GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
proletarian or bourgeois, exclusively swayed by class
ideology and invariably voicing class sentiments. From the
strict standpoint of Man's theory, we might appropriately
define the individual as a focal point for a set of social
relationships. But it is not with the individual, as he is
in his concrete actuality, that Marx's theory is concerned.
"Individuals," he says, "are dealt with only in so far as thy
an tin personifications of particular relations and class
interests." 1 Marx, that is to say, is conceding that an
individual is in actual fact more than the personification
of a class, and that class relations and interests are them-
selves unreal entities in so far as they are abstracted, as
thought cannot help but abstract them, from the social
context in which they appear.
It is on these lines that Marx would no doubt meet the
charge which has often been brought against his philosophy,
that the predictions which it led him to make have been
falsified by events.
To What Extent have Marx's Predictions been Falsified?
Marx taught, for example, that, as Capitalism develops,
the lot of the proletariat will become progressively
worse. In fact, however, since Marx's time, wages have
risen and the working classes of the nations of Western
Europe are slightly but definitely less poverty-stricken.
Does the fact constitute a criticism of the Marxian
diagnosis?
is only/ he would say,
Mane's answer would be that it does not. 'It
*
in so far as Capitalism is postulated
as an isolated system operating in vacuo, that it produces
the effects I have described. In fact, the tendency, or
rather the group of tendencies which, taken together,
constitute capitalist society, has developed pan passu with
another set of tendencies which make for collective control
and modify, therefore, the development of the first set.
As Capitalism hat developed, so has Trade Unionism.
The effect has been to confuse the broad outlines of the
structure of developing Capitalism, and to mitigate the
i My it