This subjectivist conception of history can be found amongst some “Marxists” who adopt a similar moralistic approach to society and politics. The so called Third Camp arose on precisely this kind of moralistic basis (See, for example Trotsky "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party"). They found that the reality of the deformed workers' state, in Russia, conflicted with their petite-bourgeois morality, particularly following the Stalin-Hitler Pact (See Trotsky - The USSR in War). But, their former Marxist principles meant they were compelled to defend a workers' state (even a deformed one) against imperialism. The means to reconcile this contradiction was easy for a subjectivist – simply reclassify the USSR as not a workers' state! And, as with the Narodniks, that meant, also, selecting the data to justify that reclassification, accordingly, as well as then bowdlerising Marxist teachings to justify their changed positions, as well as their subsequent zigzags, as they found themselves tossed on the sea of events, untethered from the anchor of Marxist objectivity, grounded in materialism.
Marx spoke about his failure to explain to Proudhon the actual basis of dialectics, in the time they spent together in France.
“For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides – one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm.
The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category.
The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad.”
Proudhon's version of the dialectic was precisely this moralistic approach, to see every phenomenon as having a good aspect and a bad aspect (thereby innately moralistic, as opposed to the dichotomy being defined as reactionary or progressive, reflecting the material reality in which there is constant change, and the progressive element represents the forward movement), and that the task was, thereby, to simply eradicate the bad aspects of every social phenomenon.
Mikhailovsky repeats exactly this Proudhonist approach.
“(“Having accepted something as desirable or undesirable, the sociologist must discover the conditions under which the desirable can be realised, or the undesirable eliminated”—“under which such and such ideals can be realised”—this same Mr. Mikhailovsky reasons.) What is more, there can be no talk even of development, but only of various deviations from the “desirable,” of “defects” that have occurred in history as a result . . . as a result of the fact that people were not clever enough, were unable properly to understand what human nature demands, were unable to discover the conditions for the realisation of such a rational system.” (p 137)
It might be considered “desirable” that, throughout Man's history, each person enjoyed liberty and equality, and a high standard of living, but what does this “desirability” have to do with the actual development of society and the laws that govern it? It is simply a pious wish. The reason that not every human has enjoyed a high standard of living is not a question of subjective choices, but of objective necessity. That is precisely what lies at the heart of Marx's Law of Value. The determinant for human beings enjoying a high standard of living is labour productivity. Beyond a fairly basic level, whereby that productivity is a function of land fertility, climate etc., it depends on the development of the instruments of labour, which, in turn, is a function of the development of science and technology. It depends upon this development of science not just to produce the new instruments of labour that raise productivity, but also to create the new types of products for consumption, which are the means by which the standard of living is raised.
But, as Marx comments, it was an indication of the scientific honesty of Ricardo that he noted that this development of science is a product of society concentrating in the hands of a relatively few people the wealth that enables them to abstain from labour, so as to engage in these intellectual pursuits, or to be able to employ others with the appropriate talents to be able to do so on their behalf.
“He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself. To oppose the welfare of the individual to this end, as Sismondi does, is to assert that the development of the species must be arrested in order to safeguard the welfare of the individual, so that, for instance, no war may be waged in which at all events some individuals perish. Sismondi is only right as against the economists who conceal or deny this contradiction.) Apart from the barrenness of such edifying reflections, they reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
(Marx – Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9)
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