Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx

Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx
by Benedetto Croce
translated by C.M. Meredith and with an introduction by A.D. Lindsay
1914
INTRODUCTION
The Essays in this volume, as will be apparent, have all of them had an
occasional origin. They bear evident traces of particular controversy
and contain much criticism of authors who are hardly, if at all, known
in this country. Their author thought it worth while to collect them in
one volume and it has been, I am sure, worth while to have them
translated into English, because though written on different occasions
and in different controversies they have all the same purpose. They are
an attempt to make clear by philosophical criticism the real purpose
and value of Marx's work.
It is often said that it is the business of philosophy to examine and
criticise the assumptions of the sciences and philosophy claims that in
this work it is not an unnecessary meddler stepping in where it is not
wanted. For time and again for want of philosophical criticism the
sciences have overstepped their bounds and produced confusion and
contradiction. The distinction between the proper spheres of science
and history and moral judgment is not the work of either science or
history or moral judgment but can only be accomplished by
philosophical reflection, and the philosopher will justify his work, if he
can show the various contending parties that his distinctions will
disentangle the puzzles into which they have fallen and help them to
understand one another.
The present state of the controversy about the value of the writings of
Karl Marx obviously calls for some such work of disentangling. No

honest student can deny that his work has been of great historic
importance and it is hard to believe that a book like Das Kapital which
has been the inspiration of a great movement can be nothing but a
tissue of false reasoning as some of its critics have affirmed. The
doctrine of the economic interpretation of history has revivified and
influenced almost all modern historical research. In a great part of his
analysis of the nature and natural development of a capitalist society
Marx has shown himself a prophet of extraordinary insight. The more
debatable doctrine of the class war has at least shown the sterility of the
earlier political theory which thought only in terms of the individual
and his state. The wonderful vitality of the Marxian theory of labour
value in spite of all the apparent refutations it has suffered at the hands
of orthodox political economists is an insoluble puzzle if it had no more
in it than the obvious fallacy which these refutations expose. Only a
great book could become ' the Bible of the working classes.'
But the process of becoming a Bible is a fatal process. No one can read
much current Marxian literature or discuss politics or economics with
those who style themselves orthodox Marxians without coming to the
conclusion that the spirit of ecclesiastical dogmatism daily growing
weaker in its own home has been transplanted into the religion of
revolutionary socialism. Many of those whose eyes have been opened
to the truth as expounded by Marx seem to have been thereby granted
that faith which is the faculty of believing what we should otherwise
know to be untrue, and with them the economic interpretation of
history is transformed into a metaphysical dogma of deterministic
materialism. The philosopher naturally finds a stumbling-block in a
doctrine which is proclaimed but not argued. The historian however
grateful he may be for the light which economic interpretation has
given him, is up in arms against a theory which denies the individuality
and uniqueness of history and reduces it to an automatic repetition of
abstract formulae. The politician when he is told of the universal nature
of the class war points triumphantly to the fact that it is a war which
those who should be the chief combatants are slow to recognise or we
should not find the working classes more ready to vote for a Liberal or
a Conservative than for a Socialist. The Socialist must on consideration
become impatient with a doctrine that by its fatalistic determinism

makes all effort unnecessary. If Socialism must come inevitably by the
automatic working out of economic law, why all this striving to bring it
about ? The answer that political efforts can make no difference, but
may bring about the revolution sooner, is too transparently inadequate a
solution of the difficulty to deceive anyone for long. Lastly the
economist can hardly tolerate a theory of value that seems to ignore
entirely the law of supply and demand, and concludes with some justice
that either the theory of labour value is nonsense or that Marx was
talking about something quite apart in its nature