The fallacy of Marxism lies in the fact that it regards the economic urge as the cause of our ideals while, as a matter of fact, it is our ideals that give the economic urge whatever meaning or force it acquires. Of course, instead of ideals, Marx uses another term, “the contents of consciousness” or merely “consciousness”, which includes ideals.

 

Marx wrote in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy:

 

“In the social production of their subsistence men enter into determined and necessary relations with each other which are independent of their wills—production relations which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum of these production relations forms the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a juridical or political structure arises and to which definite, social forms of consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material subsistence conditions the social, political and spiritual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence but, on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production relations or, what is merely a juridical expression for the same thing, the property relations within which they have operated before. From being forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into fetters upon their development. Then comes an epoch of social revolution. With the change in the economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is slowly or rapidly transformed. In studying such a transformation one must always distinguish between the material transformation in the economic conditions essential to production—which can be established with the exactitude of natural science—and the juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As little as one judges what an individual is by what he thinks of himself so little can one judge such an epoch of transformation by its consciousness; one must rather explain this consciousness by the contradiction in the material life, the conflict at hand between the social forces of production and the relations in which production is carried on.”

 

Friedrich Engels, the friend of Marx, expresses the same thought briefly but more clearly as follows:

 

“Marx discovered the simple fact (heretofore hidden beneath ideological overgrowths) that human beings must have food, drink, clothing and shelter first of all before they can interest themselves in Politics, Science, Art, Religion and the like. This implies that the production of the immediately requisite material means of subsistence and therewith the existing phase of development of a nation or an epoch, constitute the foundations upon which the state institutions, the legal outlooks, the artistic and even the religious ideas are built up. It implies that these latter must be explained out of the former whereas the former have usually been explained out of the latter.”

 

The idea contained in the above extracts is the very soul of the philosophy of Marx. It has served him, according to his own confession, as “the guiding thread” of all his studies. If, therefore, this idea is absurd (and we hope the facts adduced in this and the previous chapters will show that it is), then the theory of Marx in its entire form, i.e. as a complete religio-socio-political ideology, is also absurd.

 

There are four main facts which lend a plausibility to this idea. Firstly, the urge of hunger is compelling in its nature and exists before those contents of our mind which we call ideals come into existence, at least in their well-defined shape. Secondly, people generally (though not invariably) satisfy their hunger and other instinctive desires before they satisfy the other proper needs of their ideals. Thirdly, when an individual’s ideal is not of an elevated character, which is very frequently the case in the earlier stages of our self-knowledge, the satisfaction and even the over satisfaction of his fundamental economic needs form an indispensable part of his ideal. And even when the individual’s ideal is very high in the scale of Beauty, he has generally to satisfy his fundamental economic needs as an end subservient to his ideal. Thus the satisfaction of these needs always forms a part of his ideal and colours visibly the manner in which he strives for the realisation of his ideal in all its parts and with all its requirements. Fourthly, the maladjustment of economic conditions in a society (like all other forms of maladjustments which result from our actions) is due to the rule of wrong ideals and, when we become conscious of this maladjustment, we become conscious also of those elements of imperfection and incorrectness in the ruling wrong ideal which bring it about. We immediately become dissatisfied with the rule of the ideal and there is a political revolution, the object of which is to establish the rule of an ideal more perfect and more in accordance with our nature in the light of the experience gained. In the new ideal we attempt to remove those elements of ugliness in the previous ideal of which we had become conscious on account of the maladjustment which it had produced.

 

These facts would certainly enable a superficial observer to interpret with enough of plausibility that it is only our basic economic needs that grow into the form of our ideals. When two kinds of desires, one subserving the other, are mixed up in an activity, it is so easy to mistake the subordinate desire as the fundamental cause of the activity, especially when the subordinate desire has a natural, internal compulsion of its own and exists before the ruling desire comes into existence or at least becomes distinct and powerful. As a matter of fact Marxism, like the psychoanalysis of Freud, is the result of a sectional view of human nature.

 

There is no doubt that Nature, in its generosity and helpfulness, has made the urge of hunger compelling in itself but we can dominate and we do actually dominate its compulsion whenever necessary. We turn to the satisfaction of hunger first of all only when the ideal demands it, but when the demand of the ideal is otherwise, hunger becomes our last and the least consideration. Whenever peoples’ ideals are threatened, they are prepared to oppose the compulsion of hunger, to eat less and make sacrifices of all sorts and even starve themselves to death, if it is necessary for the sake of the ideal. In the recent World War millions of Russian Communists sacrificed their lives including their fundamental economic needs quite obviously for the sake of an ideal and not for the sake of hunger, although that ideal may have been only the ideal of economic justice. It points to the fact that our more fundamental and more ultimate need is the ideal and not hunger. We satisfy our basic economic needs as a means to an end and the end is always the ideal. But sometimes the desire for economic superiority is an indispensable part of our ideal. In such a case we are unable to control our desire for wealth because we have no higher altruistic motives; we are greedy.

 

An ideal is only the ultimate end of our actions. There are innumerable immediate ends which we must achieve before we reach the ultimate end. Each immediate end is essential for the attainment of the final end. It is subservient to the ideal but, when the ideal cannot be achieved without it, it assumes an importance equal to that of the ideal itself. We then attend to it before everything else. It appears to us as if we care for it more than we care for the ideal. As a matter of fact when we are exerting ourselves to achieve an end of this kind, we do so only for the sake of the ideal. Such is the case with our fundamental economic needs. They assume the importance of the ideal when, as a help to the ideal, they are threatened, but they lose all importance when attending to them means the neglect of the ideal. Then we satisfy the urge of the self at their expense; we oppose and counteract their force.

 

Our fundamental economic needs arise from the biological compulsion of our instincts like feeding, clothing, shelter, sex, etc. The satisfaction of these instinctive desires is essential for the maintenance of our life and race. It is fortunate that these immediate needs have an internal compulsion of their own. But they have no more importance than the importance of means to an end. When we are eating, we are consciously or unconsciously serving the ideal and satisfying its requirements. We shall continue to eat and to maintain our health even if there were no instinctive compulsion for eating, provided we understood clearly enough that eating is essential for living. It is on account of the natural compulsion of the hunger instinct that it appears to us that we eat for the sake of eating and satisfying our hunger and not for the sake of our ideal. We do not eat and live in order to eat and live but we eat and live for the sake of our ideals, and the proof is that we are prepared to give up eating and living when such is the demand of the ideal. We oppose every economic need and every instinctive compulsion, sacrifice everything, including our lives, when our ideals demand this, whether the ideals are wrong or right, noble or ignoble, selfish or unselfish.

 

So far as our basic needs are concerned, they are capable of being completely satisfied. That a person may go on accumulating wealth even after his needs are satisfied, can be due not to the basic economic urge but to the urge for ideals. In this case the person’s ideal may be greed or the accumulation of wealth; that may be his estimate of Beauty and Power.

 

The chief element of Beauty in Communism, which attracts the rich and the poor alike to it, is not the atheistic philosophy of Marx behind it but it is its message of economic justice to all, its assurance that all will get adequate means of subsistence. This is a need of the Right Ideal, and a demand of our consciousness itself. It is on account of this element of Beauty, or similarity with the Right Ideal, in Communism that people mistake it for the ideal of their nature and become ready to devote themselves to it. Every action of a person who loves the Right Ideal is directed to help evolution in himself as well as in others. Nobody can satisfy the urge of self and march forward on the road of evolution unless the necessities imposed upon him by his instincts, which are themselves evolved by consciousness, are satisfied. These necessities form the immediate ends for the achievement of the ultimate end, the Right ideal. He can, therefore, have no purpose in accumulating wealth and whatever amount of it remains over with him after the satisfaction of his needs he must make it over to people who need it. People accumulate wealth only when their ideal is wealth, or when the accumulation of wealth is required by their ideal. The Right Ideal, while it requires the production of wealth as much as possible, does not require the accumulation of wealth; it requires, on the other hand, the distribution of wealth as much as possible. No person living in a state founded on the Right Ideal will, therefore, be permitted to accumulate wealth. Such a state will, however, see that the necessities imposed by our instincts are reasonably satisfied in the case of all persons.

 

Since in the history of evolution the urge of hunger came into existence before the urge of ideals the former need not be the cause of the latter nor the latter need be the product of the former. Ideals are peculiar to man and even in him they assume a clear-cut form distinguishable from the instinctive desires only when a person’s age and self-knowledge have developed sufficiently. The instinct of hunger, on the other hand, has existed since the first animal came into being. The existence of the urge of hunger prior to the urge of ideals should rather indicate the lower and subservient character of the former. Evolution is always leading towards something better and higher. The process of evolution has its analogy in the growth of a tree. As we move forward we reach what is more valuable and more worthy of preservation; we achieve something for which the lower achievements may be sacrificed, if necessary, or which they may be made to subserve. Although the flower, the fruit, and the seed grow last of all in a tree, yet they form the highest and the most valuable products of the tree and the whole growth of the tree is subservient to the purpose of acquiring these products. Just as the urge of instincts in the animal world ruled the laws of matter, so the urge of ideals in the human stage rules the laws of instincts. An urge that develops later in the process of evolution must be the higher and the ruling urge. This is not merely a theory, but we actually see the fact of it daily in our experience. People frequently rule and sacrifice their instinctive desires for the sake of their ideals.

 

There is no doubt that, generally, we attend, before everything else, to the satisfaction of hunger and other instinctive, compelling needs of the body. When we are hungry, we would rather eat than pray to God or indulge in Philosophy, Art or Science. But it will be wrong to conclude from this as a general law of human psychology that our economic needs matter to us more than our ideals or that the latter are the product of the former. The reason is that there are some occasions when we do not turn to the satisfaction of hunger and other compelling needs of the body first of all when we sacrifice them completely for the sake of our ideals which reveal themselves to us as our foremost concern. This fact leads us to the conclusion that, when we do satisfy our economic needs before everything else, we must be doing so, consciously or unconsciously, for the sake of our ideals and as an end subservient to them, so that we may live and realise them. We are apt to ignore or underrate the force of the ideals because even when our ideals are high enough to be distinct from the instinctive desires, it is seldom that their love is highly developed. But if we are to understand the real, natural relationship of the ideal with hunger and other instinctive desires and formulate a general law of our nature on the basis of it, we must take into consideration those rare cases also in which the ideals are high and their love is found to have been strongly developed. For example, we must take into consideration the man who fasts continuously or eats once a day or submits to other such ascetic practices in spite of opulence to please his Creator; or the man who becomes a martyr for his religion or his country or his nation; or the prophet who preaches devotion to one God to a chafing, warlike, idolatrous people at the risk of his life and cannot be bribed into silence by any amount of riches or worldly power; or the prince who leaves the luxury of his palace for a life of extreme hardships in search of nothing but truth. No reasonable, convincing explanation of such facts is possible on the Marxist view of human nature.

 

In the case of a man who sacrifices his life willingly for a nation or a country a Marxist may argue that he does so, not because his ideal is a force independent of the economic factor, hut because he believes that his nation, if not he himself, will benefit economically, so that the urge to sacrifice his life is again of an economic origin. But this reasoning is extremely fallacious. It does not help us to explain his ideal as an outcome of his desire for food, since he forgoes for himself not only food but also his life for the maintenance of which food was required by him. Starting originally with the motive of feeding himself better in order to maintain his life, how can he end with destroying himself in order to feed others in a better way? It was more consistent with his original motive to eat less and continue to live himself than to die in order that others may eat more. The fact that he becomes ready to die shows that the desire which enables him to lay down his life is for something which is far more precious to him than mere eating and living, on his own part, or on the part of those for whom he is alleged to die. That the society benefited economically after the death of the patriot does not prove that he acted for the sake of an economic gain, when we know it for certain that he himself had actually spurned such a gain. His action as a member of his community cannot but be due to his motives as an individual. The joint action of individuals must obey those very laws of human nature which hold good for each human being separately. A society is nothing but a group of individuals and the action of the society is nothing but the sum total of the actions of its individual members. This implies that even when an individual is acting in the society and for the society, he can act only on account of motives and desires that are his own and for the sake of a benefit that accrues to him personally. Obviously, the patriot dies for the sake of an idea, for the sake of a psychological or a spiritual benefit and not for any material or economic gain as a Marxist would give us to understand. His motive in sacrificing his life is no other than his love for the ideal which dominates all his other loves and desires, even his desire to live on. The benefit that comes to him is the satisfaction (entirely different in character from the satisfaction we derive from the instincts) of having obeyed his ideal. In the absence of this satisfaction he would have considered himself to be a criminal and would have felt very miserable. The economic gain to the society is an incidental result of the nature of the ideal for which he sacrifices himself. He loves his ideal for its own sake and because it is the highest good, the highest beauty known to him. There are innumerable cases in which an individual becomes ready to make all sorts of sacrifices for an ideal of which the nature is such that there is no possibility of any economic gain to anybody as a result of his sacrifices for that ideal.

 

In the earlier stages of our life as individuals as well as in the primitive stages of our history as a race, our ideals correspond to our instinctive desires so much that they cannot be easily distinguished from them. As long as the level of our self-knowledge is very low, the urge of self and the urge of instinct correspond to each other. The impulse for the ideal finds an expression in the desires of instincts because nothing more attractive than these desires is known to us. At this stage, naturally, the instinctive or the economic urge is the only urge that is apparent. It is in fact more conspicuous in man than it is in the animal at this stage because the impulse for the ideal adds to the force of the instinctive desires making them stronger than they really (i.e. biologically, as in the animal) are. Unlike the animal which sits down quietly when its hunger is satisfied, we quarrel continuously with each other for a greater and greater satisfaction of these desires for their own sake. We behave like children who give the whole of their attention to these desires because they are unable to control them for the sake of their natural higher desires of which they are not yet conscious. This fact is very important since we have to guard against the misunderstanding that it creates. On account of it, we are apt to overrate the importance of the economic urge and to regard it as fundamental throughout. We forget that the coincidence of the urge of self and the urge of instinct pertains to a particular stage of our development. As our self-knowledge grows beyond this stage, the urge of self comes more and more into its own, our ideals become more and more separated from the instinctive desires which they begin to rule. Slowly, they rise higher from the body and its instincts as a balloon rises gradually from the earth. But while they rise above the body and its needs, they are not cut off entirely from it. They rise above it in order to rule it and to use it as an instrument in their own service more and more efficiently. They rise from a lower perfection to a higher perfection. They approach nearer and nearer to Beauty, Goodness and Truth which constitute the object of our innate desire in the urge of self. Since they have a source independent of the instincts, their development and evolution also have a law of their own.

 

After all there must be some reason why our political, religious or philosophical ideals and ideologies, even if they are determined by the economic factor and even if they are unconscious and distorted reflections of economic conditions develop around the abstract ideas of Goodness, Beauty and Truth alone. Why is it that they partake of these very qualities in one form or another more or less? Why is it that they approach these very qualities more and more as our knowledge of ourselves is growing? Even when trying to remove economic maladjustments we express our eagerness for democracy, truth, equality, fraternity, liberty, justice, freedom, morality and such-like notions. Is it then too much to say that we have a desire for these qualities as we have a desire for food? These qualities, understood to the best of our knowledge, are our common desire, whenever we are struggling for a social change, whether as French revolutionaries or as American soldiers in the War of Independence or as the peasants of England headed by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw or as the Communists of Lenin or as the crusaders of Richard or as the Protestants of Luther or as the followers of Colet, Erasmus and More, the leaders of the Renaissance. The desire for Beauty, Goodness and Truth in their greater and greater perfection is the urge of our nature, our self. Whenever we awake to it, we discover it to be far stronger than our desire for food, or the desire for life itself. The urge of self can never be disobeyed, although it can be often misunderstood, so that we often take a part of it for the whole. There is no doubt that Marx himself acted as an unwitting servant of this urge, when he created his revolutionary philosophy infused with a fervour for justice and freedom, or when he summoned the labourers of the world to action. Throughout his philosophy he has emphasised justice, equality and freedom—abstract slogans which are appropriate to a man of religion.

 

The desire for justice is a part of the urge of self; justice is desired not only by Marx and his followers but by all of us to whatever economic class we may belong, provided we become really conscious of it. Whenever we become really conscious of injustice, we hate it, not only because it means an economic loss to us, but also and more fundamentally because it is our nature to love justice and to hate injustice. The proof is that we hate injustice not only when it is done to us but also when it is done to others; and we hate it in everything, not only in matters of money and apportionment or wealth, but also in judgments of personal excellence, honour, capability and character against ourselves or others. When we become really conscious of injustice, we hate it again not only in others but also in ourselves. And honour and character are by no means money-earning equipments; rather, we frequently sacrifice money to preserve them.

 

The cause of social and political revolutions as explained by Marx contains but a fraction of truth. All social and political revolutions are due to the urge of self. This urge, we have noticed, is a definite desire of our nature capable of being definitely known and satisfied, although we seldom care to understand it definitely. But whether we understand it definitely or not, it is always goading us to act in obedience to itself to the extent to which we understand it. It is this desire which makes us feel what is right and what is wrong, what is desirable and what is undesirable. It is this desire which calls attention to the conditions that need to be changed. In its absence we would be contented with anything that happens to be our lot and we would act only when compelled by our psycho-physical dispositions which we possess in common with the lower animals. It gives meaning to the conditions, whether they are economic or otherwise, against which we rebel in the case of social revolutions. The conditions are known as unsatisfactory because of our desire for Beauty. They are brought about by ideals which are lacking in Beauty and which happen to have gained in power and established their rule. The elements of imperfection or ugliness in the ideal are reflected completely and accurately in the conditions that they create.

 

An ideal is discovered as wrong in the course of action. If it is wrong, it makes us act in such a way that we involve ourselves in difficulties, that is, action in obedience to a wrong ideal creates conditions which are unsatisfactory to us. For example, there appears an extremely unequal distribution of wealth resulting in an extreme poverty for some persons and extreme opulence for others or crime and moral laxity become alarmingly frequent or we have incessant wars which we do not know how to avoid. Unsatisfactory conditions, whether they are economic, moral, physical or intellectual, established by the ruling wrong ideal make us conscious of the unsatisfactory nature of the ideal causing it. The more intolerable the conditions that a wrong ideal brings about, the quicker and deeper is our consciousness of the elements of ugliness that it contains.

 

Since generally our self-knowledge is very poor, so long as the conditions do not become unbearable, we continue to admire the ideal that creates them more or less. But a highly self-conscious man knows, long before the ideal is actually abandoned, that it can have no permanence and cannot bring about anything but misery and harm to the society that entertains it. As soon as we become fully conscious of the aspects of imperfection in an ideal, owing to the unsatisfactory conditions brought about by it, we proceed to change it resorting to action as vigorous as possible. This action is aimed at, and results in, a social revolution. As long as we act half-heartedly, our consciousness of ugliness in the ideal is incomplete. Having overthrown the rule of the old ideal, which is discovered by us to be wrong, we establish the rule of a new ideal in which we avoid the elements of ugliness which the old ideal contained.

 

But in the absence of a sufficient knowledge of Beauty, while we avoid the known elements of imperfection in the new ideal, we generally introduce some other unknown elements of imperfection into it from which we suffer later on. Under the rule of the Right Ideal, established really in every heart, there would be no economic maladjustments or other unsatisfactory conditions and there would be no social revolutions and no changes of social formation.

 

Our ideals are indeed determined by circumstances in this sense that, as soon as the circumstances become intolerable, we understand the wrong elements in the ideal that creates them and consequently desire a new ideal. The change may, therefore, be considered as the result of circumstances in a sense. Really the change is due to that meaning which we impart to circumstances on account of our innate desire for Beauty. We should not lose sight of the fact that we change to a new ideal because we want new conditions and we discarded the old ideal because the conditions brought by it were undesirable. In discarding the old ideal and adopting a new one we give proof of our conviction, conscious or unconscious, that conditions are determined by our ideals or, to use a term of Marx, by our “consciousness” and not that our “consciousness” is determined by conditions, economic or otherwise. Lenin destroyed the rule of the old ideal in Russia because he wanted to establish a new set of economic conditions which necessitated the rule of a new ideal, the ideal of Communism.

 

That the cause of social revolutions is the urge of self and not the economic urge becomes apparent only when we consider the higher stages of self-knowledge, when our ideals begin to rise above and govern our individual instinctive desires. Of course, the ideal, however much it may  rise in the scale of Beauty, remains closely related to our economic needs in this sense that the manner in which we satisfy these needs is one of the ways in which our love for the ideal expresses itself. The ideal has to rule the instinctive desires in order to realize itself. Just because we strive for the ideal for its own sake, we cannot help affecting the manner in which we satisfy our instinctive desires on account of it. It conditions the manner in which we satisfy these desires as individuals and as a society. This manner is sometimes desirable and sometimes undesirable depending upon the standard of perfection that our ideal has achieved, and the approach that it has been able to make to the qualities of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. When it is undesirable, our desire for Beauty tests it and discovers it as such. Then we feel the need to change the ideal that is responsible for it. The change takes place away from those aspects of ugliness and towards those aspects of Beauty of which we have become conscious.

 

Our ideals are judgments of Beauty, depending upon our knowledge and innate capacities which vary from man to man. The same events are judged differently by different persons because their knowledge, understanding or intuition differs. Our ideals or philosophical creeds, therefore, cannot be determined by economic conditions or modes or phases of production. They follow a law of their own; they have their own history, their own development.

 

Far from the mode of production determining the consciousness of men it is their consciousness which determines production and its modes.

 

Let us consider why it is that the phases of production change at all. They change evidently on account of a continuous extension and complication of our wants. Men produce wealth because they need wealth and they produce it at every stage of their evolution in a manner which, according to them, best fits their needs at that stage. The nature of what Marx denotes as “the productive forces” is nothing but man himself acting on matter or environment in response to his own nature. It is not “men” who are “determined by a definite development of their productive forces”, as Marx imagines, but it is the development of productive forces which is determined by men, by their desires and activities, by their increasing knowledge and by their discoveries of new facts and possibilities following their research and exploration in obedience to the promptings of their nature. Marx is wrong when he says, “What individuals are depends upon the material conditions of their production”. It is in fact the individuals who alter, maintain, accept or reject the material conditions of production to suit themselves, their nature and their desires.

 

The continuous extension and complication of our wants are due to an insatiable desire for Beauty. All the wealth that we produce is not required for the mere satisfaction of hunger and such-like instinctive desires. Our wants are not really as extensive and as complicated as we have made them. We share our fundamental needs with our ancestors, the cavemen of old. The modern man eats, drinks, clothes and shelters himself and the caveman used to indulge in the same activities. That these needs of the caveman were satisfied by him fully and adequately can be judged from the fact that he was able to live on, prosper and have an offspring which is the human race of today. The modern civilised man too can satisfy these basic needs of his fully and adequately by living like the caveman but actually the manner in which he satisfies them is vastly different from that of the dwellers of the caves. The difference is created only by our desire for Beauty which has been finding ever greater and greater expression in the manner of our living through the ages. Thus there has been an evolution in our wants as well as in the modes of production. The modes of production would not have changed at all unless our wants had grown in all directions.

 

We already know that our desire for Beauty has many aspects. We express it in four different ways, in the love of ideals, in moral action, in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and in art. Of these ways of loving Beauty the first one is the most important and the most comprehensive, since our ideal is, to the best of our knowledge, the whole of the Beauty that we desire. Other ways in which we express our love for Beauty only subserve the ideal, directly or indirectly. Art was defined as the expression of Beauty in brick, stone, colour, voice, sound, word, or movement. But there is another variety of art which consists in the expression of Beauty in the manner of living, that is, the manner in which we satisfy our desires. It is indulged in by all human beings more or less at all times but it has reached its highest standard so far in the life of the modern man. It is this art which we designate by the name of civilisation.

 

Just study the living of a civilised man of today. There is beauty in the cut, quality, and combination of colours of his dress. There is beauty in the design and shape of his residential house, its furniture, equipment and decoration. There is beauty in the appearance and arrangement of his chairs, tables, books, carpets, sofas, wall pictures and other articles in his room. There is beauty in the manner he talks, eats, drinks, travels, plays and behaves generally. In order to introduce beauty into the manner of living he requires, not only material objects, but also personal excellence, polish, education and training. His taste or his desire for Beauty which we find reflected in his material possessions is in fact guided by his knowledge, education and training. As our knowledge grows, we are able to live a more and more refined and artistic life. When you meet a modern man of average means in his drawing room, you are impressed with him as an artist of a type. To live a civilised and decent life is an art and belongs to the same category as the painting of a beautiful picture. Like every other variety of art, it is due to our urge for Beauty. In the effort to express Beauty in the manner of living we extend our needs and make them more and more complicated. We express Beauty not only in the material articles that we produce but also in the manner in which we produce them. The extension and complication of our needs on account of our urge for Beauty both as consumers and producers accounts for the changing phases of production.

 

Economists, Professor Marshall being one of them, tell us that we multiply our needs on account of our desire for variety or desire for comfort or desire for distinction. But when we examine these motives closely, they turn out to have their source in our desire for Beauty. We love variety in our dress, food and other requirements because of our desire for Beauty which is insatiable. Whenever we attribute charm to an object or feel an attraction for it, we do so on account of our innate desire for Beauty. But nothing is permanently attractive except consciousness or the source of Beauty itself. A continued contact with the object reveals the fact that, after all, it is not as charming as we thought it to be. Its beauty proves unreal because it does not go with us the whole length of our desire; it does not grow with our desire and, therefore, does not satisfy the whole of it. Then we feel the monotony of associating with the object; we become tired of it and look for Beauty in something else, in other words, we desire variety. The love of variety is, therefore, really due to the love of Beauty; we desire a different object to associate with in the hope that it will be more satisfactory to our insatiable desire for Beauty. The desire for a different object is a conscious or unconscious desire for a more beautiful object.

 

Even when we desire variety for the sake of self-display or social distinction, it is due to our desire for Beauty. Social distinction is obtained by conveying an impression of Beauty and thereby winning the approval or admiration of society which is really the society’s response to Beauty. We win social distinction by displaying beauty in our dress, in our material possessions, in our abilities, character and the way of living generally. Our sense of social distinction is synonymous with the sense of approval of persons we love or admire, that is, of persons to whom we attribute Beauty or Perfection. It is secured by expressing beauty in ourselves which is also a way of loving beauty in others. Thus the desire for distinction is also at bottom a desire for Beauty.

 

It is the same innate desire for Beauty, the same artistic sense, so conspicuous, developed and trained in the modern man which impelled the caveman to come out of his cave and build a hut of twigs to live in. The possibility of a new way of seeking shelter, more comfortable than the first, was suggested to him by this desire.

 

A refined method of satisfying a need is desired by us initially, not on account of the comfort that attends it, but on account of the desire for Beauty that it satisfies. For we see that people sometimes undergo an unproportionate discomfort in order to secure the comfort that results from a new artistic combination of the material means of satisfying a need. The increase of comfort is a proof only of the increased harmony we succeed in establishing between our needs and the means of satisfying them, and harmony is nothing but Beauty. It is true that, after sometime, when, on the one hand the use of the article becomes monotonous, and on the other, we become used to comfort, we think more of the comfort that it brings than the desire for Beauty that it satisfies. Then we imagine that it is less beautiful than it should be and we wish to have it refined still further.

 

Comfort implies an easier achievement of purpose; it implies efficiency.

 

The more comfortable thing is the more efficient thing. Efficiency, in its turn, is connected closely with the ideal. Before ascribing efficiency to an object we determine the purpose, the end or the ideal for which it is efficient. An article that is useful and efficient for one man may be entirely useless and inefficient for another who has a different ideal, end or purpose in view. Efficiency, therefore, means power for the realisation of our ends or ideals. As such, it cannot be distinguished from Beauty. Efficiency is Beauty because it is power. The moment we think of efficiency, we think of a quicker possible approach to our ideal, we think, that is, of Beauty itself. An efficient object reflects the Beauty of the ideal. We have known that we attribute beauty not only to our ideal but also to all those subservient ends which bring the ideal nearer to us. Really these ends are not apart from the ideal; they are within the ideal and that is why they are attractive to us. Thus since the capacity to give comfort is the same thing as efficiency and efficiency is Beauty, our desire for comfort is a desire for Beauty. Here it is necessary to repeat that our free desire for Beauty which is a characteristic of the urge of self is different from that lower type of attraction which is compelled by the urge of our animal instincts and must not be confused with it.

 

Again, it is not necessity that compels us to have a more complicated system of wants than the caveman had. Necessity has a different meaning for different persons, of different tastes, understanding and education. Of two men having the same income one may feel the necessity to live a more decent life than the other because he has a greater desire for Beauty or, what is the same thing, he has a better taste and a better sense of decency. He may feel it necessary to own a car or a radio or to have high-class furniture, equipment or crockery in his house, while the other may justly feel that he can do without many of these things. So far as the bare necessity that is involved in our wants is concerned, it is no more than what the caveman used to feel. This necessity was fully satisfied by the caveman because be was able to maintain his life very well and have a progeny which is the modern man. All our wants beyond those that correspond to the bare satisfaction of our instinctive animal desires are unnecessary as far as we are animals; they are necessary as far as we are men. They are created by our desire for Beauty as men. As human beings we not only need to satisfy our instinctive desires but we also want to satisfy them more and more beautifully and artistically. Even if it is necessity which makes us extend our wants more and more, it is similar to the necessity which the painter feels of having a particular shade of colour in a particular part of his picture. It has its source in our desire for Beauty. Necessity is, no doubt, the mother of invention, but we have to consider why it is that we continue to feel one necessity after another and go on inventing without a stop. It is no doubt on account of our desire for ever greater and greater Beauty and Perfection. We can, therefore, safely modify the statement and say that the desire for Beauty is the mother of invention. The standard of that art which we call civilisation is improving and our life is increasing in beauty, at least in one of its aspects, as fresh ideas are enabling us to add to our wants.

 

Our instinctive desires are, no doubt, the fundamental cause of our efforts to produce wealth; wealth develops mainly around the necessity that we feel of satisfying these desires as ideals or as servants of ideals. But we must make a sharp distinction between the necessity that we feel of satisfying the needs for which we feel a biological compulsion and the necessity that we feel of satisfying those needs, of a spiritual origin, which grow around them on account of our desire for a refined living. The former are our fundamental instinctive needs as animals and the latter constitute the superfluous additions that we make to them on account of our desire for Beauty as human beings. The latter, spiritual in character, overgrow around the nucleus of the former which are of a biological nature. There is no doubt that on account of habit and personal conviction a certain amount of overgrowth varying in degree for various persons becomes as necessary to us as the central nucleus. We do not want to live entirely like animals, as far as possible. Many people would rather starve themselves to death in a famine than eat what they hate. But the fact remains that a majority of our wants is merely superfluous so far as the maintenance of our life is concerned. There is a level up to which we must satisfy our instinctive needs in order to live on. As our income grows, we are able to satisfy more and more of our additional wants and rise higher and higher above the level of the barest needs. As our income decreases, we are less and less able to satisfy our additional needs and come nearer and nearer that level.

 

The activity of our intellect in the search of knowledge helps us to improve the standard of the art of living. As our knowledge grows, we are able to give a greater and greater expression to our desire for Beauty in the manner of living. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is itself an aspect of the urge of self. As we satisfy this aspect of our desire for Beauty, we increase our power to live a more refined life. With the growth of scientific knowledge we are able to produce the means of life more and more easily, in larger quantities and at less and less cost and effort. We refine not only the articles that we produce but also the methods and the instruments by which we produce them. The instruments themselves become articles of need and require other instruments for their production. In this way the instruments of production go on improving and our wants go on complicating and refining more and more. Education and training become essential for such production and add to the list of our wants arising from the desire for Beauty.

 

Karl Marx takes the idea of contradiction and movement in matter by inversion from Hegel, but his conception is only a travesty of a truth. As a matter of fact, there is no more contradiction between “productive forces” and “production relations” than there is between the two states of a man who first of all opens a tap to have a bath and then discovers that he has to adjust his position to receive the flowing water on his body or of a man who switches on the light in his room to read a book and then finds that he must (at the cost of some inconvenience to himself) open the book and adopt a suitable posture to read it. In his search for Beauty man is always adjusting himself to himself. This is true of the human individual as well as of the human society, and we are familiar with the close analogy between an individual and a group. It is not merely an analogy; a perfectly organised group is an individual from a scientific point of view. As there is a consciousness of the human individual, so there is a consciousness of the human society, and the urge of consciousness in each case is to seek more and more of Beauty. Some of the limbs of the individual create a change in the environment which the individual desires and his other limbs or rather the individual as a whole adjusts himself to this change. By this adjustment the individual goes in for the full benefit of the change that he had himself initiated. In the case of the human society some men initiate the change which is really desired by the society as a whole and other individuals or rather the society as a whole adjusts itself to this change. By this adjustment the society goes in for the full benefit of the change that it had itself initiated. It is this adjustment that Karl Marx describes as the change of “production relations” to suit “productive forces” as if “production relations” and “productive forces” are fundamentally opposed to each other.

 

Unfortunately, Marx does not realise that the new productive forces and the new production relations are both the creation of society; both originate in the same unconscious and yet powerful urge of the human society to advance a step nearer to Beauty and Perfection in everything. Every change of environment, every new development of productive forces that man brings about or accepts, is for the sake of a greater satisfaction of his urge for Beauty. When the society has brought about and adjusted itself to one change, we have one set of production relations and, when it has brought about and adjusted itself to the next, we have another set of such relations. The change of society from one mode of production to another comes as a result of the general will of the society originating in their urge for Beauty. Some men may, no doubt, find it difficult to adjust themselves to a change brought about by their more imaginative and enterprising brothers but, because the change happens to be more satisfactory to the nature of man, the society as a whole welcomes it and these men cannot resist it. The new production relations are not independent of the will of society as a whole, although they may be independent of the will of some individuals temporarily.

 

Marx had stated that men are “determined by a definite development of their productive forces” and that production relations are “independent of their wills”. But it seems that subsequent Communist philosophy has moulded or reinterpretted such statements of his with a view to bringing them nearer to facts. “Man”, say the writers of A Text-Book of Marxist Philosophy, “is conditioned but not determined by social structure and the stage of economic development” (p. 21). Again, they write, “Man is partly determined by his environment. But his relation to his environment is not a static one. In the first place the environment itself is as much the creation of man as man is the creation of environment. Interaction is continuous. The changes wrought by man react on man himself and then man proceeds to yet further changes.”

 

But this latter statement is still misleading. It is certainly incorrect in the sense in which it is intended by its authors, that is, as suggesting that there is a real conflict between man and the change of environment which is created or accepted by man. Man adjusts himself to a change of environment favourable to himself for the sake of a greater satisfaction of his desire for Beauty. We cannot say, therefore, that the environment has changed him in spite of him. When the change of environment is unfavourable to him and comes in spite of him, he tries to resist it, oppose it and minimise its adverse effects as much as he can; he tries to change the environment again instead of changing himself. Man is continuously bringing about or accepting changes of environment that suit his desires and opposing and rejecting changes that do not suit him. He changes the environment but the desires of his own nature have a definite character and it is these desires which make man what he is. We can realise and satisfy these desires more, but we cannot change them.

 

Whenever it appears to us that man has changed on account of the change of environment, what has really happened is that either the change of environment was favourable to man and he has learnt to exploit it for a fuller satisfaction of his unchangeable desires or it was unfavourable to him and he has learnt to resist successfully its interference with the satisfaction of these desires. In neither case has man changed himself fundamentally. Man’s relation to his environment is certainly not static but it is so because his desire for Beauty is insatiable and he is himself dynamic and progressive.

 

To conclude the above discussion, the gradual increase in our wants, together with the means of satisfying them and the consequent changes in the modes of production are due to our desire to introduce more and more of beauty into the manner of living. Since artistic ideals, developing as they do gradually in standard with the growth of knowledge, have to be included in the term “consciousness” used by Marx, it follows that a large part of our “social existence” and “material life” which, according to Marx, determines our “consciousness”, is itself determined by our “consciousness”. Man is his “consciousness”, his desire for Beauty in the form of art of all kinds including the art of civilisation and in the form of morals, religion, philosophy and science. Take away “consciousness” from man and nothing remains of him except the animal. He will still eat, drink, seek shelter and satisfy his other instinctive needs to the last limit of necessity, no doubt, but that is exactly what the animal also does. He will not only have no religion, no politics and no philosophy, but will also be unable to produce or reproduce anything. All production and reproduction peculiar to man, whatever the phase through which it is passing and whatever the mode in which it is carried on, is due to his “consciousness” or his desire for Beauty which includes his taste for art in all its varieties.

 

The desire for wealth over and above that which is necessary for the maintenance of life is, however, a restricted form of our desire for Beauty. It is confined to the expression of Beauty in the manner in which we satisfy our needs. Naturally, therefore, wealth does not satisfy the whole of our urge of self. By far the most important form in which we express this urge is the love of an ideal. We ascribe to the ideal the whole of the Beauty that we desire. The ideals, therefore, rule our desire for wealth. But we must allow for the fact that, although we always make the best choice that we can, our ideals are not always of the highest perfection. They are noble or ignoble, worthy or unworthy, according as they have more or less of beauty in them. Sometimes our ideal is so low and so close to the instinctive desires that it is unable to rule them. In such a case wealth itself is our ideal and we are greedy and selfish. In such a case we may be civilised but we are not cultured. Just as civilisation is the standard of Beauty we achieve in the manner of living, culture is the standard of Beauty we achieve in our ideal. Civilisation and culture must go hand in hand. Civilisation without culture is dangerous.

 

When wealth is imagined to be the ideal of a man, it is not, strictly speaking, his ultimate desire. Every ideal is a social ideal because the nature of the self is social. The real and ultimate desire of the self is for a companion, a self or a person. The ideal, therefore, takes the form of an approval of some person or persons. The ideal has always some social reference whether this reference is clear or vague, definite or indefinite, conscious or unconscious. Wealth is desired by us for the sake of some approval that we seek through it. Most of the wealth that a man may hanker after, at present, will have no attraction for him should he come to know that he is all alone in the world. The greater portion of what Marx understands as the material life of man is, therefore, really his spiritual life. It is determined by an idea and not by any material object.

 

All wealth-production is in the service of the ideal. Wealth serves the ideal first of all by maintaining our life. But there is another important way in which it serves the ideal. The immediate object of whatever wealth is produced by us over and above the lowest limit of our biological necessities is no doubt the joy of having satisfied our desire for Beauty in the manner of living. But by improving upon the manner in which the primitive man used to satisfy his instinctive desires we increase simultaneously our efficiency and power which we harness in the service of the ideal. Every ideal is badly in need of efficiency and power. Since unlimited expansion is the demand of every ideal, an ideal can expand only at the expense of other ideals. It is, for this reason, engaged in a continuous war with other ideals and finds itself increasingly in need of power to cope successfully with rival ideals. This power consists of various factors, e.g. the standard of the ideal’s beauty and the numerical, moral, physical, intellectual and economic strength of men who love it. The higher the standard of an ideal’s beauty and the greater the number and efficiency of its adherents and helpers, the greater the power that the ideal commands.

 

Economic well-being is an important form of efficiency and power for an ideal. It is necessary for an ideal group, if it is to participate successfully in the mutual struggle of ideals, not only for the maintenance of its own life, but also for the satisfaction of its natural desire for expansion. When the economic instrument improves, the ideal is able to expand and enlarge its power. Whenever it does so, it is able to make the economic instrument still more efficient and the efficiency of the instrument increased in this way is utilised by the ideal again to expand itself further.

 

The extent to which the ideal is able to satisfy its own needs of expansion depends partly upon those economic conditions which the ideal group has succeeded in setting up in the service of the ideal. The ideal has to take notice of these conditions always in order to improve them and to continue to adjust them more and more to its own needs. The economic instrument is prepared by the ideal as a partial help to itself and the ideal is strengthened by the instrument in part. Receiving help from the instrument and fashioning and improving the instrument on the part of the ideal go on simultaneously mixed up with each other. Thus the way in which we strive for the ideal is conditioned by the economic factor. But all along it is the ideal that determines the economic factor and rules it and it is the economic factor that serves the ideal. When Marx says that “the mode of production of the material subsistence conditions the social, political and spiritual life process in general”, he is right and we have to agree with him for reasons explained above. But when in the same breath he says, “it is the social existence of men that determines their consciousness”, he oversteps the limits of his previous statement and substitutes it by an assertion which he does not care to prove, as if it is merely a repetition of the former. He carelessly confuses the determining cause with the limiting condition.

 

Wealth acquires its proper place only when it is subserving the Right Ideal. In such a case there can be no economic injustice, no greed, no unnecessary, unjust or harmful equality or inequality in the distribution of wealth. But in the absence of the rule of the Right Ideal the internal or external check on injustice is absent and, since everybody has the freedom to acquire as much wealth as he likes there appears necessarily a great variety in the standards of wealth achieved by different persons. This gives rise to the so- called “economic classes” ranging one above the other. A mere economic class is never a united group of men. The individuals in an economic class have nothing in common with each other except perhaps their vocations or the approximation of their incomes to a certain standard. They behave as individuals and not as a class. More often than not they are the enemies of each other.

 

The “struggle of economic classes” of which Marx has made so much in his theory is a highly misleading term. No struggle is possible without the drive of the ideal. Every human struggle is essentially the struggle of ideals and not that of economic classes. Moreover, what Marx understands as the struggle of classes is really the struggle of individuals. It is the struggle of one individual against every other individual who comes in his way, whether he belongs to his own class or to a class above him or to a class below him. The motive power of this struggle is the ideal which is indeed the motive power of all our actions. It is controlled, checked or reinforced by the force of the ideal. The economic gain which the individual may aim at in this struggle acquires whatever force or importance it does acquire, on account of his ideal. Every individual of every economic class has his ideal, whether he is a guild master or a journeyman, a feudal lord or a serf, a bourgeois or a proletarian. An economic class becomes a united group of men capable of joint action only when their ideal becomes one. In such a case it is an ideal group and not merely an economic class. It is essentially the similarity of ideas that creates a unity and a homogeneity in a group of men and not the similarity of vocations or incomes. There are several ideals in every economic class and several classes in every ideal group.

 

Individuals, even when they belong to the same economic class, must remain at war with each other (for example, when trying to excel others of their class in canvassing and attracting customers) so long as their views and ideals do not coincide. On the other hand, persons having the same ideal will have a unity among them, although they may belong to different economic classes and have different standards of income or wealth. They will go to the length of willingly sharing their wealth among themselves, if they become conscious that their ideal requires it. Whenever men acted jointly in history, they did so because they had a common ideal. No economic class of men is ever able to act jointly unless they come to have a single ideal or someone succeeds in inspiring them with a single ideal by means of education and propaganda.

 

When Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto ending with the words, “Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains”, they did so because they felt the necessity of a common ideal for the workmen. It is a proof of their unconscious conviction that it is the idea or the ideal that rules our actions and makes us into a united group of men and not the economic factor. Moreover, in order to create a single ideal among the workmen, Marx laid stress on the injustice that was being done by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat and thereby appealed to the latter’s sense of justice and desire for freedom, qualities the desire for which forms a part of the urge of self. It was because of his unconscious belief that the workers will act only in obedience to a desire for the expression of these qualities that he needed to awaken this desire. Whenever people become conscious of the needs of justice which is an aspect of Beauty, they become ready to serve it, no matter to what economic class they belong. We struggle fundamentally for the ideal. The struggle for the ideal is not necessarily of an economic character. It is a struggle for everything, whether of a moral or material nature, that we require in the service of the ideal.

 

A person’s ideal is an idea which is most satisfactory to him and for which he feels the greatest attachment. When a number of individuals come to have the same ideal, their attachment for a common ideal creates a unity and a harmony among them. When an economic class is struggling for an economic advantage, it can be due to one of the two reasons: either the ideal of every member of the class without exception is that economic gain for which they are struggling or the desired economic gain is an end which can subserve equally a large number of different ideals entertained by different persons in this group.

 

In so far as they have the same ideal they will act in perfect unity; they form an ideal group and not merely an economic class. They belong to the same category as a set of religious fanatics fighting a crusade heedlessly of all economic losses to themselves. In the former case the ideal is wealth, in the latter case it is God. The ideal of each group is the idea of Beauty as understood by the members of the group. Each group struggles for a change which they think is in the right direction. The driving force in each case is the ideal.

 

In so far as these persons have different ideals but the same subservient end, they are not united permanently. As soon as the subservient end is gained, each will be ruled by his own ideal. It is also possible that some individuals in the group may be required by their ideal to part company with other men in the group in the course of the struggle. Then we shall see cases of faithlessness to the so called “class-interests”. But the faithlessness of these individuals to the class is really their faithfulness and loyalty to their own ideals. Experience has shown that it is really very difficult to make an economic class composed of persons of different ideals to act with perfect unity. Their ideals have first to be harmonized by means of education in all its suitable devices before they can act harmoniously. This is one reason why the Trade Union Movement started in England in the beginning of the nineteenth century could not be successful. This is one of the reasons also why the workers of England and America have not yet been able to feel one with those of Russia in their scheme of creating proletarian revolution in all countries of the world. It is a fact of history that as often as the Communists of Europe tried to form a Communists’ association composed of workers of various nationalities, it was shattered by disunion. Workmen of different ideals and ideologies cannot act together.

 

As soon as our ideal has developed sufficiently to become distinct from the instinctive desires, we cease to behave like animals. We manifest a new attitude, the human attitude, towards life. The economic urge ceases to appear as our only urge. The ideal or the sense of right or wrong created by the ideal becomes the driving force of our actions. The ideal may be very low and we may err miserably in judging what is right but, nevertheless, we do only what we think to be right. Sometimes it may be right for us to the best of our knowledge to procure an economic gain. Then we struggle for it. On another occasion it may be right to sacrifice it. Then we sacrifice it willingly. Before performing every act we label it as “right” and not as “economically beneficial” even when we know that the result of our action will be an economic gain. The fact that our judgments may be wrong or right, may vary from person to person or may be conscious or unconscious, does not alter the conclusion.

 

If the judgment is wrong or if it varies for different persons, it is due to a low stage of self-consciousness. If it is unconscious, it is still present in our minds and we can know its presence by introspection. Even a thief or a robber pacifies his conscience by means of arguments to justify his crimes. He obtains a sanction or a verdict of “right” from his conscience before committing the theft or robbery. Even he has a standard of right or wrong, although we may consider his standard to be very low. A wrong judgment is due to a lack of self-knowledge but the consciousness of right or wrong has a course of evolution leading up to the highest knowledge of the self. Economics, like politics, is subordinate to ethics. A bad economics like bad politics is invariably the result of bad ethics. The economic man or the political man is the ethical man first of all. In fact, economics, politics and ethics cannot be separated from each other. The economic man is at once the political as well as the ethical man.

 

Wherever there is an arithmetical inequality in the distribution of wealth, we know it easily and tolerate it, or rather take it as a matter of course, although it reflects undesirable social conditions. The mere existence of undesirable social conditions or even the existence of the knowledge that they exist is not enough to bring about a change. We have to become conscious of the fact that they are undesirable. This consciousness must have its source evidently in some internal standard of what is desirable and what is undesirable, what is wrong and what is right, and not in some standard of what is more or what is less economically or monetarily. The consciousness of more or less existed already but it was helpless and unable to achieve anything. Of these two kinds of consciousness it is the former consciousness that induces action and not the latter.

 

We act only when the consciousness of what is “desirable” or “right” comes to us, although the economic conditions demanding social change may have been known to us and may have existed long before the dawn of this consciousness. It is a proof that our action starts fundamentally in the service of this consciousness, this idea, and not in the service of any economic gain. This is also proved by the fact that our action intended to bring about a change comes to a stop, when the economic gain has reached a definite limit, which limit is again determined by the idea of what is “desirable” or “right”. If our fundamental object had been to gain economically, then, having once started to act for the achievement of this object, we should have continued to act and to gain economically to any extent. We stop at a certain limit because we fight essentially for what is right and not for what is more useful economically or what is greater as a mathematical quantity in money. Before opposing a system we judge it as wrong and condemn it. The source of this judgment is a criterion in our nature and we have always to depend upon this criterion alone when we want to invite a class or a group of men to action. Marx and Engels too had to depend upon it when they wrote their Manifesto. This criterion takes the form of an urge which constitutes a sort of a power house that supplies the energy we require for all our actions.

 

Original thought in philosophy is the forerunner of political revolutions because philosophy deals with ideals, the source of which is the urge of self. When old ideals lose their attraction for us, we are able to see the beauty of new ideals advocated by philosophy and feel attracted towards them irresistibly. The philosophy of Rousseau brought about the French Revolution in the nineteenth century as the philosophies of Gentile and Karl Marx brought about the Fascist and Communist revolutions in the present century.

 

The need of organizing and educating the labourers by propaganda is a proof that the efforts of the labourer to create revolutions in capitalist countries are not due merely to his desire to get more wealth for himself. This desire was always there but all by itself it was so weak that the labourer did not and could not exert himself for it. Moreover, it was subservient to ideals of national peace, national solidarity, imperialism, misunderstood religion, contentment, etc., and it could not, therefore, acquire sufficient force to induce vigorous action for its own satisfaction. It was necessary to make it independent of the ideals that were ruling it in order to enable it to have its own way. It was necessary to raise it to the standard of the principal desire from its position as a subordinate desire. In order to make it sufficiently powerful it was essential, not only to liberate it from the domination of another powerful desire in us, that is, the desire for the ideal, but also to reinforce it by that desire. Both these objects could merge into one and could be achieved simultaneously by replacing the various existing ideals of the proletariat, by a single suitable ideal compatible with the purpose of the Communist revolutionary. It is this replacement and change of ideals that is aimed at by the theories of so-called “scientific socialism” and propaganda for the organisation and education of the worker, which are really devices of a spiritual approach to his heart. Their object is to disengage the labourer’s natural, innate desire for the ideal which is being utilised by different ideals for the time being and make it free and available to add its force to the force of his already existing weak and inactive desire for more wealth.

 

The source of every ideal is the urge of self for Beauty, some aspects of which are justice and freedom which include economic justice and economic freedom, qualities which are particularly attractive to the Communist. The Communist propaganda is, therefore, intended to awaken this aspect of the urge of self in the labourer and make it so attractive in his eyes as to surpass in beauty every ideal which may be ruling him, so attractive that his love for it may overpower his love for every existing ideal with which he may be inspired. This propaganda must naturally derive an immense power from the theory of Marx which clears the way for the ideals of economic justice and economic freedom by an attempted “scientific” repudiation of all other ideals.

 

If today the workman wants to upset capitalism everywhere in the world, it is not so much on account of a desire for his own personal economic gain as for the sake of his ideal of economic justice which he wants to serve because it attracts him more than any other idea. Serving the ideal is itself a source of satisfaction for him. He loves not so much the economic gain that may come to him as a result of his revolutionary activities, if he survives them, but the justice that he hopes to establish in a part of the world through these activities, whether he survives them or not. As long as he desired only the economic gain his desire was never strong enough to turn him into a revolutionary. It was weighed down by his ideals. He does not so much envy the riches of the bourgeoisie as he hates their injustice and greed. One proof of this is that he is not infrequently being helped by those rich people who, as human beings, are being affected as much as the labourer by a propaganda which the Communist really intends for the latter.

 

The urge of self is the same in all human beings, whatever the economic class to which they may belong. We all love justice and hate injustice. The Communists’ propaganda awakens in the labourer’s heart a desire which he shares with all other human beings. The rich man who becomes conscious of justice and, therefore, helps the labourers had evidently to lose rather than to gain economically by a proletarian revolution. Yet he is bound to obey the urge of self in him because he becomes conscious of it; we are all bound to obey it, whenever we become conscious of it, whether we gain economically like the labourer or lose economically like the rich man. Another proof is that the most highly cultured men throughout the world, irrespective of their classes— men, therefore, who are the nearest to the knowledge of Beauty and who are the most qualified to understand it and love it— are espousing the cause of the labourer. This is certainly not class- consciousness but self-consciousness.

 

Every workman knows that he is a workman. He is fully conscious of his class but it is possible that he may not be conscious of the injustice of the capitalist system, because this system happens to be a part and parcel of the ideal that he loves. Communism, as an ideal, cannot attract him unless he is able to shake off the love of his existing ideal. As long as Communism is not attractive enough for him to enable him to overcome the love of his existing ideal, he can never join the Communists. England, according to Marx, was the model of a country that was ripe for a Communist revolution even in his own days about a century ago but his forecast about England has yet to come out true and there is little possibility of its coming out true in the near future.

 

Certainly, one reason why the prophecy of Marx has proved to be wrong is that the English labourer loves his ideal of British Nationalism more than the ideal of Communism. He will not like to change his ideal of Nationalism for that of Communism. He will rather try to seek his economic rights constitutionally and in a manner which does not violate this ideal. The socialist philosopher ventured to make his forecast because he failed to see that it is the ideal that induces action, that economic considerations do not always count for everything and that the workers of England may, therefore, continue to find some ideal of a spiritual character far more attractive than some other, of an economic importance, which he expected them to love.

 

The fact that ideals (which include philosophical creeds) determine the social existence of men stares the Communist philosophers in their face and they feel that they cannot ignore it although they must also believe in the contrary dictum of Marx, which is the very foundation of Marxism, that the social existence of men determines their ideals, They are, therefore, confused and their confusion often results in illogical and conflicting statements. The following sentences occur in A Text-Book of Marxist Philosophy:

 

“Man is conditioned but not determined by social structure and the stage of economic development.”

 

“But the Russian knows that a man’s creed matters, that it may be a positive force behind exploitation and parasitism and that you cannot destroy the social disease if you do not accompany your political and industrial measures with the refutation of capitalist philosophy and propagation of an alternative . . . They know the fallacies of the system they repudiate and they have a system of their own to be the master light of all their seeing.”

 

“This will occasion surprise in those who have always understood that the first principle of Soviet philosophy was the economic determination of ideas. But although no creed comes into existence as a mere development of thought and out of all relation to social needs, yet once a creed is born it has a force of its own. If it is believed, it will help to perpetuate the social system to which it belongs, if it is overthrown one of the buttresses of that system will be taken away. Therefore, the Russian is inclined to believe with Chesterton that the practical and important thing about a man is his view of the Universe.”

 

“We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy’s numbers but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy.”

 

“There has been no great movement in history that was not also a philosophical movement. The time of big theories was the time of big results.”

 

“It is indeed impossible to keep the mind free from philosophy. The man who says he is no philosopher is merely a bad philosopher” [Italics are mine].

 

The admission that a man’s creed may be a positive force behind exploitation, that the social disease cannot be eradicated unless the creed is destroyed, that a creed has an activity and a force of its own, that the practical and important thing about a man is his philosophy or view of the Universe, that every great movement in history was philosophical rather than economic, that big theories are the causes rather than the results of big events, that philosophy is unavoidable, is nothing if not a contradiction of the fundamentals of Marxism. It only means that the presence as well as the absence, the appearance as well as the disappearance of social disease, is determined by the philosophical creeds or the ideals of the society and that the creeds or the ideals must be changed in order that the economic conditions created by them may change. The statement that “no creed comes into existence as a mere development of thought and out of all relation to social needs”, which is made side by side with all these emphatic pronouncements of the importance of creeds in determining social conditions, proves nothing to the contrary when we know (what we have already known) why and up to what extent really the birth of a new creed is connected with the prevailing social conditions.

 

Our creed determines the whole of our life, including our social conditions. When the creed is wrong, it creates wrong social conditions. These conditions are tested as wrong after a prolonged contact with them because they fail to satisfy our urge of self which is our internal criterion of right and wrong. When the conditions are discovered to be wrong, we come to know that the creed or the ideal determining them is also wrong. Therefore, in order to secure a fuller satisfaction of our urge for Beauty, we change the creed first of all. The fact that a new, a better and a more Perfect Ideal is suggested to us by the existing social conditions which we have judged as wrong is rather a proof that it is the ideal or the creed that determines the social conditions and not the social conditions that determine the creed or the ideal. The new creed comes into existence in order to take the place of the old wrong creed which had determined the old wrong conditions and the new creed is itself expected to determine the new conditions which we judge as right. In each case it is the creed that we believe to be the determining cause of social conditions. If, on the other hand, the social conditions had been the determining cause of the creed, we should have tried to change the conditions directly without bothering about the creed. But the fact that it is impossible to change the conditions without changing the creed is a proof that the creed determines or creates them. We change only the creed because we are convinced that the social conditions are only a part of it and that, when it is changed, the change of conditions will come automatically as a result of it.

 

The fundamental misunderstanding of Marx that it is the material life of men that determines their “consciousness” in addition to being incompatible with facts of human nature and human history implies that matter is the ultimate reality of the Universe. But recent advancements in the domain of physics have led scientists to question seriously the validity of this hypothesis. These advancements have implications which point to consciousness rather than matter as the final reality of the world. The growing scientific knowledge of this century is, therefore, depriving Marxism of its foundations. Marxists, no doubt, still attempt to reinterpret the philosophy of their master with a view to reconciling it with the implications of modern physics but their attempts which are concentrated mainly on belittling the significance of these discoveries are hardly successful. Marxism ignores the real character of the powerful unconscious urge of the human mind. We cannot stick to the creed for long because we desire much more than mere economic well-being. The urge of our unconscious mind keeps us restless even when we have secured the full satisfaction of all our instinctive desires or material requirements. We shall have to discover the causes of this restlessness as well as the means of curing it. Supposing we have achieved a class-free society like that of the U.S.S.R. throughout the world. In what direction will the future evolution of such a society take place? Marxism has nothing important to say in answer to this question. The fact is that we evolve by striving continuously after Beauty or Perfection in obedience to the urge of our unconscious mind. The glorious future of man lies in unravelling the mysteries of the unconscious, and utilising more and more of its unlimited powers.

 

It is a significant clue to the understanding of human nature that it has not been possible so far to curb the desire for religion entirely in Russia. This is so in spite of the fact that there is no struggle of classes in that country any longer and there is no necessity, therefore, to seek a “refuge” from the realities of life which is all that Marx understands religion to be. This is so, moreover, in spite of the fact that the authorities in Russia, if they are afraid of opposing religion directly, at least discourage it as much as possible. The desire for religion so powerful, so irresistible and so inexplicable on any materialist hypothesis is due to the fact that the human self has a strong unconscious urge of attraction for the Divine Self which is the common ideal, the Right Ideal, of all men. All the gaiety and beauty that we have been able to express in our life and the whole of the history of our race is due to our efforts to express this urge as much as possible.

 

Marxism, like every wrong ideal, contains the germs of its own dissolution and must break up sooner or later.