Confident that history worked on the side of enlightenment, equality, and individual freedom, Marx and Engels did not have to give much thought to the morality of means and ends, the issue that troubled those who believed, with Weber, that progress was a mixed blessing at best. For Marxists, the choice of means was simple: whatever hastened the proletarian revolution. Whether violence had to be used depended solely on local conditions. The choice of means was a question of revolutionary tactics; morality had nothing to do with it. Conventional morality was a bourgeois swindle: the bourgeoisie had not scrupled to use violence against the feudal nobility, but now they preached nonviolence and parliamentary methods to the workers as a way of keeping them in their place. Exploiting classes could be expected to seize on every moral advantage ; revolutionary militancy based on historical understanding, however, was the proper answer to ruling-class hypocrisy, not moral indignation. Hypocrisy aside, the bourgeoisie had done the world a service, with the worst of motives, by destroying the old patriarchal regime, seizing the common lands, consolidating production, introducing modern machinery, and subordinating sentimental considerations to the overriding goal of greater productivity. Thanks to the bourgeois revolution, the workers now had only to take over the existing system of production, at least in countries already industrialized, and to operate it in the interest of mankind as a whole.

The "natural laws of capitalism," Marx said, worked "with iron necessity towards inevitable results." This did not mean that every nation had to go through a bourgeois phase on the way to socialism. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they could cite Marx's statement that Russia might be able to "obtain the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched humanity without passing through the capitalist regime." Without a bourgeois revolution, however, the socialist regime would itself have to do the work of capitalism, beginning with the expropriation of the peasantry; eventually this became the rationale for Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The upshot of the Marxian scheme of history was that certain things had to happen in sequence, whether they hap

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