On Marx from Hegel-list 3.

[Jukka Laari <jlaari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Third 'On Marx' posting from Hegel-list:

(From: duquda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Tue Sep 12 15:41:49 1995
Subject: no subject (file transmission))

To all those interested in the Marx discussion:

I would like to respond to Hans Despain's comments on my somewhat lengthy
August 29 post on Marx.  First, I recognize that to say that private
property must be abolished for Marx is misleading without specifying that
it is private ownership of the menas of production that he is concerned
with, not personal private property (as Marx makes clear in the Communist
Manifesto).

Also, Hans suggests that I put too much emphasis on the liberating force
of technical progress in Marx, and while I certainly do not want to
exaggerate the role of technology in Marx it is quite clear that for him
the technological liberation from material need is a precondition of fully
emancipated society.  Hence, the positive historical significance of the
rise of capitalism, despite its exploitive character.

The third, and most significant, issue raised is the nature and basis of
Marx's normative criteria for both judging capitalism and anticipating the
ethical features of the emancipated society of the future.  I want to
argue, contrary to Hans, that this does not rest merely on a sociological
perspective but that indeed there is a historical teleology at work.  The
following essay provides my account.

     I begin with Marx's statement in the 1859 preface to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, (all references are to R. Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd. ed., 1978)

     No social order ever perishes before all the productive
     forces for which there is room in it have developed;  and
     new, higher relations of production never appear before the
     material conditions of their existence have matured in the
     womb of the old society itself.  Therefore, mankind always
     sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking
     at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the
     task itself arises only when the material conditions for its
     solution already exist or are at least in the process of
     formation.  In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and
     modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as
     progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.
     (MER, 5)

One way to grasp the scope of Marx's pronouncements here, I would suggest,
is to distinguish between a theory of history which gives some sort of
standard causal account of societal development over time and a conception
of history that provides an overall theme or motif of development very
broadly construed. Clearly, Marx has a theory of capitalism that explains
its internal dynamic and historical development as it emerges out of
feudalism.  This theory articulates the internal contradictions of
capitalism and, based on an analysis of the antagonisic nature of this
system of production, predicts its demise.  The "prediction" is not just a
matter of specifying a particular causal chain of events in time (e.g.,
the occurrences that lead to crises) but of deriving capitalism's collapse
from its essential features, in particular its internal contradictions,
which have been empirically established in the critical appropriation of
Hegelian dialectics and the science of political economy.  There is a
larger story, however, within which the theory of capitalism is contained
and which conveys the sense of an historical goal of humankind and the
role and fate of capitalism in its attainment.  This broader account is
not needed to explain capitalism internally but it is required in order to
establish a framework for the expectation of what lies beyond capitalist
society in the future.
     If we take seriously the empirical requirements of the study of
political economy there is no way that from this study alone Marx could be
justified in predicting what sort of society arizes in the aftermath of
the downfall of capitalism, given the data available to him.  Indeed, even
Marx's prognosis regarding capitalism is somewhat limited, for the system
he describes is in some sense an abstract model or "ideal type" that
reflects the main tendencies observed in actual capitalist society but
does not take into account the possibility of modifications that could
blunt these tendencies or transform the system in such a way as to alter
significantly its course of development.  There is, one could say, always
the possibility of historical contingencies entering into the actual
course of things and, if significant enough in influence, leading to
transformations that make the model of explanation no longer applicable,
at least not unequivocally so.
     Try as one might, one will not find a theory of proletarian
revolution contained in the theory of capitalism.  What one does find in
Marx is a conception of progressive stages of history leading up to
capitalism along with a recipe for the transformation towards the future
society.  The emancipatory role attributed to the proletariat in the early
writings prior to Marx's study of political economy is never given up but
only contextualized later in terms of what Marx saw as the globalization
of capitalism.  The world-historical role of the proletariat comes about
due not to the inherent necessity of philosophy realizing itself in
practice (the early view) but because of the economic conditions created
by the developing of a capitalist world market.  Nevertheless, the
proletarian revolution is not itself derivable from the theory of capital
but relies on certain assumptions about human nature and human
rationality.  These assumptions were necessary in order for Marx to be
able to wed his economic theory of capitalism to his radical program for
social and political change and they provide the thread of continuity
between the earlier view of the necessity for the realization of the human
essence and the later view which stresses the material conditions of the
triumph of the proletariat.
     The assumptions about human nature are evident in the 1859 Preface.
The statement "mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve"
is a claim about the predominance of human rationality over social forces
which, while created by humans, can come to subordinate the creators to
their creations. Collective activity historically is always more than the
sum of the actions of each individual, and Marx quite rightly, though at
times misleadingly with his use of more deterministic language, emphasizes
the constraints put on human activity both by inherited material and
social conditions and the dynamics of social interaction.  But also clear
is Marx's view that subordination of humans to forces beyond their control
is not a historical fate from which they can never escape.  While
humankind already displays sufficient technological reason such that there
are "progressive epochs in the economic formation of society,"
nevertheless, that the bourgeois social formation as the last antagonistic
form "brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close"
cannot be the result of technological advance only.  Along with the
revolutionizing of production comes a transformation of human
consciousness both in the experience of an expropriated proletarian class
and in the emergence of a communist movement the intellectual leaders of
which provide theoretical and practical guidance to the oppressed masses.
     If the concept of forces of production is read humanistically, then,
given the teleological dimension of Marx's thought about history as a
whole, it may well be accurate to ascribe to Marx, as does G. A. Cohen, a
"development thesis,"  i.e., that the productive forces have an indogenous
tendency to develop.  Of course, on the holistic reading these forces of
production cannot be treated as theoretical explanans for other dimensions
of human life--they do not function as part of a theory of history that
explains particulars but rather they provide the concept of history as a
goal directed process overall.
     As has frequently been pointed out, this seems to conflict with
Marx's claim that

     "[h]istory is nothing but the succession of the separate
     generations, each of which exploits the materials, the
     capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by
     all the preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand,
     continues the traditional activity in completely changed
     circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old
     circumstances with a completely changed activity.  This can
     be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the
     goal of earlier history, e.g., the goal ascribed to the
     discovery of America is to further the eruption of the
     French Revolution. (MER, 172)

Presumably, Marx would find it equally distorting to hold that the goal of
the spread of population from the countryside to towns in the late
medieval period was to further the rise of the industrial revolution, or
that the goal of the development of new relations of production in a given
epoch is the development of novel or advanced forms of technology in a
later epoch.  However, the teleological conception of history in Marx that
I am suggesting is not a matter of making specific events or developments
in history the goal of some previous events or developments.  The goal of
history for Marx is construed very broadly as the liberation of humankind
from subjugation to forces it has created, which does not require that any
particular events in history be causally or teleologically related to any
other events, or that any specific events or sets of events had to occur.
The kinds of connections Marx does make between what happens earlier and
later in history are of the nature of conditionalities, as in how the
development of division of labor and commercial private property were
necessary conditions for the rise of a bourgeois class, how the separation
of capital and landed property were necessary for property being based
solely on labor and exchange, or how the rise of big industry was the
basis for the formation of a proletarian class.
     The teleological conception of history in Marx is most evident in the
Communist Manifesto.  First published in 1848 by Marx and Engels (and
again in 1872 and 1882, and in various subsequent editions by Engels) the
Manifesto recapitulates the story of the development of capitalism found
in the German Ideology along with a discussion of communism and its
relation to other socialist movements.  While generally considered
primarily a strategical "political"  tract, it nonetheless provides an
overview of the materialist conception of history which is fully
consistent with the viewpoint of the German Ideology.  (MER, 473-83;
176-93) Moreover, the conceptions of the goal of history and of historical
necessity are most prominent.  Further, it is evident how these
conceptions are cast not only in terms of social, economic, and political
developments but also in terms normative considerations.  Along with the
account of the development of commerce, urbanization, political
centralization, the universalization of market competition, and the crises
in capitalism brought about by an "epidemic of over-production,"  is the
casting of the proletariat with the world-historical mission of bringing
to an end the history of class oppression. (See Engels' 1883 preface to
the Manifesto) In Marx's conception of the revolutionary proletariat we
find a mixture of conditional, practical, and teleological necessity
which, while generating a degree of ambiguity concerning the essential
nature of Marx's conception of history, can be understood as forming a
coherent view once the threads are untangled.
     The necessary conditions for the success of the proletarian
revolution are largely a matter of the functionings of capitalism, both in
its role in the revolutionizing of production and in the generating of
internal contradictions in its system of production that lead to crises.
While the facts of wage-labor, industrialization, and urbanization are the
basis for the growth of a proletarian class, the radicalization of this
class is due to the nature of capitalist exploitation, which is manifested
in a variety of ways but which can be summed up in terms of the amassing
of capitalist wealth at the expense of impoverishing workers.  This
impoverishment is of a broad nature, for it involves not only the poverty
produced through low wages but also the burdensomeness and repulsiveness
of work and its environment, the various aspects of alienation Marx
describes in the Paris Manuscripts, the sense of a lack of social and
political power, and for many ultimately becoming a member of the
"industrial reserve army," a pauper (483). According to Marx, the
crises-prone nature of capitalism, where the expansionism which drives the
system inevitably leads to tremendous market disequilibrium, combined with
the creation of a proletariat into which gradually enter members of the
lower "middle"  classes (479-80), results eventually in a crises that is
at once economic, social, and political.  Given these sorts of conditions,
which would presumably produce a systemic paralysis of sorts, it might
seem unthinkable as to how a revolution of the proletarian masses against
the capitalist minority would not fail to take place, one resulting in a
fundamental change in the relations of power in society.
     Even if the high probability of this scenerio is granted, however, it
does not give us the world-historical role that Marx attributed to the
anticipated proletarian revolution.  The proletarians are not merely an
oppressed class that, given the collapse of the economic system along with
a hightened sense that things have become intolerable, has reached a sort
of functional threshhold such that upheaval is unavoidable.  They are, or
become over time, members of a class movement that grows in virtue of the
struggles of workers against capitalists, and for Marx this struggle must
of necessity take on a significance greater than the sum of individual
interests of the workers.  Even though the workers' labor has lost the
character of self-activity and "only sustains their life by stunting it,"
nonetheless "things have now come to such a pass, that the individuals
must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to
achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very
existence."  (German Ideology in MER, 191) The nature of Marx's thinking
regarding practical necessity of achieving self-activity is evident as he
goes on to say that

     This appropriation is first determined by the object to be
     appropriated, the productive forces, which have been
     developed to a totality and which only exist within a
     universal intercourse.  From this aspect alone, therefore,
     this appropriation must have a universal character
     corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.
     The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production
     is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of
     capacities in the individuals themselves. (191)

Here Marx places together the conditional necessity for the appropriation
of the productive forces by the proletariat, the fact that these forces
have been developed in such a manner that they can be effectively
appropriated only collectively, with the practical necessity of actually
making this appropriation which is at one with the normative necessity for
developing the capacities of individuals (distributively and
collectively). The necessary conditions for collective appropriation are
linked with but not identical to the practical necessity of accomplishing
this task, for we need to know about what motivates or impels the
proletarian class to act in certain ways rather than in others to
understand why it must take advantage of the material and social
conditions present to it.  Indicating the unique situation of the
proletariat historically, that "only the proletarians of the present day,
who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to
achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity," (191) does not
tell us why they will in fact make this achievement. Historically, all
previous attempts by underclasses in society have failed because they were
restricted by the prevailing material and social conditions, e.g., by
crude instruments of production and forms of intercourse which were not
sufficiently universal, and did not radically alter the form of division
of labor which made individuals subservient to an instrument of production
and to an exploitive system of property.14 Rather, "[m]odern universal
intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when
controlled by all...[i]t can only be effected through a union, which by
the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one,
and through a revolution...in which, further, the proletariat rids itself
of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in
society." (191-92) This means, among other things, that private property
in the ownership of the means of production comes to an end.
     Marx's critical comment in the German Ideology about conceiving the
historical process as the evolutionary process of "the self-estrangement
of `Man'"  which is overcome in the abolition of division of labor does
not obviate the implicit teleological character of Marx's assessment of
overall development.  He is not attacking an evolutionary view of history
per se but one that tranforms history into a process of consciousness.
This, of course, is in line with Marx's emphatic claim that social reality
is not a function of the predominant self-conceptions of one's time but is
a product of the prevailing material conditions.  Read
non-deterministically, this means that social reality is the result of how
humans respond to those conditions, and again why they respond or will
respond in certain ways requires knowing more than just what those
material conditions are.  Marx implicitly acknowledges a substantive role
to human conceptions when he speak of the proletariat as a class "from
which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental
revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among
the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this
class." (192-93) Presumably, this consciousness is at least in part a
matter of the proletariat having become so extensive, and organized
politically, that it sees itself no longer as one class among others but
rather as "the expression of the dissolution of all classes,
nationalities, etc., within present society."  (193) Attaining communist
consciousness, therefore, would seem to be part of the necessary
conditions for proletarian revolution of the sort required.  However,
stating requirements about how humans must respond to their situation if
they are to achieve certain goals is not to show that they must in fact so
respond, even under favorable conditions and given relevant opportunities.
     The emphasis on practical, as distinct from conditional, necessity is
highlighted in the German Ideology when Marx says that

     Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist
     consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the
     alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an
     alteration which can only take place in a practical
     movement, a revolution;  this revolution is necessary,
     therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
     overthrown in any other way, but also because the class
     overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in
     ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted
     to found society anew. (193)

In the Communist Manifesto the practical necessity of the historic mission
of the proletariat is expressed as follows:

     The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
     forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous
     mode of appropriation.  They have nothing of their own to
     secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all
     previous securities for, and insurances of, individual
     property. (MER, 482)

Furthermore, this idea of having an historical mission, and how the
practical necessity of carrying it out is related to material and social
conditions, is not restricted to the proletariat. Marx emphasizes the
revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in comparison to the other feudal
classes in the furthering of the development of the productive forces.
Again, we can distinguish between the necessary conditions for the
existence of a class, in this case the bourgeoisie, from the practical
necessity of its carrying out a certain task.  Interestingly, it is not
the development of new technology that produces the bourgeoisie but the
increase in demand for manufactured products through the creation of an
incipient world market, accomplished largely by England.  This demand
which outgrows the existing productive forces calls for the development of
new ones by calling into existence a new form of private ownership, which
itself is made possible by free competition and developments in mechanical
science.  In spite of customs regulations and other measures enacted by
countries to protect their manufactures, big industry universalizes
competition, establishes means of communication appropriate to a world
market, makes trade and other forms of capital subordinate to industrial
capital, and through a financial system centralizes capital.

     By universal competition it [big industry] forced all
     individuals to strain their energy to the utmost.  It
     destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality,
     etc., and where it could not do this, made them into a
     palpable lie.  It produced world history for the first
     time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every
     individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction
     of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the
     former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. (185)

In addition to revolutionizing production, urbanization, and
internationalization of markets, the bourgeoisie has in centralizing
ownership of the means of production in the hands of an elite minority
also managed to effect a political centralization such that
"[i]ndependent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, become lumped
together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one
national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff." (477)
     In all of this, the bourgeoisie creates the conditions not only for
the existence of the proletariat but, ironically, for its own demise, for
in simplifying class antagonisms by splitting society into two opposed
classes the relation between oppressor and oppressed is in a way
demystified, for "naked self-interest" and "egotistical calculation" are
now the explicitly acknowledged rule of life. "All that is solid melts
into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind." (476) Moreover, in a sense the bourgeoisie is the master
educator of the proletariat insofar as it demonstrates in a manner
unparalleled historically how revolutionary transformations in the
economy, society, politics, and culture can bring a class to power.  "The
weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself." (478)
     Thus, the bourgeoisie appear to have the historical mission of
providing the conditions for the existence of a "universal" class of
proletarians, of "calling" them into existence, and in providing them the
means for its own destruction, which, when understood especially in terms
of economic contradictions, is really a self-destruction.  The proletariat
has the historic mission of carrying out a revolution against the
bourgeoisie and in doing so bring class struggle and oppression to an end.
Its material and social condition effectively define it as a "universal"
class.  "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities,
or in the interests of minorities.  The proletarian movement is the
self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the
interests of the immense majority.  The proletariat, the lowest stratum of
our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the
whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the
air."  (482)That the proletariat will rise up to the task seems to be
necessitated by the conditions of its existence, which is that it sinks
deeper into pauperism the more that wealth is accumulated by the
bourgeoisie, that despite this the socializing of the production process
provides a context for the organization of the proletariat, and that it
can continue to exist at all only by attacking the existence of the
bourgeoisie, the basis of which is the relation of capital to wage-labor.
"The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet
the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products.  What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own
grave-diggers.  Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable." (483)
     But why this inevitability?  As Marx seems to put it, under the
conditions he described the proletariat would appear to have nothing to
lose and everything to gain by a revolution against the bourgeoisie.
Human motivation can be a complex matter, however, and even when the
situation is one of social crisis and near-desperation it is not clear
that human psychology is such that, whether as a class or as individuals,
human response must be rational in the sense Marx seems to require.  In
any case, it is not clear that revolution against the bourgeoisie is the
only rational alternative for the survival of the proletariat.  Marx's
recognition of the necessity of political organization of the proletariat
which "compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the
workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself,"  and resulting, for example, in the ten-hours bill which set a
maximum working day in England, surely raises a difficulty for the idea of
a class without reasonable alternatives to revolution. Probably conscious
of this, Marx was on the whole quite ambivalent about politicization of
the working classes, especially if their participation in constitutional
or legislative reform would replace radicalism with patriotism.  The point
in considering ways to organize the proletariat was not to achieve
external political recognition but to find means of effective struggle
against the existing order.  Marx must have sensed what anyone looking at
history would conclude, that those who are completely impoverished are,
usually, also quite helpless.
     It is doubtful we will discover in considerations of human
psychology, on the one hand, or in material and social conditions, on the
other, the explanation of the historical roles of either the bourgeoisie
or the proletariat.  The reason, I suggest, is that Marx conceives of
these classes somewhat as philosophical categories and not just as
sociological phenomena. The philosophical conception of these classes is
noticeable in the 1843 introduction to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right, where Marx first introduced his conception of the proletariat.
It is noteworthy that in speaking of the role of the bourgeoisie in
effecting political emancipation Marx indicates that this class succeeds
only because it emancipates society as a whole, that is, insofar as
members of society have become to a large extent "bourgeois" in their
ability to acquire money and culture.  "It is only in the name of general
interests that a particular class can claim general supremacy." (MER, 62)
Moreover,

      For a popular revolution and the emancipation of a
     particular class of civil society to coincide, for one class
     to represent the whole of society, another class must embody
     and represent a general obstacle and limitation.  A
     particular social sphere must be regarded as the notorious
     crime of the whole society, so that emancipation from this
     sphere appears as a general emancipation.  For one class to
     be the liberating class par excellence, it is necessary that
     another class should be openly the oppressing class. (63)

Marx adds that it was the French nobility and clergy that served as the
negative opposition in virtue of which the bourgeoisie appeared as the
positive representative of society as a whole.
     Why Marx wished to make this observation about the conditions for the
role of the bourgeoisie as emancipator into a general principle of the
rise of classes is uncertain.  Perhaps he found this to be a pattern in
all revolutionary movements in history, although the empirical evidence
for such universal assessment would certainly be moot.  More likely, Marx
had in mind Hegel's conception of the struggle for recognition with its
dialectic of opposition between self and other, now understood as a
dialectic of class struggle for recognition.  In any case, Marx makes it
quite clear that the real possibility of emancipation in Germany required
the formation of a class which fit the paradigm set out above.  Because of
its "radical chains" the proletariat, which is beginning to form in
Germany in 1843, is the proper candidate for representing the human
emancipation of society.Four years later in the Poverty of Philosophy
(1847) when Marx is considering the class struggle in England Marx says
that "[t]he condition of the emancipation of the working class is the
abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the
third estate, the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and
all orders." (MER, 281)
      The categorial conception of the historic role of the proletariat is
evident when Marx, in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
`Philosophy of Right': Introduction, says that "[w]hen the proletariat
announces the dissolution of the existing social order, it only declares
the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of
this order." (MER, 65) In the Holy Family (1845) Marx reiterates the point
when he says

     It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even
     the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal.
     It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and
     what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
     compelled to do.  Its goal and its historical action are
     prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in its own
     life-situation as well as in the organization of
     contemporary bourgeois society. (MER, 135)

Here Marx seems to be claiming that the proletariat embodies the
philosophical idea of self-liberation, which can be realized in actuality
when in abolishing itself as (under)class it also abolishes all class
distinctions.
     Despite the changes that occurred over time in Marx's program of
social and economic studies, changes which were largely a matter of
emphasis rather than fundamental shifts in view, there is a remarkable
constancy in his conception of the world-historical role of the
proletariat.  Conceived of at first almost completely as a philosophical
concept, and in regard to a country (Germany) which lacked in modern
economic development, Marx gradually examined and explicated the material
conditions for the existence of the proletarian class, with Capital being
the definitive scientific study of those conditions. Readings of Marx's
conception that put almost exclusive weight on these conditions arrive at
a view of historical determinism as the basic explanatory device for
understanding the inevitability of the rise and eventual triumph of the
proletariat over capitalist society.  If one attempts to preserve a
strictly empirico-scientific Marx, however, such a standpoint will not
hold up under careful scrutiny.  While much of the material and social
conditions articulated by Marx may be necessary for the existence and
success of the proletariat they cannot be with any certainty sufficient.
Marx himself recognizes the importance of class consciousness and the
political role the proletariat must take in order to achieve liberation.
He says,

     Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people
     of the country into workers.  The combination of capital has
     created for this mass a common situation, common interests.
     This mass is thus already a class against capital, but not
     yet for itself.  In the struggle, of which we have noted
     only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes
     itself as a class for itself.  The interests it defends
     become class interests.  But the struggle of class against
     class is a political struggle....Do not say that social
     movement exclude political movement.  There is never a
     political movement which is not at the same time social.
     (The Poverty of Philosophy in MER, 218-219)

The willingness and ability to effectively carry out a political struggle,
however, are not simply determined by social and economic conditions.  The
practical necessity of carrying out the task is not reducible to the
conditions necessary for its possibility.  Nonetheless, these two forms of
necessity appear to converge in Marx into a view of historical necessity
that elicits if not absolute certainty at least a very high degree of
confidence as to the outcome of the historic struggle of classes.
     I would suggest that Marx's conception of historical necessity is
governed by normative considerations that are essentially Hegelian in
nature, but the speliing out of this is for another essay.

David Duquette





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