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To ask, in these times, the question “On whose side is history?” is to risk sliding into politics—a discussion of capitalism versus Communism. Nikita Khrushchev’s warning to Americans (“We will bury you”) was a particularly crude answer to this question in political terms, but it was also a statement of the fundamental Marxist dogma according to which history is merely the offspring of the tools of production. History—that is, final victory—will therefore be on the side of those possessing the greatest competency in forging the tools best suited to produce the best society.

Unlike the concept of the best society, the making of the best tools is hardly a debatable matter. Tool-making is no longer a matter for tinkerers, but has become the task of the most exact sciences. Now, Marxism has always claimed to be a scientific ideology—indeed, the only true scientific ideology. In the preface to the second edition of Das Kapital Marx claimed to have offered a theory of economics no less exact than Newton’s celestial mechanics. Countless Marxists followed suit in repeating the same claim from different perspectives: The title of this essay is merely a variation on the title of the book History Is on Our Side, published about forty years ago by a prominent British Marxist, Joseph Needham.

SJ

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Stanley L. Jaki

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To ask, in these times, the question “On whose side is history?” is to risk sliding into politics—a discussion of capitalism versus Communism. Nikita Khrushchev’s warning to Americans (“We will bury you”) was a particularly crude answer to this question in political terms, but it was also a statement of the fundamental Marxist dogma according to which history is merely the offspring of the tools of production. History—that is, final victory—will therefore be on the side of those possessing the greatest competency in forging the tools best suited to produce the best society.

Unlike the concept of the best society, the making of the best tools is hardly a debatable matter. Tool-making is no longer a matter for tinkerers, but has become the task of the most exact sciences. Now, Marxism has always claimed to be a scientific ideology—indeed, the only true scientific ideology. In the preface to the second edition of Das Kapital Marx claimed to have offered a theory of economics no less exact than Newton’s celestial mechanics. Countless Marxists followed suit in repeating the same claim from different perspectives: The title of this essay is merely a variation on the title of the book History Is on Our Side, published about forty years ago by a prominent British Marxist, Joseph Needham.