make them religious
men; but the capitalists alone could not produce the result. The
result is produced by the fact that many working men prefer the
advancement of their creed to the improvement of their livelihood.
However deplorable such a state of mind may be, it is not necessarily
due to capitalist lies.

All politics are governed by human desires. The materialist theory of
history, in the last analysis, requires the assumption that every
politically conscious person is governed by one single desire--the
desire to increase his own share of commodities; and, further, that
his method of achieving this desire will usually be to seek to
increase the share of his class, not only his own individual share.
But this assumption is very far from the truth. Men desire power, they
desire satisfactions for their pride and their self-respect. They
desire victory over rivals so profoundly that they will invent a
rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a victory possible. All
these motives cut across the pure economic motive in ways that are
practically important.

There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of
psycho-analysis. In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to
rationalize their conduct. If a man thinks that the only reasonable
motive in politics is economic self-advancement, he will persuade
himself that the things he wishes to do will make him rich. When he
wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is
ruining his trade. If, on the other hand, he is an "idealist," who
holds that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human
race, he will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand
their humiliation. The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage,
but not through the former. To desire one's own economic advancement
is comparatively reasonable; to Marx, who inherited eighteenth-century
rationalist psychology from the British orthodox economists,
self-enrichment seemed the natural aim of a man's political actions.
But modern psychology has dived much deeper into the ocean of insanity
upon which the little barque of human reason insecurely floats. The
intellectual optimism of a bygone age is no longer possible to the
modern student of human nature. Yet it lingers in Marxism, making
Marxians rigid and Procrustean in their treatment of the life of
instinct. Of this rigidity the materialistic conception of history is
a prominent instance.

In