whether the fact that the worker only receives a part of the produce of his labour is merely a consequence of our social order, or a law of nature that no social order can abolish. Marx’s own peculiar views, however, remained as unknown to them as to the mass of those who were under the spell of his work. In the critical as in the apologetic Marx-literature of that time, elements of Marx’s thinking are still inextricably blended with ideas taken from the older rationalist socialism. Marxism had notyet freed itself of the confusion of run-of-the-mill [Allerwelts: all-purpose] socialism.

First, a series of excellent popularisers had to turn the gold bars of Marx’s thought into usable coin, which now runs from hand to hand, before the basic ideas of Marx’s work could enter, by many channels, into the consciousness of broader classes of people. Friedrich Engels’s articles against Duhring, which appeared in the Leipzig Vorwarts, were dedicated to the solution of that prob­lem more than 30 years ago. Collected in a book, they were the most fertile pop­ularisation of Marx’s theory?³ The clarity of its thoughts, the gracious humour of their author, made them eminently suitable to introduce Marx’s difficult arguments [Schlussreihen] to broader circles. The effect was all the more last­ing because Engels followed Marx’s opponents into all the areas of knowledge, driving them out of their last hiding places. To be sure, Engels’s book also has vices as well as virtues, but those who read it today will not argue over details. Despite some mistakes and shortcomings, it remains an historical fact. It is one of our best introductions to Marx’s great theoretical edifice, and the people to whom it opened up Marx’s intellectual world have continued Engels’s work diligently. They were the teachers of the younger generation of Marxists.

However, neither Engels's writings nor the works of his disciples have been able to exploit the whole richness of Capital. The chatter of dilettantes should not obscure the fact that no science can be popularised for the layman without losing many of its best elements in the process. But if popular presentations of Marx's theory still showed, albeit in broad outline, the master's whole intel­lectual system, what could become of it in the consciousness of the masses, who now began to take possession of it? How could the untrained masses grasp Marx's peculiar method, which can only be understood by those who know the great work of thought accomplished by German classical philosophy out of the rich material made available to it by the development of the exact sci­ences? Thus the method was lost; the masses stuck to the results. But they could not understand the propositions in which Marx summarised the results of his research, in their interdependence, into a system, or in their interrela­tion with the whole bustle of social life; they juxtaposed Marx's propositions abruptly and categorically. ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the con­sciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness'.^{[361] [362] [363] [364] [365] [366] ‘The history of all hitherto exist­ing society is the history of class struggles'?5 ‘The value of every commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its produc­tion'?6 ‘The wealth of the propertied classes stems from the surplus-value, from the unpaid labour of the working class'?7 ‘Capitalist society has the tendency to impoverish the working class more and more'?8 ‘Small businesses are des­troyed, control over the means of production falls into the hands of a con­stantly diminishing number of large capitalists'?9 ‘The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socializ­ation of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’.[367] These and a few similar sentences, immediately juxtaposed - that is the idea that the general public has of Marxism. It is that vulgar Marxism that the masses are acquain­ted with in the popular presentations of Marx’s theory, and which they must necessarily be acquainted with given the inadequacy of their educational back­ground and methodological training. It is only about that vulgar Marxism that the wider circles of the public debate whenever the question of ‘Marxism’ is posed.}

To complain about the emergence and spread of vulgar Marxism would only testify to a deplorable lack of historical sense, because the acquisition of a new science by the masses is an historical process, in the course of which the masses change at every moment the ideas they want to take possession of, in order to adapt them to their comprehension at a particular time. Abundant examples from the history of the natural sciences and philosophy could be adduced, showing that the simplification and trivialisation of a new doctrine is nothing but a stage in its triumphal march, its road towards prevalence. And as poor as vulgar Marxism appears in comparison with the enormous wealth of Marx’s thought, it stands much higher than the confused ideas about social life replaced by it. But [vulgar Marxism] is, for the masses of the workers, not just a tremendous advance in their knowledge; it is also one of the driving forces of their will. By showing them - if only in rough outline - the development of capitalist society, it has been of great help in turning proletarian class instinct into clear class consciousness, a clear recognition of the position and tasks of the working class in bourgeois society. Even in the impoverished and stunted version in which the ideas of the first volume of Capital have so far penetrated the consciousness of the masses, they not only enriched the knowledge of the working masses; they were also the most effective way to develop the unity, clarity and purposefulness of their will.

Vulgar Marxism certainly offered to the Marx-critique welcome points of attack. This criticism did not care about Marx's method, or about the coherence of his system, but only about those individual - and in their isolation mislead­ing - propositions that the great public takes as the quintessence of Marxism. The Marx-critique focused its attack upon them. Theoretical revisionism is noth­ing but the counterpart of vulgar Marxism, the necessary consequence of the equally necessary atrophy of Marx's theory as it seriously penetrated wider and less educated classes of people.

But precisely the attacks of revisionism had to turn us Marxists back to our sources. Since the individual propositions, in their misleading isolation, appeared shaken by the attacks of revisionism, and their validity was called into question, we had to remind ourselves again of their interconnection in the system. Since the results were disputed, we had to re-examine the method. The popularisations were no longer sufficient; and if we wanted to answer the questions with which we were overwhelmed from all sides, we had to appro­priate intellectually the whole richness of the new science developed in Marx's works. The changing historical situation forced the latest generation of Marx­ist scholars to work in a completely different way; it set us tasks different from those of our predecessors, which we had to approach with a mental disposition totally different from that of our teachers of a quarter of a century ago.

In the year 1885 appeared the second, and in 1894 the third volume of Capital. They were already available to us when we started the study of Marx's economics, and for that reason alone we had to read the first volume differently [from our predecessors]. We did not have to add to the results of the first volume of Capital those of the second and third, but instead we had to read the entire work in one go at the beginning of our studies. For us, the question of whether the third volume stood in contradiction with the first, or whether the theory of value was overridden by the theory of production prices, could not arise. We would never have become Marxists if we had not seen, from the first day, all the component parts of the system at work in their mutual interdependence. Since the completed building was shown to us from the beginning, we recognised its plan much more easily than did our predecessors, who saw it in the making.

At the same we were assailed by countless new economic phenomena de­scribed and catalogued for us by the historical school: the myriad forms of indir­ect dependence of handicrafts [on capital]; the stupendous revolution in the character of the farm; the formation of new social strata in the advanced indus­trial nations; the changing forms of concentration of capital, which vary from country to country and from decade to decade. We had to overcome all that intellectually; before we could ever commit ourselves to Marx's school, we had to explain how those countless new phenomena could be classified according to Marx's broad guidelines. Thus we learned to understand Marx's theory about the developmental trends [of society] in its deepest sense, in all its richness, and we were prevented from letting that doctrine, which grasps the transforma­tion of thousands of intricate and interconnected economic relations of people in their conformity to law, wither into mere prophecies about purely outward phenomena, which is all that can be gleaned from business statistics.

Thus we first mastered the content, the substance of Marx's system, con­sciously assimilating it as a lasting intellectual acquisition. It could be no mys­tery to us that the first abstractions, with which Marx's deductions begin in the first volume of Capital, were actually the last results of his intellectual work. Indeed, we experienced in our actual research work the fact that we cannot do without those ultimate and most general concepts in order to recreate in our consciousness, through their interaction, the concrete empirical facts of economic experience. But again we faced scepticism. Was the procedure that we learned from Marx, that whole tedious intellectual work, not an aberration of the human mind? In 1896, Rudolf Stammler again brought up for discus­sion the method of the social sciences.^{[368] [369] [370] Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert sought to reinstate naive empiricism in the historical sciences.22 Thus, all the results again became uncertain for us, for the method itself seemed to be called into question.}

Marx's conception of history is an exact science. It is not a critique of know­ledge, not a philosophy. The uncritical mixing up of the philosophical consid­eration of the limits of science with actual scientific work in the spheres of action [Arbeitsfelde] and experience can only cause harm in the social sciences, just as it wrought disasters in the field of the natural sciences. In itself, Marx's social theory does not require any more instruction from philosophy than, for instance, mechanics or astronomy. Philosophy does not have to provide science with its procedure; [on the contrary,] philosophy rests on science's research method. Philosophy singles out, from a given science, those elements of recog­nising consciousness that are ‘necessary and sufficient to establish and stabilize the fact of science'?³ Despite that fact, social theory, from an historical and psychological point of view, is much more intimately linked with philosophy than with the natural sciences, because the latter separated themselves from the crushing embrace of philosophy two centuries earlier. The natural sciences have developed their methods in such a way that, however differently they may be rated by philosophers, their practical application and general validity can no longer be challenged. But their younger sisters, the social sciences, must still defend themselves today against philosophy’s desire to dominate. Confused by party hatred and patronage, none of its working methods can secure undis­puted advantage. That is why social science cannot do without epistemological justification and defence of its methods.

Marx has done the methodological work of justifying his own approach himself, but he put it in a language that is almost incomprehensible to us, i.e. outwardly according to Hegel’s teachings. In his work, of course, Hegel’s trains of thought have become something quite different and new; the words taken over from Hegel express very different concepts. For that reason, we have to translate Marx’s methodological justification of his work into the language of our own time in order to forearm ourselves against the attacks of scepticism.

The great fact underlying Hegel’s logic, as well as his criticism of Kant, is the natural sciences. Hegel, too, does not fail to recognise their empirical charac­ter, and he has no doubt ‘that all our knowledge begins with experience’; but he characteristically calls the empirical ‘the immediate’,^{[371] [372] [373] [374] and the logical con­ceptual processing of the experience, the ‘negation of an immediately given’?5 Behind the immediate, Hegel looks for the true and the real. He finds the true and the real in the ‘realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion’?6 In Existence [Dasein], the determinacy [Bestim- mtheit] - the concrete empirical qualitative condition [Beschafenheit] - is one with Being [Sein]; but only if this condition is sublated [aufgehoben], posited as indifferent, only then do we get to pure Being, which is nothing but quant­ity. But quantity [Quantum], to which an existence or a quality is bound, is measure [Maβ].27 Measure is the concrete truth of being; in it lies the idea of essence [Wesen]. ‘The truth of being is essence. Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being’.[375] That background, that essence of being, is measure; we get to it by positing the determinations of being as indifferent, when we turn from qualitatively determined existence to pure being as pure quantity.}

What Hegel thus describes, in his strange and mystical-sounding way, is none other than the method of mathematical science, which seeks to understand the manifold empirical phenomena of nature according to their law-governed determination, by relating them to mathematical laws of motion. But those concepts, which can only find justification in the fact that they first make possible [consideration of] the objects of nature as objects of science, that they are the constitutive conditions of the possibility of science itself, become in Hegel independent essences, compared to which the empirical appears as something unreal. That is the ontological character of Hegel’s logic.

Marx certainly imitates Hegel’s method. He also looks behind the ‘appear­ance of competition’ for the true and real. And he also wants to find behind immediacy the truth of being - by sublating the qualitative determination of being in its empirical existence, positing it as indifferent and turning to being as pure quantity. Thus, in the famous opening chapters of the first volume of Capital, the concrete commodities are stripped of their determination (as a frock, or 20 yards of linen) and posited as mere quantities of social labour. In the same way, the concrete individual labour is deprived of its determina­tion and regarded as a mere ‘form of manifestation’ of general social labour. Thus, even economic subjects, these men of flesh and blood, eventually lose their apparent existence and become mere ‘organs of labour’ and ‘agents of production’, one the embodiment of a certain quantity of social capital, the other the personification of a quantity of social labour power. The quant­ity, to which existence or quality is bound as Hegel’s measure, is here social labour. It is the essence of economic phenomena, which, as Hegel said, not only passes through its determinations - let us recall Marx’s account of the circula­tion of capital, which makes the same value assume the ever-changing forms of money, commodity, money, money capital, productive capital, commod­ity capital! - but also rules them as their law. Social labour becomes finally - and it would be an enticing task to develop this idea in detail - what Hegel calls substance, absolute activity-of-form (Formtatigkeit), absolute power, from which all accidents emerge.^[376] But if Marx's method thus mimics Hegel's pro­cedure, and if Marx uses Hegel's terminology to describe his own mode of research [Arbeitsweise], he strips this method of its ontological character. In many methodological remarks, scattered throughout his work, he argues that his concepts do not - as Hegel's do - pretend to be real entities, but are only tools to grasp the concrete empirical consciously and to reproduce it in sci­ence: ‘The method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as a concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process of origination of the concrete itself'.^[377]

When we recognise that Marx takes from Hegel nothing but the method of mathematical natural science, disguised ontologically by Hegel and again disrobed by Marx from its ontological disguise, we recognise the essence of Marx's work as science: Marx has conquered a new field for the method of math­ematical natural science. If we understand that Marx, in his methodological remarks, not only uses Hegel's terminology but also takes over from Hegel's logic the idea, common to all idealistic philosophy, of the determination of our knowledge by the conformity to law of our consciousness (rejecting, however, the ontological concealment of this idea by Hegel), we can understand Marx's methodological description of his own working method and see him as the heir of our classical philosophy. We see him equally remote from the ontolo­gical metaphysics of absolute idealism as from the illusion of naive empiricism, which does not recognise human consciousness's own achievement in science, degrading and devaluing human knowledge into a mere image of the ‘immedi­ate'.

Marx's legacy from our classical philosophy is the concept of science. We think that the concept of science, as it was developed by idealism through a critical examination of mathematical natural science, can be found in its purest form in Kant’s epistemology. But Marx, like the whole age in which he received his philosophical training, was too alien to Kant to take his view of science directly from critical philosophy. His historical starting point was rather the ‘absolute idealism' of Hegel. And in Hegelian philosophy Marx could also find the concept of science common to all idealism, but only in a form cloaked in Hegel's ontological view. By freeing the concept of science from that shell, Marx essentially restored it to that form in which it was and is the foundation and starting point of critical philosophy - albeit in a different language.

But for that reason we should not regard as a meaningless coincidence the fact that Marx owes his logical training to Hegel. Even if Hegel's ontology today looks like a hardly understandable aberration after Kant's critique of reason, it should not be forgotten, for that reason, that in other respects Hegel also repres­ents a significant advance beyond Kant. For while Kant's critique of knowledge was still mainly oriented towards the mathematical natural sciences, in Hegel human history appears at the heart of his system.^{[378] [379] [380] If the historical facts of human social life were arranged by Hegel as forms of self-development of spirit, this means, when translated from the ontological language into the method­ological, as in Marx, nothing but the demand for such a logical treatment of historical phenomena that they may be understood as individual cases of a law of motion in a lawful science, 32 which, according to the method of the mathematical natural sciences, relates qualitative determinations to quantitative changes. For Hegel, the concrete, individual historical representation [Vorstellung] is just a metaphor of the concept, and for that reason everything transient is only an illusion,33 but Marx demands that the historical [material] should be under­stood as an instance of a law - not as if, for instance, there were laws somewhere outside history that rule over it, but so that the historical connection partakes that character of universality and necessity, which can only be given to it by the relation [of historical facts] to a law. Marx's political economy includes the material of economic history, processed in this sense. Economic history is the starting point of all economic research; in an accomplished economic system,}

however, the facts of economic history must appear as single instances of a developed economic law. What is psychologically the starting point is logically the result.

Marx performed the great task of providing an exact scientific treatment of history in the three volumes of Capital. He saw in the countless qualitative changes of the human productive forces simple quantitative changes [changes of Measure in Hegel's terms], understanding them as changes in the organic composition of capital. From these quantitative changes follow, with that strict universality and necessity that only the realm of mathematics knows, the laws of motion of the rate of surplus value, the rate of profit and the accumulation of capital, which allow us to understand the specific historical events of our time in conformity with their lawful determination. Thus Marx gave us the first mathematical law of motion of history.

Thus we secured Marx's doctrine against the assaults of scepticism; it is now no less secure than mathematical natural science. In Marx himself we discovered the critique of knowledge that Marxism had to overcome. And if historicism rejects the ultimate results of Marx's abstractions because they are not copies of empirical events, we respond to it, with the words of Kant, that also in this case the object does not create the concept, but the concept brings forth the object as object of our knowledge.^[381]

Thus, it has not really been easy for us - the ‘dogmatists', the ‘Orthodox' - to secure possession of Marx's doctrine through struggle with a world of doubt, and we know very well that the way we had to pass through was not harmless for ourselves. We had to defend the boundaries of the new science against the incursions of scepticism and with the weapons of the critique of knowledge. We must now guard ourselves all the more anxiously against the danger of considering our real job to be the cherished philosophical defence of the new science as a whole, and to forget the further development of the new doctrine in particular areas. We had to appropriate all the wealth of Marx's research results, but for that reason we must not avoid the task of applying Marx's fertile method to the ever new and broader fields of work, because the ultimate and most general abstractions only find their justification in the fact that we can explain by their interaction the concrete problems of each historical epoch and the individual characteristics of each country. What the pranksters, the columnists, and the archival scholars can only imagine as a dogma must be a creative method for us. We have to penetrate deeply into the basic structures of Marx's work, but this should not distract us from carrying out the more important task of bringing the certain knowledge thus won, piece by piece, to the masses, in this way continuing the work of permeating the masses with Marx's ideas; a work that our teachers and predecessors have begun so successfully and with such a great impact on the history of the peoples. We - the ‘dogmatists' - have not ventured to intervene in the history of our people before we checked again and again the theoretical views lying at the basis of practical action, and before we related it to all the knowledge of our time. But of what use would all of our knowledge be if we did not implement it in active practical work for the goal theoretically proven to be the right? We cannot follow with slavish mindlessness every advice that Marx gave in another country, at another time and under different conditions to the struggling working class, but we must use Marx's method to understand the specific practical problems of our country and our time. We have wrested a commitment to Marx's theory by heavy struggle ourselves, and for that reason it cannot be for us a scheme that dominates us, but only a method that we control.

Thus each generation, each age group and level of education has its own Marx. What they are able to appropriate from the inexhaustible wealth of the master reflects their whole spiritual being. The history of Capital is interwoven into the whole intellectual history of recent decades. And for each generation the knowledge thus acquired becomes a determining destiny that shapes their practical actions; a personal experience that leaves indelible marks on their character. What at first is just knowledge becomes, in the living reality of creation, a never-ending source of enthusiasm, passion and energy.