Martin ,spot on ,I choose to sing the song because I like it.
Ruth Archer
Means and Ends

The dialectic of Means and Ends is of deep historical, ethical and political significance. The "Means" is the activity a subject engages in with the intention of bringing about a certain "End." The "End" has initially only an ideal existence, and the Realised End – the actual outcome of the adopted Means – may be quite different from the abstract End for which the Means was adopted in the first place.

Both Means and Ends are therefore processes which are in greater or lesser contradiction with one another throughout their development – constituting a learning process of continual adjustment of both Means and Ends in the light of experience – until, at the completion of the process, Means and End merge in a form of life-activity, which is both its own End and its own Means. The dialectic of Means and Ends is manifested in certain maxims which express aspects of the dialectic in a one-sided or limited way.

"We do not have the means to achieve our ends" is something which radical socialist groups have been saying for more than a century, reflecting the absolute gulf between their capacity to imagine socialism and the smallness of their own resources. The problem here is simply to mistake the socialist imaginary for an End, and to understand the purpose of socialist agitation to be to bring into being a socialist utopia. The socialist utopia is an ethical precept rather than a state of affairs which has to be brought about. As Marx said in The German Ideology:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." [German Ideology]

Thus, the perception that there is an impossible gulf between ends and means results from an abandonment of the critique of existing conditions, in favour of a hankering after a distant utopia, or simply a role far out of line with a group's actual sphere of activity. Whenever a radical group finds itself with such an absolute contradiction between means and ends (perhaps resulting from a gradual change in conditions, a weakening of its base), then it should consider re-orienting itself towards the critique of existing conditions, since these conditions necessarily provide the means for their own critique.

"The End justifies the Means" is a maxim which originated in an accusation made by Protestants against the Jesuits. Although few would openly proclaim such a cynical maxim, it is clearly the conception which justified the atrocities of Stalinism and the use of terror by some who claimed to be pursuing the socialist objective. The idea that some means (such as the use of violence against political opponents, or lying to the working class) which is inconsistent with the aim (socialism, world peace) can in some way serve that end is untenable. There is always some "tension" between Ends and Means – Means refer always to existing conditions as they are while the End refers to how things ought to be. But the means must be adequate to the ends; that is to say, the means must be such that attaining the End will mean the fullest development and flowering of the Means. So the idea, for example, that deceiving the working class could be any part of the struggle for socialism is an absurdity, because the fullest development of the Means (deceiving the working class) could only be the disorganisation and subordination of the working class, the opposite of socialism. On the other hand, a picket line in support of a wage-rise is a far cry from socialism, but insofar as a picket line is a manifestation of the self-organisation of the working class and manifests elementary class discipline, it is a "means" which can be understood as an "embyronic" expression of an admittedly distant "end."

Base political methods however, such as lying, conformism, personal denigration, which are to be found within the workers movement, would find their fullest expression, not in socialism, but only in some kind of Stalinist gulag. So a claim that such unprincipled means are justified because they serve the End of socialism is false; in fact, base means can never serve noble ends.

Eduard Bernstein (the former collaborator of Marx and Engels, for whom the term "revisionist" was first coined) said: "To me that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything." [Evolutionary Socialism] This is going to the other extreme and is equally as wrong as "the End justifies the Means." If a movement has no "end" – an ideal or vision – which is in contradiction to existing conditions, including the movement itself, then such a movement can be nothing more than a celebration of existing conditions and a support for the status quo. The deception involved in the idea of the "movement is everything," the rejection of any ideal which contradicts what exists, is not only incompatible with Marxism; such a reconciliation with the existing world is actually contrary to human life itself, which is always striving for something.

The process of Means and Ends is a process of the manifestation of Means in the form of the Realised End, and the contradiction between Abstract End and Realised End transforming the conception of Means and Ends, much like the continual adaption of species in a changing environment of which the species is itself a part. The adequate Means becomes itself an End, the discovery of which itself entails certain Means; on the other hand, an adequate conception of the End is a powerful Means in its own right. The dialectics of Means and Ends is referred to as Teleology (purposive development), and in Hegel's terminology, passes over into the dialectic of Life and Cognition – "history as a learning process."

Further Reading: See Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours on the subject of "The end justifies the means," Hegel's Shorter Logic and Means and Ends.