Before Good and Evil (a non-moral reality)
A generally overlooked aspect of Engels’ social evolutionary schema that closes the circle around its dynamic if not its scale, is the absence of a God concept in what he refers to as ‘primitive communism’. Marx later writes, ‘for the communist man, the idea of God cannot occur’. That is to say, even the very idea of a God becomes impossible in the communist mode of production. For Engels, the cultures of the social contract were to be the model of the relations of production in what remains today an hypothetical communist society. In his schematic, the quirk occurs late in the day, almost as if it were a plot device, necessary because, after unrolling a tight tapestry of human history and prehistory alike – and for the first time, making a connection between them without regressing into either metaphysics or flirting with outright bigotry – the reader finds the climax requires the usual suspension of belief. While this is fine for commercial fiction, it is not so fine for philosophy. That the means of production do not change from the Bourgeois mode of production to that of communism more than implies that capitalism is communism bereft of pre-capitalist symbolic formations.
This is not, on the face of it, an insoluble problem in practice, only for the model. It is somewhat difficult to believe that neither Marx nor Engels were aware of this tipsiness in an otherwise reasonable ‘model of’, but this is precisely the point here: if Engels strove to create a ‘model of’, Marx desired rather a ‘model for’. Given the challenge of transforming the same model from one to the other, it is perhaps unsurprising that the logic of the dialectic abruptly drops off just when one would expect to see its culmination. A literary scholar once suggested to me that a failed novel is the worst thing, but a failed philosophy is but a work in progress. While such a sentiment is itself reasonable, the key is to continue that work. Let’s reexamine the connections between the origin and the destination in Engels, in order to clarify both the motive and thence the rationale for constructing it the way in which he did.
‘Primitive communism’ is the less romantic version of Rousseau’s social contract. It becomes even less sentimental in Durkheim’s ‘mechanical solidarity’, and downright Third Reichish in Malinowski’s diaries, not intended for publication, wherein the ‘savages should all be obliterated’. Yes, living-in with a bunch of superstitious morons would likely get old, as the famous ethnographer discovered for himself, but then again, this was precisely the point of Marx and Engels when they dedicated their corpus to a demythology of modern man. In the nineteenth century, when social evolutionary schemas were all the rage, Darwin’s revelations only fostered a deepening of the sense that what one saw regarding ‘progress’ was not merely cultural, but had to do with the ‘species essence’, as Marx has it. This post-Enlightenment problem was not quite overcome even in the work of some of the greatest of its revolutionary thinkers, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. For each, there is a point wherein metaphysics, the idea of Man, capital ‘M’, creeps back in. From a purely authorial point of view, this is a subjective reaction to becoming over-enamored with one’s own ideas. This is the more easily solved aspect of the problem. Less simple is the aspect which lies at the discursive level: from Aristotle to Foucault, metaphysics, in its broadest sense and most distanciated case, re-presences itself. At the far end, ethics does not manage to sever its umbilical cord to metaphysics, and at the near end, the archaeological structures of discourse, their ‘evenements’ and their orthographies, trend trundling into the same. It appears that it is not an easy thing, at all, to overcome the idea of the ideas.
Yet for the vast bulk of our species’ tenure on this planet, and presumably, for all of the millions of years before this, wherein our hominid ancestors rusticated, metaphysics didn’t, equally at all, exist. This is the perduring strength of Engels’ understanding: the original human condition provides all of the symbolic clues necessary to convert capitalism into communism. A cosmology without gods, a cosmogony of transformation, and an apolitical polis; what more could one ask for? This was humanity not beyond good and evil, but rather before.
Gauguin and D.H. Lawrence were liberated by this discovery, but Malinowski was apparently appalled by it. Even so, one would have to more minutely distinguish the types of societies each of these European interlopers lived in, in order to more fully appreciate the implications of Engels’ own work. Melanesia is not Eden, though Polynesia appeared to be a closer approximation thereof. And Mestizo Meso-America, however sunny and sexy when compared with a paranoid and ultimately also delusional Interwar Europe, could only be compared with subsistence social organizations, at a stretch, in the remotest village conditions. Rousseauist romance aside for a moment, Engels was himself the polar opposite of any sentimentalist, having disowned his father, a great capitalist and solemn Protestant Bourgeois, and thence studying the working conditions in the heart of industrial England, producing the first ever full-fledged ethnography in 1845. No romance here, one would suspect, but even there, even then, Engels did find his life love, rescuing a 12-year-old girl from the mills and later marrying her when she ‘came of age’, to use a period expression. In a word, Engels cut a rather more heroic figure than the dreamy Rousseau, embittered Lawrence and escapist Gauguin. For the feminist, Engels was able to do so because he had also shed the misogynist contraptions of his forebears and peers alike. Marx was unable to claim the same for himself, we would suggest.
However this may be, what is certain is that Rousseau’s image of the ‘noble savage’ itself cut two ways. Was it then the savagery or the nobility that evolutionary discourse would favor? In Nietzsche, they appear to almost become the same thing, and thence in Freud as well; hence the ongoing problem of repression. Darwin, on his part, seemed aloof to the distinction, which may well be par for the course for the harder sciences; ‘it is what it is’, could be an empiricist motto. But all of this discursive hand-wringing in the face of human history comes just before 1859 and thenceforth in the implicatory interregnum between Darwin’s ‘Origin’ and his 1871 ‘Descent’. Afterwards, handwringing gives way to head-shrinking.
Metaphysics, as a projection of human aspiration, served equally well as a set of ideals as it did ideal conditions; it proposed, in its diverse contents cross-culturally, that while humanity actually lived like this in the present, in the future it could live like that. At first, even death was but a metaphor. One needed to shed the human being which I am in order to ascend to the new culture. There is thus an exiguous, but still continuous, connection between the exhortations found in Gilgamesh to those of The Will to Power. In a word, my life as it is and how it has been, is but a shadow of either what is to come, or what it should be. The discursive rendering of the saint, metaphysics as morality quickly came to define not only the standard of ideal conduct in the world – and this as a role model, a ‘model for’; which in turn suggests that the dialectic should have been able, if left to its own internal logical device, overcome any flaw in Engels’ schema, since in metaphysics we do have a general example of what once was merely a ‘model of’ transmuting itself into a ‘model for’ – but as well the rubric by which one, indeed, anyone, could attain such an ideal. These are the timeless codes, from Hammurabi to the Decalogue, which connote a space transcendent to history, a space which is not a place and which can be simply called ‘Time’. In this, metaphysics reinvents the absence of history which was, forever and ever, the condition of our species and its direct predecessors.
The timeless time of the social contract was attractive to Engels both as a model of a society which endured in spite of itself and its own serious limitations, as well as politically; as a model for the re-creation of a similar set of relations of production which would, in their own way, withstand the test of historical time. Communism is thus granted the status of an Eden-in-practice. Like any utopian scheme, Engels’ dialectical materialism presents its terminus as at the least indefinite, and in this, aspires to bring the metaphysical metaphor to ground. That we have not yet been able to slough off the ‘old gods’ of pre-capitalist symbolic forms, does not slay the utopian loyalist but rather summons her to further heroics, discursive or otherwise. In our own day, climate clamor, identity ideology, gender genuflection, and hysteria in the face of the facts of human history fashionably dominate popular discourse regarding the future, however indefinite it may be or yet become. Not that Engels’ was himself either an ill-considered thinker or a person who dwelt in the clouds, quite the opposite. But any time one ‘gets an idea in one’s head’, as it were, the deeper meaning of such a phrase comes to the fore in light of the represencing of metaphysical aspirations, this time at a very subjective level. It allows us to mistake the personal for the political, the ideological for the theoretical, even the factual for the fanciful. It blinds us to both the vicissitudes of historical time – our conception thereof does not admit to there ever being a ‘forever’, either in the distant past or the projected future – as well as the evidence, fragmentary and yet possessed of its own miracle: that even in the fossil record of quasi-timeless geological time, there is still change, albeit glacial. The toolkit of Homo Erectus showed almost no alteration over a span of up to two million years, but, in the end, it was transformed, as more sophisticated proto-humans arose. This cannot possibly be called a memory, but only a fact. In this, we learn that experience has a too-intimate effect upon us; through it alone we are become bigots, the deniers of worlds.
What Engels did realize, before the logical slippage, was that too great a cleaving to models of meant a more challenging effort regarding models for. There is no sign, in running through his evolutionary model, that anything unexpected was to occur. Marx noted, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else, that capital presented the most liberating possibility of any human condition theretofore, simply because there was not only the vast potential of its industrial-technical means of production, but there was also, and for the first time, social mobility built into the system itself. Romantic pseudo-history has culture heroes flung to the top of antique societies, but these figures are exceedingly rare. Whether or not Capital can overcome the metaphysics it has inherited from the social organizations occurring in history between the bookended communisms remains to be seen. Social mobility itself cuts both ways. That one can improve one’s subjective lot also means that one can sabotage it. And when an entire culture history ‘breaks bad’, it is the great plot device of an ideology to glorify the implausible in order to suppress the impossible.
G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.