Marxism on the Attack

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A REVIEW OF FRANZ MEHRING: 'ON DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM' , New Park Publications, 50p.

Franz Mehring's short essay omes to us today as fresh and icisive as when it was first ublished more than eighty cars ago. : On Historical Materialism' was litten in 1893 in reply to Durgeois opponents of Marxism inong the German intelligentsia, swering the attacks they had lade on the basic works of Marx id Engels and on Mehring's own initings. ¡ But from the first page it goes ¿yond merely replying, to give a lear and lively exposition of istorical materialism. | Within fifty pages he covers an Honishing variety of examples: ime of the essential "technical' mentions which spread through arope with the development of te capitalist mode of production -pinting, gunpowder and firearms, ew methods of weaving; the ffects of climate and geography on ponomic development; the way the religious moral lactices of nomadic tribes are rown into chaos when their herds c and they are forced to settie; ad the putrefaction of German milosophical idealism after Hegel, face with the bourgeoisie. ading a more and more explicit The common thread throughout the opposition between iaterialism and idealism. The Durgeois opponents of Marxism re united in one thing: their wish › rescue ideal' or 'spiritual' driving ces in human history, which can en be shown to act independently !, or even as causes of the main laterial - and economic evelopments.

SHOOTS

Mehring insists that the aterialist, scientific key to human tory lies in searching out the ays in which the development of le productive forces lay down the cessary soil from which the new oots of intellectual and 'spiritual' le grow.

Naturally, following generations of these plants also return to the earth from which they came, to form part of the future topsoil, but the human mind can no more make itself something permanently independent of material history than biological evolution could take place outside the limits set by geology and climate.

Mehring deals, for example, with the claim that 'Christianity', in all its different forms during the last two thousand years, has acted as any sort of single moral and religious force.

CHANGED

"With every upheaval of the mode of production, the spiritual content of the Christian religion changed with varying rapidity. This has become clear even to the better bourgeois historians, such as Gustav Freytag, who emphasises that the Christian faith had already made great changes in the first century of its existence. It continually succumbed to these changes following the changes in economic development.

If one wanted to determine a spiritual content of Christianity common throughout all the changes in time, then one would have at the the most a few lifeless formulae at hand, and scarcely that - formulae which at their best could not move a feather, let alone a world. As the world religion of a world empire, Christianity had to develop an unusual adaptability to the most varying economic conditions, and to their ideological requirements; in Italy, it took over many components of the mythology of antiquity, in Germany it took over equally strong components of the Germanic religions, in China the veneration of Confucius and the cult of ancestors.

And if the Bible was the book of books for the European peoples for more than a thousand years, if it had an extraordinarily lasting effect on the spiritual and religious conceptions of these people, then this did not take place because of its godly and unchallengeable truth, but precisely because its countless contradictions". (p43)

Like Mehring econom neatly

Mehring

Without seeing this it is impossible to grasp how the same Christian belief' should both inspire the resistance of slaves and the poor to the economic collapse of the Roman Empire and become the ideological organiser of feudal society, as well as the main plank of state power, how "Christianity' should justify both Papal exactions across Europe and the Protestant armies as they marched into battle against the Pope, how it should provide the banners under which both Cromwell and King Charles used pike and cannon to dispute their doctrines in the English bourgeois revolution and civil war.

Mehring simply demolishes the idea that 'Christianity' forms any constant ideal force in history - and as far as European history is concerned there is no body of doctrine which comes closer to being a candidate for such a role.

ACCURACY

all great polemicists, wields his blade with and accurac y. First he Its off the numerous The lobby uary 14th, stion On TV CC mmitte swollen heads of his enemies and then - without personal malice, but just in order to demonstrate that the matter should be settled once and for all - he holds up their skulis and shakes them to show that there are really no brains in them.

But, as an historical materialist, he knows it is necessary to go further, so he also examines the insubstantial vapours with which their skulls are filled, to discover how even their smell and colour express - often in a quite direct way - the class interests and prejudices of the German bourgeois and petit bourgeois, disguising their ignorance with a thick dust of reudition and footnotes, their essential cowardice and lack of grace with vainglorious sallies into the field against 'oversimplication' and 'popularisation' TEDIOUS There is no need to describe any of Mehring's examples - their descendants can be found, as tedious as ever, in the corridors of any modern university.

Mehring's essay - here published in English for the first time - was written as part of the struggle (in the German Social Democratic Party) to build a socialist leadership of the working class, and that is what it remains.

There are few better primers in the method of dialectical materialism, applied to human history and the development of society, for workers studying for the first time the world view of Marxism. The present edition -though not cheap at 50p - has the advantage of a clear and literal translation.

The editors, however, have merely translated Mehring's own explanatory notes, and added references to some of the works which he cites. They have not given notes or a glossary to explain briefly people, dates or events which will not necessarily be known to British workers in 1976.

Who, for example, was Schopenhauer, or Louis XIV? Despite these Distore at Materials, houl, of the greatest value to the cadre of ballot voting which is not only open to corruption by the bureaucracy, but invites the intervention of the capitalist press and the witchhunt.

Johns tries to explain the awkward problem of the content of White's vote, by claiming that they did not come from the right-wing but were "the votes of 1,117 trade unionists" • But the 1,200 votes Parsons recieved as convenor also came from trade unionists. In fact most of them were the same trade unionists who voted for White -the right wing.

ISOLATED

In any case, if 1,117 votes give White a mass base, then 1,200 votes must give Parsons a mass base -when in fact Parsons is isolated from every principled worker on the plant.

One thing is now clear, White is with Parsons all the way. We can give some examples of this.

On the day before the Deputy Senior Stewards elections, the 5/293 branch voted to send the branch committee to lobby the Regional Office with a branch resolution demanding an inquiry into the recent elections for the regional, national and executive committees - a move which directly challenged the right wing.

LOBBY

was on Wednesday the day after the Tuesday afternoon e member, including the Workers Socialist League in training ourselves and the new forces coming forward to build revolutionary leadership.

Printed with Mehring's essay is also an important letter from Engels to Mehring in 1893, congratulating him on the publication of his Lessing Legend -a treatment of German history which dealt with various reactionary and patriotic myths which had grown up around it.

COMPARISON

It contains a comparison of the parallels and differences between the development of the French nation state (a rare objective logic during the whole course of the process') and the belated, reactionary unification of Germany under the bourgeoisie (the outcome of a 'story of a continuous state of wretchedness').

Engels also makes the important point that he and Marx, in defending their discoveries against the sort of bourgeois critics with whom Mehring was struggling, put "the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts."

This gave their adversaries opportunities to distort them, and to caricature Marxism as though it denied that ideology and consciousness had any effect upon Mehring's work is a concrete refutation of all such accusations -as universal as they are trivial - in the way that it skillfully reworks the knowledge of history, literature and philosophy which he acquired as bourgeois intellectual, consciously giving it a political edge and turning it to the preparation in practice of a revolutionary party whose task it was to equip the German working class to impart to Germany the greatest convulsion in its history.

The knowledge of historical necessity, in Mehring's hands, became a powerful lever to assist in breaking the chains of capitalist Slavery event, al thi night ting, in ich White, withdrew. Somewhere decision had been taken, and the line was drawn between those who were prepared to challenge the bureaucracy and those who were not.

SPLIT

A similar position arose at a recent meeting where Parsons was criticised for splitting the inspectors' dispute which threatened to close the Assembly Plant. (Parsons had called a meeting of TGWU members only and had instructed them to work normally after a joint meeting had voted to continue the overtime ban).

When Parsons was attacked White defended him, saying that "Reg" had not wanted to split the inspectors but had been under instruction from the District Office.

PRETENCE

It is clear that White cannot hold the pretence of a "left" position much longer. He will be forced continuously further into the open as struggles proceed and his position on the Ryder committee brings him into conflict with workers fighting to defend their jobs.

We said over a year ago that Healy was liquidating the WRP, this is clearly the case today. WRP members are asked to give large sums of money to a hopeless crisis fund which can solve nothing as Healy's unprincipled manoeuvres lose the movement the last remnant