Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/349

Rh history, that, despite certain new attempts à la Dürkheim, we can quietly ignore the mass consciousness talked of by Marx and Engels. The discussion concerning the nature of history has been so diligently and so persistently conducted that we are further in a position to discard Marx's conception of history and his purely would-be-objective historism. The historical dialectic which was transferred from the Hegelian system into the Marxist system as an objective "material dialectic," has no real existence.

Marx and Engels developed historism into an ultra-positivist amoralism which is untenable precisely because the individual consciousness cannot be absorbed by the mythical mass consciousness. (The concept of mass is vaguely employed by Marx and Engels, now as party, and now as humanity.) From the notion of the determinism of nature and of history, Marx deduced the unfreedom of the individual will, instead of empirically approaching the problem of the so-called freedom of the will through a psychological analysis of facts. Thus determinism was transformed into fatalism.

In practice, none the less, Marx and Engels made a predominant appeal to the ethical decision of the individual; they continually appealed against capitalism to the revolutionary sentiment; every speech in a social democratic meeting, the entire social democratic party education, is a flagrant disavowal of objectivist amoralism; theoretical amoralism is overthrown by practical moralism. To Marx and Engels, moral preachments are tedious and appear ineffective—but they are themselves preachers, and expect their sermons to change the bourgeois outlook. Marxism as a philosophical and sociological system is, after all, itself nothing but ideology, and this ideology has been conceived prior to the practical realisation of communism. Marxist ideology is not a superstructure but a substructure and an anteroom!

Socialism can have no other than an ethical foundation. The European and Russian predecessors of Marx are perfectly right here. Criticism, science, does not do away with the motivation of actions or with the formulation of aims; utopianism is not rooted in morality, but in inadequate criticism and in the lack of scientific grasp. Consequently Marx's amoralism is itself utopian. Unquestionably it is far from easy to grasp and to decide how the course of history exercises a codeterminative influence upon the individual, or to what