time: the refreshing river 



itself upon that very evolutionary progression which Spencer described 

 with so much care. His successive levels of integration are allowed 

 for in the dialectics of nature, as in hardly any other philosophy. 

 The concept of surplus value, says Dickinson,^ has very unjusdy 

 shared in the logical discredit into which the labour theory of value 

 has fallen. If Marx's theoretical foundadon for it is unsadsfactory, 

 some other must be found. But it is an undeniable fact of observation 

 that the labour of men organised in society produces a surplus above 

 the immediate requirements of the producers, and that this surplus 

 may be disposed of in three main ways: (a) it may become the material 

 basis of social growth, either absorbed in the support of an additional 

 number of producers, or embodied in the increase and improvement 

 of the means of production, or used to maintain more complex forms 

 of social organisation, (b) it may appear as increased leisure or in- 

 creased supply of consumption goods available for society as a 

 whole, (c) it may be appropriated by a dominant class, appearing as 

 rent, royalties, dividends, interest, profit, excessively high salaries, or 

 various minor forms of privileged income. Here is a concept, the 

 lack of which one deeply feels in reading Spencer's sociology. Again 

 and again in his descriptions of the origins and nature of classes^ he 

 comes near to considering their relative economic privileges, but 

 never clearly describes the phenomena of class-domination and the 

 class-struggle. Hence he cannot realise the nature of the State; the 

 neuro-muscular apparatus of control developed by the dominating 

 class. 



The history of all human society, past and present, wrote Marx 

 and Engels in 1848, is the history of class-struggles.^ "Freeman and 

 slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-burgess and 

 journeyman — in a word, oppressor and oppressed — stood in sharp 

 opposition each to the other. They carried on perpetual warfare, 

 sometimes masked, sometimes open and acknowledged; a warfare 

 that invariably ended, either in a revolutionary change in the structure 

 of society, or else in the common ruin of the contending classes." 

 The history of the European West can only be understood in the 

 light of this empirical fact. In the course of a long process extending 

 over some four centuries, from about 1400 to 1800, the power of the 

 feudal aristocracy gave place to the power of the middle-class. The 



^ H. D. Dickinson, Highway, 1936, p. 82. 



2 e.g. FP, p. 391. 



^ Communist Manifesto, 1848; first published in England, 1850. 



256 



