An Original Interpretation of Marxism

Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) succeeded in interpreting Marxist thought from the standpoint of Marx's virulent atheism. Historical materialism and the inexorable evolution of universal history in the direction of victorious communism are therefore shown by him to be the  fruits of Marx's atheism and of the influence exerted on him by Hegel's ideas, and nothing else.

Marx was also the one who subordinated philosophy to politics. In his view, as we all remember,  philosophy was not meant to interpret the world, but to change it. This is also the fundamental reason why Marxism cannot even be considered a proper philosophical system and why Marx is not a philosopher in the true sense of the word: from a melange of  ideas from different philosophers - some materialists, others idealists - one cannot build a truly original philosophical system.

The same can be said of Marx the "economist", who had little to add to Adam Smith's labour theory of value or to the economic ideas borrowed from David Ricardo. The analysis of the mechanism of exploitation of the proletarians by the owners of capital is more pertinent in the work of Eugene Buret, whom Marx plagiarized copiously, and so on.

But Del Noce's analysis shows that the political philosophy of the affluent and technocratic West was also influenced by Marxism, although Western atheism is based on eroticism, not class struggle. ( at this point it is important to note the essential role played by neo-marxists like Herbert Marcuse in igniting the sexual revolution during the sixties in the West ).

Soviet communism - or today's Chinese communism - was therefore only the revolutionary version of Marxist thought, as it was put into practice by Lenin.

Marx's belief that science and technology would emancipate man from faith in God was adopted in the West by liberalism, thus spawning today's technocratic societies. The two traditional enemies of liberalism - revolutionary ideology and religion - were thus eliminated in the wake of an ideological fusion between liberalism and Marxism, whose messianic dimension got amputated. The result, says Del Noce, was the emergence of Western neo-totalitarian societies, which only retain the appearance of democratic societies.

THE INVENTION OF SOCIOLOGY, MORE BENEFICIAL THAN THAT OF ECONOMICS

 

Working classes and the poor in England and the rest of Europe had a better fate after the appearance of the positivist doctrine of Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and after the "invention" of sociology. Comte's field surveys and positivist philosophy inspired two altruistic British businessmen, Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, in the late 19th century , who laid the foundations of British sociology.

The two paid out of  their own pocket for sociological surveys to be conducted on the phenomenon of poverty in London and York. The Booth-sponsored survey found that by the end of the 19th century, 30.7 percent of London's population was still living in poverty (according to a World Bank study, the proportion of poor people in Western Europe in the early 19th century was about 84 percent). Rowntree 's survey gave a similar proportion for Yorkshire and set a sociological poverty line. 

Together, their investigations and lobbying led to the introduction by the British government of a system of social insurance and pensions, starting in 1909. In 1909, the report of the Royal Commission on the Laws of the Poor (Majority Report) was based on the findings of the sociological surveys sponsored by Charles Booth. Rowntree - the owner of a chocolate factory - introduced an 8-hour working day, a 5-day working week into his company and decided to increase the salaries of his employees. For his measures in industrial relations, welfare and management, Rowntree was proclaimed as "the British management movement's greatest pioneer" (Lyndall Urwick).

Neither Booth nor Rowntree flirted with socialism, both reformers having been staunch supporters of liberalism.

 It is a well-known fact that Rowntree and Booth were deeply influenced in their actions by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte. In other words, the father of sociology had a beneficial influence on his European contemporaries, clearly superior to the detrimental influence exerted by the founders of classical economics - Adam Smith and David Ricardo - on most economists and much of nineteenth-century liberal politicians.

 It can therefore be said with some certainty that the new science of sociology arose from the need to counteract the negative effects on British intellectual and political elites of the mistaken or retrograde ideas inherited from the classics of economics.