Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 4

[19] Marx's Capital, Vol. III., Hamburg, 1894, pp. xix-xx. The date of 1845 refers princ.i.p.ally to the book "Die heilige Familie, Frankfort, 1845," which was produced in collaboration by Marx and Engels. This book is indispensable to an understanding of the theoretical origin of historical materialism.

[20] I stop with Cabet who lived at the epoch of the Manifesto. I do not think I ought to go as far as the sporadic forms of Bellamy and Hertzka.

[21] The Balzac of the 17th century.

[22] It is these writers whom Menger thought he had discovered as the authors of scientific socialism.

[23] It is for this reason that certain critics, Wieser for example, propose to abandon Ricardo's theory of value because it leads to socialism.

[24] Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots.

[25] For example in the essays of Th. Rogers.

[26] Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law?

[27] Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition.

PART II

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

I.

This cla.s.s of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called _verbalism_. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social _complexus_, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things.

In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called,--there the myth and superst.i.tion of words are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the pa.s.sions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect, cla.s.s and religion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into abstract and conventional fashions of speech.

We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history." Many have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple a.n.a.lysis of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from the context of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation of the doctrine,[28] or from the polemical writings in which its partisans refute the objections of its opponents. Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense _complexus_ of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in them nothing but questions of nomenclature.

If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds a support in certain theoretical hypotheses, for example, that _matter_ indicates something which is below or opposed to another higher or n.o.bler thing which is called spirit; or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit which opposes the word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense, to all that, in a word, is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum total of the anti-egoistic inclinations and acts; then our embarra.s.sment is extreme! Then we are told that in this doctrine it is attempted to explain the whole of man by the mere calculation of his material interests and that no value whatever is allowed to any ideal interest.

The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste of certain partisans and propagandists of this doctrine have also been a cause of these confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they themselves only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.

Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the meaning of this doctrine ought, before all else, to be drawn from the position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to the ideologies of every sort;--that the proof of its value consists exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the succession of human events which is derived from it;--that this doctrine does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other interests, but that it merely affirms the objective co-ordination and subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and this it affirms, thanks to that genetic _processus_ which consists in going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of formation to the things formed.

Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word _matter_ in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception, or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human a.s.sociation in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology, but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of human a.s.sociation, which form and develop through the succession and the growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination and subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action.

It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a criticism; it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must be put in evidence.

And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn, give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and employ certain means and certain tools and a.s.sociate themselves in certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the prose of reality and halting there.

II.

There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects I will call it _phraseology_, although this word is not an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.

For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have ill.u.s.trated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately practical to the interests purely aesthetic, have moved different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition.

These different types have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state and of the pa.s.sage from the primitive communist society to the society which rests upon cla.s.s differences and cla.s.s antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten.

This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the G.o.ds of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Tame, an infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Cla.s.s tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other a.n.a.logous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and often coa.r.s.e conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., _chance_) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., the _inevitable course of events_ which sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears.

In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the _non plus ultra_ of intelligence,--in all these a great part of the human _processus_ is revealed and reflected; and, consequently, we should not consider them as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings are mingled and confounded in the accepted opinions of cultured people, or of those who pa.s.s for such, they make up an immense ma.s.s of prejudices and they const.i.tute an impediment which ignorance opposes to the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.

To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions, these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively acting--that is to say, men in their various and diversified social relations,--this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes the explanation of the historical _processus_.

A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain ma.s.s of individuals, but a _plexus_ of men organized in such and such a fashion by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason of permanent proximity;--this nation, on a certain circ.u.mscribed and limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous labor;--this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already developed and ripened such and such a division of cla.s.ses, or which has already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of cla.s.ses;--this nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle, which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products, conformably to its way of producing;--this nation, which by all these relations const.i.tutes a society in which either by habits of mutual accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of giving birth to legal-political relations which result in the formation of the state;--this nation, which by the organization of the state, which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself, renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for progress and retrogression:--there is the sum of what is at the bottom of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the fantastic and ideological combinations.

Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are, pa.s.sing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man.

It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and the motives which are real and which belong to all human development, including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the rhythm of their own development.

III.

But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who narrate, explain, or ill.u.s.trate have themselves invented and given life to this enormous ma.s.s of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the historic events--great ma.s.ses of people, directing and ordering cla.s.ses, masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word, if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval--never had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work, unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was pa.s.sing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which developed property and the state, or at least the city,--even then, at the epoch of all the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of G.o.ds and heroes. So much so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belong to them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to _The City of G.o.d_ of St. Augustine--from the superst.i.tious credulity in miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is to say, down to the _Idea_ which for the _decadents_ of Hegelianism engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most incongruous variations of social life in the course of history.

Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific explanation of the history of the past.

The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood as speaking exclusively of the criticism of doc.u.ments in the proper and ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves with what is delivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars, and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate source which is behind the so called doc.u.ments properly and which, before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit, that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions.

To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very facts while they are developing--this is to make a new criticism of the sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal doc.u.mentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and thereby to reconstruct them anew.

But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which they often found both the motives and the justification of their action, we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure appearance, a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court.

He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the cla.s.s movement which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation, particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to a.n.a.lyze the circ.u.mstantial integrality by a posthumous a.n.a.lysis altogether subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now, the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in the Low Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light the pa.s.sage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the forerunners of capitalism. _Post factum_, and after the tardy realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments, that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement certain pa.s.sions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,--in these consist its specific character, which no a.n.a.lytic ability can make otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the zeal of the pa.s.sionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record merely the _economic moment_ (often still unknown and often unknowable), and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent.

From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three consequences follow:--

First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism, the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, pa.s.sing above all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive at the a.n.a.lysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism.

It is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way, we begin with motives religious, political, aesthetic, pa.s.sionate, etc., but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at that form which reveals them to the consciousness as motives whose origin is often obliterated.

And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the _last a.n.a.lysis_ (Engels) all the historic facts _by means of the underlying economic structure_ (Marx), which necessitates a.n.a.lysis and reduction and then interlinking and construction.

It results from this, in the third place, that, pa.s.sing from the underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche nor to the concept of an a.s.sumed collective spirit which by its own laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that ma.s.s of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of which some attribute to the social being, as Schaffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment, conscience, will, etc. But I wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine's expression, the "spontaneous anarchy" of 1789, those peasants who finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology, which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions, the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain social conditions actually determined;--this cla.s.s, in this situation, determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;--and finally, these cla.s.ses, these functions, this subjection and this dominion involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economic structure. This social psychology, by its nature always circ.u.mstantial, is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).

But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the conditions of life, const.i.tute in themselves also a part of history.

This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of consciousness, whether it be superst.i.tious or experimental, ingenuous or reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.

IV.