Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific
Written: Between January and March of 1880;
Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3, p. 95-151;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, 1970;
First Published: March, April, and May issues of Revue
Socialiste in 1880;
Translated: from
the French by Edward Aveling in 1892 (authorised by Engels)
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version:
Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999, 2003.
Introduction:
Preface to the First German Edition, Engels 1882
[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]
[History of the English middle-class]
Introduction to the French Edition, Karl Marx 1880
Contents:
Part I: [Utopian Socialism]
Part II: [Dialectics]
Part III: [Historical Materialism]
“At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now
representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three
chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title: Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique. From this
French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German
friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish,
Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been
published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book circulates in 10
languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist
Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany,
it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.” [from the Preface to
the 1892 English Edition]
1892
English Edition Introduction
[General
Introduction and the History of Materialism]
The present little book is, originally, part of a larger
whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who
formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin
University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to
Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist
theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of
society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he
honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.
This took place about the same time when the two sections of
the Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected
their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an
immense increase of strength, but, was what more, the faculty of employing the
whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany
was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was
that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly
proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate
party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us,
and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.
This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was
evidently a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a
terribly ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality,
whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he
considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising
system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the
fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other
purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And
Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less
than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism";
and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big
volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of
arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in
general, and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete
"revolution in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I
had to treat of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space
to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable
nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of
youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my
opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a
more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and
myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason
which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles in the
Leipzig Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1], and later on as a
book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft" (Mr. E.
Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which
appeared in Zurich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now
representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three
chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique".
From this French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883,
our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian,
Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text,
have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book
circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not
even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often
translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.
The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the
intention of spreading among the German Socialist party some elementary
knowledge of the history and development of landed property in Germany. This
seemed all the more necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of
the working-people of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the
agricultural laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has
been included in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land
common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less
known in England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the
original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim
Kovalevsky, according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands
among the members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for
joint-account by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several
generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and
that the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so
as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably
quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].
The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are
new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital. We call
"production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are
produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose of
exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase extends from
the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it
attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under
conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs,
for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their
own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products
over his outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the
Middle Ages into three periods:
handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and
apprentices, where each laborer produces a complete article;
manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in
one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of
division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that
the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands
of all;
modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery
driven by power, and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending
and correcting the performance of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will
meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if
we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British
"respectability", we should be even worse off than we are. This book
defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word
materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers.
"Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly
inadmissible.
And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from
the 17th century onwards, is England.
"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.
Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible
for the matter to think?'
"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in
God's omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was
a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among
the English schoolmen.
"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon.
To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon
the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as
his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of
all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting
the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation.
Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal
forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion
is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical
motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a
'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's [2] — of matter.
"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still
occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand,
matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole
entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine
pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.
"In its further evolution, materialism becomes
one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge
based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract
experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of
sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent,
misanthropic, flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground,
materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a
sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all
the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all
human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but
the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy
can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one
of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if,
on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of
sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that, besides
the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals,
there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily
substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance,
are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate
thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes
going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that
our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material
things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of
God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical
movement, which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we
call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are
identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however,
furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human
knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the
Human Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of
Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly
shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's
sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Deism is but an
easy-going way of getting rid of religion."
Karl Marx
The Holy Family
p. 201 - 204
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern
materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he
paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that
Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French
materialism which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and
sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French
century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we
outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this century,
what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was
what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the
English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists, or,
at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that
almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible
miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the
facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book
of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own
intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst
the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were then called, the
working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been "civilized" since then. The
exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England
became gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much
headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here. Anyhow,
the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only to the
aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental scepticism
in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism, though not yet
considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England, is yet
very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and
decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that
under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and
condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany",
like so many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than
their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive
Lancashire term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception
of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by
law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he
adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of
some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the
time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's
Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly
replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in
our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for
either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the
whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me,
a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based
upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive
through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects,
or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely
the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of
reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before
there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from
Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action
had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of
the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these
objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an
infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these
perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object
can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed
in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea
of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof
positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with
reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a
failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us
fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and
superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not
warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care
to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits
prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall
find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions
with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance,
so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically
controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by
their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent
incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may
correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or
mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is
beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the
qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact
that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you
that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant's
time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might
well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious
"thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable things
have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant
progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as
unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century, organic
substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to build them up one after
another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes.
Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of
no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are
still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the
albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after
centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial
albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced
organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal
mode of existence of albuminous bodies.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal
mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.
He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called,
energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of
their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this
admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of
court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have
none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there
is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter
and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of
energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed
by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far
as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres
about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls
it agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an
agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history
sketched out in this little book as "historical agnosticism".
Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I
making fun of them? And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be
overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the
term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course
of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all
important historic events in the economic development of society, in the
changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of
society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against
one another.
This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the
sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to
British respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years
ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English
respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable English
middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the
intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.
Notes
1. Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha
Unification Congress.
2. "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual
literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the
same time, the mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning
of the Latin qualitas; his "qual" was the activating principle
arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the
thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain
inflicted from without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]
1892
English Edition Introduction
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising
middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had
conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but this
position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development
of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance
of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the
Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in
spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to
the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized its own
hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most
powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil of the
Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each
country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be
destroyed.
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on
the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy,
physiology were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of
its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature.
Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not
been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been
no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could
not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion.
The above, though touching but two of the points where the
rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established
religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly
interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the
bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time,
had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in
the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities
started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses
of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their
very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism
culminated in three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in
Germany. The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by
two insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were
defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most
interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes of which
we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated into a fight
between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out
Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The
Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to
absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted
to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed
was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world
of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or
cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that
willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic
powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when
all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and
America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic
articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break
down. Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized, could the
kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While
German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism
founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and,
above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its
doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The
middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country
districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois
risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the
economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the
yeomanry of england had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that
yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would
never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have
brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of
the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to
be carried considerably further – exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in
Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois
society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the point
where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations, the new
centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point. The
grand period of English history, known to respectability under the name of
"the Great Rebellion", and the struggles succeeding it, were brought
to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians
"the Glorious Revolution".
The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising
middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now,
the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them to become what
Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period: "The first
bourgeois of the kingdom". Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons
had killed one another during the War of the Roses. Their successors, though
mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of
descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far
more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at
once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and
replacing them with sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands,
created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the
whole of the 17th century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry
VII, the English "aristocracy", far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to
indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great
landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to cooperate with the
leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and
place" were left to the great landowning families, provided the economic
interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class were
sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that time
powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There might be
squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a
recognized, component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them,
it had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the
nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,
or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his
clerks, his work-people, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they had to be trained
to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had supplied the
standard under which he had fought the king and the lords; he was not long in
discovering the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon
the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the behests of
the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In short, the English
bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower
orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one of the means
employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.
There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the
religious leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in
England. This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the
middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and
cultivated men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for
the uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes, it stepped on
the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called upon
absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus ["Robust
but malicious boy"] – to wit, the people. Similarly, with the successors
of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form of
materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore,
hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its
anti-bourgeois political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the
materialism and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had
furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to
furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even today
the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".
In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France,
where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a
branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively
aristocratic doctrine. But, soon, its revolutionary character asserted itself.
The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of religious
belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political
institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their doctrine to
universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all
subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named – the
Encyclopaedia. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms – avowed materialism
or deism – it became the creed of the whole cultures youth of France; so much
so that, when the Great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by English
Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and Terrorists, and
furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Great French
Revolution was the third uprising of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had
entirely cast off the religious cloak, and was fought out on undisguised
political lines; it was the first, too, that was really fought out up to the
destruction of one of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph
of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary
and post-revolutionary institutions, and the compromise between landlords and
capitalists, found its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and
in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France, the
Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it
cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the Code Civil
a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law – that almost perfect expression of
the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the
production of commodities – to modern capitalist conditions; so masterly that
this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law
of property in all other countries, not excepting England. Let us, however, not
forget that if English law continues to express the economic relations of
capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the
thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation
– vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople, said a Frenchman –
that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and
transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part of that old Germanic
personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from all interference
(but that of the law courts), which on the Continent has been lost during the
period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been as yet fully recovered.
To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution
gave him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies,
to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush the
last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why he fought
it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his
grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt to
carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois do without
his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were, and invented
fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army, which kept order at
home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets
aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that
minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise;
this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class, did sympathize
with the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament.
Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French
Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his
religion. Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if
the religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free
thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a
cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its
manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another, but they
were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the
bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others,
initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of
gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably
faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself, the
financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed into the
background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual
changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to
the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these parties,
too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the
preceding century. The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used
by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became
incompatible with the new economic interests. A fresh struggle with the
aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a victory of the new economic
power. First, the Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance,
under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie
a recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws
[a move toward free-trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of
the bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers,
over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.
Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social power
– first its ally, but soon its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of large
manufacturing capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of
manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in
proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture
after another, and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it
proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts
forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen
constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having
excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's
Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first
working-men's party of modern times.
Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March
1848, in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the point
of view of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction. First, the
defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then the crushing of the Paris
workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year; then the disasters of 1849
in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte
over Paris, December 2, 1851. For a time, at least, the bugbear of
working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost! If the British
bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common
people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all
these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he
continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the
evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own native religious
machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan 1), the greatest organizer in
existence of religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody
and Sankey, and the like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the
Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to
the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters
an element of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become
troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.
It seems a law of historical development that the
bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of political power – at least
for any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism was
completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession of
the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's reign,
1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom; by far the
larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification. Under
the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for three years
only; their incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is only now, in the
Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the
helm for more than 20 years; and they are already showing lively signs of
decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in
countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very
beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, the
successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already knocking at the
door.
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even
the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession
of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the middle-class
submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech, implored the young men of
Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from
his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to
move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as English! The fact
was, the English middle-class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated
upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior
Government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular
narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business sharpness. 2) Even now the
endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show that the English
middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for the best education,
and looks to something more modest. Thus, even after the repeal of the Corn
Laws, it appeared a matter of course that the men who had carried the day – the
Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc. – should remain excluded from a share in the
official government of the country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act
opened to them the door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the
present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that
they keep up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste
of drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they
consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found worthy
of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by
themselves.
The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore,
not yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage. The
reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions, as well
as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66 (ascribed vulgarly
to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development of railways,
ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again driven the
working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which they formed,
as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to the franchise,
however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the Liberals
"funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories seize
the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the boroughs, along
with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot; then, in 1884, the
extension of household suffrage to the counties and a fresh redistribution of
seats, by which electoral districts were, to some extent, equalized. All these
measures considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class, so
much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now furnished the
majority of the voters. But parliamentary government is a capital school for
teaching respect for tradition; if the middle-class look with awe and
veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called "our old
nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect and
deference to what used to be designated as "their betters", the
middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the model
workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master, and whose
self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled our German
economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable communistic and
revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.
But the English middle-class – good men of business as they
are – saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their powers but
reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist years,
what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the people, is capable of. And since
that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better part of the
People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now, if ever, the
people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first and foremost of all
moral means of action upon the masses is and remains – religion. Hence the
parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of
the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to
the Salvation Army.
And now came the triumph of British respectability over the
free thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen of
France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected with
Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular as to the
legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy. The puer
robustus, here, turned from day-to-day more malitiosus. Nothing remained to the
French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop their
free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps upon him, quietly drops
the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board; one-by-one, the scoffers
turned pious in outward behavior, spoke with respect of the Church, its dogmas
and rites, and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped.
French bourgeois dined maigre on Fridays, and German ones say out long
Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays. They had come to grief with
materialism. "Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden" – religion
must be kept alive for the people – that was the only and the last means to
save society from utter ruin. Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find
this out until they had done their level best to break up religion for ever.
And now it was the turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say:
"Why, you fools, I could have told you that 200 years ago!"
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the
British, nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem
the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force, is the vis
inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is sure to be broken down; and
thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist society. If our
juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more or less remote
offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas
cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a complete change in these
relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural revelation, we must admit
that no religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a tottering society.
In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to
move again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds.
Bourgeois traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two
parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out
its salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Working-men's traditions,
inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such as the
exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not
gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding, by every such
union, of its own blacklegs. But, for all that, the English working-class is
moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother
Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things in England, with a slow and
measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative
attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious mistrust of the
name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance; and the movement
spreads and seizes one layer of the workers after another. It has now shaken
out of their torpor the unskilled laborers of the East End of London, and we
all know what a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return.
And if the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of some people, let
them not forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest
qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in advance is once
gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the
old Chartists, for reasons unexplained above, were not quite up to the mark,
the grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.
But the triumph of the European working-class does not
depend upon England alone. It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at
least, England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries, the
working-class movement is well ahead of England. In Germany, it is even within
measurable distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last
25 years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the
German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political
capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German
working-class have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years
ago, Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European
middle-class; as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that
Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European
proletariat?
Frederick Engels
London
April 20, 1892
Notes
1. "Brother Jonathan" – A sort of Anglo-Christian
"Uncle Sam".
2. And even in business matters, the conceit of national
Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English
manufacturer considered it derogatory for an Englishman to speak any language
but his own, and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact that "poor
devils" of foreigners settled in England and took off his hands the
trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never noticed that these
foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a very large part of British
foreign trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade of
Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China, the United
States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with
other Germans abroad, who gradually organized a complete network of commercial
colonies all over the world. But, when Germany, about 40 years ago [c.1850],
seriously began manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in
her transformation, in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a first-rate
manufacturing country. Then, about 10 years ago, the British manufacturer got
frightened, and asked his ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no
longer keep his customers together. The unanimous answer was:
(1) You don't learn customer's language but expect him to
speak your own;
(2) You don't even try to suit your customer's wants,
habits, and tastes, but expect him to conform to your English ones.
I.
The Development
of Utopian Socialism
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of
the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the
society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists
and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production.
But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as
a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French
philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had,
at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its
hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the
coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no
external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society,
political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing
criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of
reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It
was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head [1]; first in
the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought,
claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by,
also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these
principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and
government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room
as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by
prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for
the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth
superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by
eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable
rights of man.
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more
than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found
its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to
bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as
one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat
Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a
democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no
more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their
epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal
nobility and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society,
was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and poor
workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing
not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further. From
its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot
exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval
burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman
and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And
although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility,
could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different
working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there
were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less
developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German
Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the
great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution,
Babeuf.
These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with
these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and
17th centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the 18th
century, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably)[2]. The demand for
equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the
social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were
to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing
all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching.
Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class
movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance;
Fourier; and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most
developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked
out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in
direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as
a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical
development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they
do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity
at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal
justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from
that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world,
based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and
unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as
feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice
have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men
have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of
genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now
arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable
event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a
mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier,
and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the
forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that
is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything
that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We
saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized
understanding of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving into the
bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and
government.
But the new order of things, rational enough as compared
with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The
state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had
found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who
had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in
the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the
Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war
of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism
between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had
become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had
to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable
institutions of the Church. The “freedom of property” from feudal fetters, now
veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small
proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the
overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these
great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors
were concerned, became “freedom from property”. The development of industry
upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses
conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in
Carlyle’s phrase [See Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, London 1843], the sole
nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year.
Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though
not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their
stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all
the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating.
The “fraternity” of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and
rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by
corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the
first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois
manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never heard of. Marriage itself
remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of
prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.
In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the
philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of
reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the
men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the
century. In 1802, Saint-Simon’s Geneva letters appeared; in 1808 appeared
Fourier’s first work, although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; on
January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.
At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production,
and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was
still very incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in
England, was still unknown in France. But Modern Industry develops, on the one
hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of
production, and the doing away with its capitalistic character – conflicts not
only between the classes begotten of it, but also between the very productive
forces and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand, it
develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of ending these
conflicts. If, therefore, about the year 1800, the conflicts arising from the
new social order were only just beginning to take shape, this holds still more
fully as to the means of ending them. The “have-nothing” masses of Paris,
during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and
thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie
themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their
domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which
then for the first time evolved itself from these “have-nothing” masses as the
nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action,
appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help
itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.
This historical situation also dominated the founders of
Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude
class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social
problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the
Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing
but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to
discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon
society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the
example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as
Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they
could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment
longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can
leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies,
which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own
bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity”. For ourselves, we delight in
the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out
through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
St. Simon Saint-Simon was a son of the great French
Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet 30. The Revolution was the
victory of the 3rd estate – i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in
production and in trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the
priests. But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively
the victory of a smaller part of this “estate”, as the conquest of political
power by the socially privileged section of it – i.e., the propertied
bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the
Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the
Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon
the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers
that, under the Directorate, brought France to the verge of ruin, and thus gave
Napoleon the pretext for his coup d’état.
Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate
and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between “workers” and
“idlers”. The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes, but also all
who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived on their
incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the
manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the
capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved,
and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had
not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign
of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science
and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that
unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation
– a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic “new Christianity”. But science,
that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the working
bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were, certainly,
intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public
officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-à-vis of the
workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers
especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by
the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in
which Modern Industry in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and
proletariat was only just coming into existence. But what Saint-Simon
especially lays stress upon is this: what interests him first, and above all
other things, is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and the most
poor (“la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre”).
Already in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the
proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he recognizes also
that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses.
“See,” says he to them, “what happened in France at the time
when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” [Lettres d’un
habitant de Genève à ses contemporains, Saint-Simon, 1803]
But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and
not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility,
bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant
discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and
foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that
economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only
in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the
future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things
and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of
the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise.
Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his
contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into
Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the
alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries, with
Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.
To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo
required as much courage as historical foresight.
Fourier If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of
view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not
strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of
the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon
that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their
inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after
it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery
of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers’ dazzling
promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in
which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility,
and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.
He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most
high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with
his mordant sarcasm.
Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene
nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all
time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that
blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit
prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more
masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes,
and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare
that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural
measure of the general emancipation.
But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the
history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of
evolution – savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is
identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today – i.e., with
the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves “that the
civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion
into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical” – that
civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly
reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the
very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain,
so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”.
[Théorie de l’unite universelle, Fourier, 1843 and Le nouveau monde industriel
et sociétaire, ou invention du procédé d'industrie attrayante et enaturelle
distribuée en séries passionnées, Fourier, 1845]
Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same
masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues
against talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical
phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies
this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into
natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier
introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the
human race.
Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over
the land, in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous,
revolution was going on. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were
transforming manufacture into modern industry, and thus revolutionizing the
whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the
manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress period of
production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up into large
capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of
the former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of artisans and small
shopkeepers, the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a
precarious existence.
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the
beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of
production – the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless,
even then it was producing crying social abuses – the herding together of a
homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of
all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations;
overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete
demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new
conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern
industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change
from day to day.
Owen At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a
manufacturer 29-years-old – a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of
character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen
had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man’s
character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the
environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his
period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only
chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters
and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into
practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had
already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a
Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New
Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with
greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European
reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for
the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to
2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police,
magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by
placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by
carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant
schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two, the
children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could
scarely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people 13 or 14
hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only 10 and a half hours. When a
crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full
wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value,
and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence
which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy
of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively
favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a
rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions,
much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.
“And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500
persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half
a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of
600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the
wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by
600,000?” [3]
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the
proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent on the capital they had laid out,
in addition to over £300,000 clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark
held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.
“If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,
imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to
Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have
been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the
working-classes.”
Note, l. c., p.22.
To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged.
The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich
individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a
reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all,
to be worked for the common good of all.
Owen’s communism was based upon this purely business
foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it
maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of
the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates
of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. And in his
definite plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed
with such practical knowledge – ground plan, front and side and bird’s-eye
views all included – that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there
is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual
arrangement of details.
His advance in the direction of Communism was the
turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was
rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most
popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes
listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his Communist theories
that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to
block the path to social reform: private property, religion, the present form
of marriage.
He knew what confronted him if he attacked these – outlawry,
excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position.
But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of
consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official
society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his
unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his
fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their
midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on
behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced
through in 1819, after five years’ fighting, the first law limiting the hours
of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first
Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great
trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete
communistic organization of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for
retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given
practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite
unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of
the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit was a
single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely
anticipating Proudhon’s bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing
entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social
ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.
The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed
the Socialist ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until
very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier
German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all
these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and
has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power.
And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development
of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this,
absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each
different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and
justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of
existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is
no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they
shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come
but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up
to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in
France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of
opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures
of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of
opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp
edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate,
like rounded pebbles in a brook.
To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed
upon a real basis.
Next: Dialectics
Notes
1. This is the passage on the French Revolution:
“Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt,
and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this
conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and
henceforth everything must be based upon this. Since the Sun had been in the
firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of
man standing upon his head – i.e., on the Idea – and building reality after
this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, Reason, rules the world; but
now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the
mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have
participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that
time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the
reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world.”
[Hegel: “The Philosophy of history”, 1840, p.535]
Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action
against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late
Professor Hegel?
2. Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists
Thomas More (16th century) and Tommaso Campanella (17th century). See Code de
la nature, Morelly, Paris 1841 and De la législation, ou principe des lois,
Mably, Amsterdam 1776.
3. From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a
memorial addressed to all the “red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe,” and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and also “to
Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers.”
II.Dialectics
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy
of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.
Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as
the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural
dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already
analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy,
on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g.
Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more
and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by
which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all
events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the
restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic.
We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours
sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here,
in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the
history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the
picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but
everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore,
at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less
kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections,
rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive,
naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient
Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is
and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming
into being and passing away.[A]
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general
character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain
the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not
understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to
understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special
causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and
historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on
very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first
of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount
of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any
critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species.
The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out
by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period [B], and later on, in the Middle Ages,
by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th
century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity.
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different
natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal
anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the
fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that
have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left
us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation,
apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose,
not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death,
not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by
Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow,
metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes,
ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from
each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He
thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea, yea;
nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a
thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be
itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one
another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.
At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very
luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound
commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four
walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide
world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and
necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the
nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit,
beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the
connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets
the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their
motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.
For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an
animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many
cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have
cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the
killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible
to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death
is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the
same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from
without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die
and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of
its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter,
so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than
itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two
poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they
are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate.
And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only
hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider
the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole,
they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that
universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally
changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and
then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the
framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends
things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned
above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for
modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials
increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works
dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal
oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical
evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt
the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all
organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process
of evolution going on through millions of years. But, the naturalists, who have
learned to think dialectically, are few and far between, and this conflict of
the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking, explains the
endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of
teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike.
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution,
of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the
minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with
its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death,
of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German
philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar
system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had
once been given, into the result of a historical process, the formation of the
Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous mass. From this, he at the
same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the Solar system, its
future death followed of necessity. His theory, half a century later, was
established mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that, the
spectroscope proved the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas
in various stages of condensation.
Picture of Hegel This
new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and
herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural,
historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant
motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace
out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement
and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer
appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally
condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are
best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man
himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of
this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law
running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it
propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded
the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to
solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of
his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own
knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and
conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an
idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less
abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and
their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea",
existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking
turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of
things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were
grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is
botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian
system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its
kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable
contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception
that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot
find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute
truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this
absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing
everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law
of dialectic reasoning.
This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the
contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external
universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in
German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to
the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th
century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of
irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of
evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French
of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as
a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal
celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus,
taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural
science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial
bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them,
being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to
move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In
both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer
requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended
to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound
to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge
of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or
unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science
of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is
subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature
could only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials
furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had
occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831,
the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the
first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached
its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the
front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to
the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the
newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. facts more and more
strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the
identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and
universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition.
All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and
English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect,
expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet
dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew
nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared
in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of
civilization".
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past
history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its
primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring
classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of
exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the
economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from
which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole
superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the
religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel
has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception
of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its
last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of
history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's
"knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his
"being" by his "knowing".
From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an
accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome
of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society
as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of
events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung,
and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the
conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this
materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists
was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days
certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its
consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the
mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly
this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class,
inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this
exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary —
to present the capitalistic mode of production in its
historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical
period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and
to lay bare its essential character, which was still a
secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the
basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the
worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power
of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts
more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this
surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly
increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The
genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both
explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of
history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through
surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a
science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.
Next: Historical Materialism
Notes
[A] Unknown to the Western world until the 20th-century, the
Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu was a predecessor of or possibly contemporary to
Heraclitus. Lao Tzu wrote the renowned Tao Te Ching in which he also espouses
the fundamental principles of dialectics.
[B] The Alexandrian period of the development of science
comprises the period extending from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century
A.D. It derives its name from the town of Alexandria in Egypt, which was one of
the most important centres of international economic intercourses at that time.
In the Alexandrian period, mathematics (Euclid and Archimedes), geography,
astronomy, anatomy, physiology, etc., attained considerable development.
China also been began development in natural sciences in the
third century B.C.E.
III.Historical
Materialism
The materialist conception of history starts from the
proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social
structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in
which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is
dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are
exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and
political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's
better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of
production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in
the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing
social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become
unreason, and right wrong [1], is only proof that in the modes of production
and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order,
adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it
also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been
brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition,
within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be
invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in
the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this
connection?
The present situation of society — this is now pretty
generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the
bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since
Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal
system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks
and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination
which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie
broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of
society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality,
before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist
blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in
freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery
transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces,
evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in
a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and
handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into
collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in
its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the
capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have
already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between
productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the
mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in
fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of
the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in
thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of
the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
Now, in what does this conflict consist?
Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages —
the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private
property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the
agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the
handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural
implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single
individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity,
small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a
rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of
production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of
production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of
capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth
section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century
this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple
co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is
shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty
productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of
production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a
collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer,
were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the
individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and
thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series
of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual
to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out
of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they
had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of
them: "I made that; this is my product."
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of
production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and
not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of
commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual
producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle
Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought
from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers,
of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst
of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan,
which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a
definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual
production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the
same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But
organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of
labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity
of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual
small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after
another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of
production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little
recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing
and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made,
and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of
commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production
thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was
a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in
full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of
commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise.
The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to
himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by
the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to
appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course.
His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even
where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and
very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices
and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for
education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of production and
of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation
into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the
socialized producers and means of production and their products were still
treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means
of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the
instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule,
it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the
owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product,
although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor
of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by
those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually
produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and
production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to
a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of
individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings
it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of
appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter
rests. [2]
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of
production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the
social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode
of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing
countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant
residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized
production with capitalistic appropriation.
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of
other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural
laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres
of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds
were so organized that the journeyman to today became the master of tomorrow.
But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and
concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as
the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there
was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist.
Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and
basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole
remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a
wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further enormously
increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same
time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of
the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete
between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists,
on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power,
on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic
appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and
bourgeoisie.
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust
its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose
social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon
the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have
lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for
himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such
exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how
much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will
be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual
demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to
sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of
production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws
work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the
only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here
they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They
are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered
by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out,
therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as
inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product
governs the producers.
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries,
production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the
individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his
family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it
also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was,
therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the
character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they
wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when
it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the
payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce
commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for
sale, became commodities.
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to
produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of
their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their
cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and
firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of
exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange
was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was
local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in
the town, the guild.
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and
especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws
of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with
greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken
through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated
producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at
large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy
grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the
capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production
was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of
production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment.
By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this
organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked
no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a
battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization
following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of
handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the
individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in
their turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th
centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market
made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of
virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now
decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of
whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It
is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from
Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence
natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The
contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents
itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the
individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.
The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms
of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get
out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered.
What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is
gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must
come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the centre. It
is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that
more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and
it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to
anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social
production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern
industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist
must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor
superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the
displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in
machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers
themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of
available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation
of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3], available at
the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the
street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs
of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator
for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.
Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes
the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that
the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the
hands of the laborer; that they very product of the worker is turned into an
instrument for his subjugation.
Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments
of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of
labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor
functions; that machinery,
"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor
time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the
laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the
purpose of expanding the value of his capital." (Capital, English edition,
p. 406)
Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the
preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry,
which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of
the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its
own home market.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-
population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of
accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the
wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of
misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth
at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of
toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,
i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of
capital (Marx's Capital, p. 661)
And to expect any other division of the products from the
capitalist mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a
battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the
positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the
battery.
We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of
modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a
compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to
improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare
possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a
similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry,
compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a
necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all
resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets
for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive
and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws
that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep
pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as
this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces
the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist
production has begotten another "vicious circle".
As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general
crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and
exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric
hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a
stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as
they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed,
the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they
have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon
bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years;
productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the
accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in
value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by
little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a
canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect
steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally,
after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so
over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five
times, and at the present moment (1877), we are going through it for the sixth
time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit
all of them off when he described the first "crise plethorique", a
crisis from plethora.
In these crises, the contradiction between socialized
production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The
circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of
circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and
circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has
reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of
exchange.
The fact that the socialized organization of production
within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with
the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and
dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent
concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many
large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of
the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive
forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means
of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the
industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of
subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general
wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of
distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents
the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For
in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they
have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of
exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital
of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these
and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and
personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to
function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the
capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to
further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces
themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the
existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the
practical recognition of their character as social production forces.
This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more
and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger
command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capital
class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as
this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high
pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash
itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring
about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production
which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of
these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal
that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic
expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes
insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of an
industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a union for the
purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be
produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price
fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are
generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater
concentration of association. The whole of a particular industry is turned into
one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the
internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in 1890 with the
English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in
the hands of one company, conducted upon a single plan, and with a capital of
6,000,000 pounds.
In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very
opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic
society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading
socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and
advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so
palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production
conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a
small band of dividend-mongers.
In any case, with trusts or without, the official
representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to
undertake the direction of production. [4] This necessity for conversion into
State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and
communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie
for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the
great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock
companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are
for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further
social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and
gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one
another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces
out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as
it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not
immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies
and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic
nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this
is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that
bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the
capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers
as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is
essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal
personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the
taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national
capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers
— proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather,
brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of
the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within
it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
This solution can only consist in the practical recognition
of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the
harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this
can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the
productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a
whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products
today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and
exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly,
destructively. But,with the taking over by society of the productive forces,
the social character of the means of production and of the products will be
utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and
instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become
the most powerful lever of production itself.
Active social forces work exactly like natural forces:
blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon
with, them. But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action,
their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them
more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends.
And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As
long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of
these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of
the capitalist mode of production, and its defenders — so long these forces are
at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have
shown above in detail.
But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the
hand working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants.
The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the
lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the
voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the
service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the
productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a
social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of
the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of
appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer, and then the
appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is
based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand,
direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of
production — on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of
subsistence and of enjoyment.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more
completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians,
it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to
accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the
transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State
property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The
proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State
property.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat,
abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State
as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the
State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro
tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing
any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and,
therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited
classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of
production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official
representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a
visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that
class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:
in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the
whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer
any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the
individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production,
with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more
remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer
necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself
the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means
of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last
independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in
one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the
government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the
conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It
dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free
State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to
its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called
anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.
Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of
production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has
often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by
sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a
historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were
there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men
understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice,
equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by
virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an
exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the
necessary consequences of the deficient and restricted development of
production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields a
produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of
all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the
great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society
is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond
slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which
looks after the general affairs of society: the direction of labor, State
business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of
labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not
prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence
and robbery, trickery and fraud. it does not prevent the ruling class, once
having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the
working-class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified
exploitation of the masses.
But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a
certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only
under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production.
It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces.
And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of
historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that
particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the
existence of class distinction itself, has become a obsolete anachronism. It
presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree
at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and,
with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of
intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only
superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to
development.
This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual
bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their
economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society
is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products,
which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd
contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are
wanting. The expansive force of the means of production burst the bonds that
the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from
these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated
development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited
increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of
the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial
restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation
of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable
concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further,
it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of
products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes
of today, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for
every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not
only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an
existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their
physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time,
here, but it is here. [5]
With the seizing of the means of production by society,
production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery
of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by
systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence
disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally
marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal
conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the
conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes
under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real,
conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social
organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face
with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used
with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization,
hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now
becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that
have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only
from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own
history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him
have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by
him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of
freedom.
Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.
I. Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small
scale. Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive,
ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action. Production for immediate consumption,
either of the producer himself or his feudal lord. Only where an excess of production
over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into
exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its infancy. But
already it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production of
society at large.
II. Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at
first be means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the
means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops. As a
consequence, their transformation from individual to social means of production
— a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange.
The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears. In his
capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates the products
and turns them into commodities. Production has become a social act. Exchange
and appropriation continue to be individual acts, the acts of individuals. The
social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental
contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present-day
society moves, and which modern industry brings to light.
A. Severance of the producer from the means of production.
Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the
laws governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition.
Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and
social anarchy in the production as a whole.
C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by
competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a
constantly growing displacement of laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the
other hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under
competition, for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of development of
productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production and products —
excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence.
But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to work
together, because the capitalist form of production prevents the productive
forces from working and the products from circulating, unless they are first turned
into capital — which their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction has
grown into an absurdity. The mode of production rises in rebellion against the
form of exchange.
D. Partial recognition of the social character of the
productive forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the
great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock
companies, later in by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated
to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by
salaried employees.
III. Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the
contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this
transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the
bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means
of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives
their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized
production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The
development of production makes the existence of different classes of society
thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production
vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the
master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the
lord over Nature, his own master — free.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the
historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the
historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the
now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the
meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task
of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific
Socialism.
Notes
1. Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust
2. It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out
that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the character of the
appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production is by the changes
described above. It is, of course, a very different matter whether I
appropriate to myself my own product or that of another. Note in passing that
wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalist mode of production in embryo,
is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form, it existed for centuries alongside
slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of
production only when the necessary historical pre-conditions had been
furnished.
3. "The Conditions of the Working-Class in
England" — Sonnenschein & Co., p.84.
4. I say "have to". For only when the means of
production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by
joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State
has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of
today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of
another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society
itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and
again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all
State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if
the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then
Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.
If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and
financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not
under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian
lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to
bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and
especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of
parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or
indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime
Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the
army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed
by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of
the brothels.
5. A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of
the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production, even under
capitalist pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain
and Ireland amounted, in round numbers in
1814 to £ 2,200,000,000,
1865 to £ 6,100,000,000,
1875 to £ 8,500,000,000.
As an instance of the squandering of means of production and
of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone,
in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress
(Berlin, February 21, 1878), as 22,750,000 pounds.
Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3, p. 95-151;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, 1970;
First Published: March, April, and May issues of Revue
Socialiste in 1880;
Translated: from
the French by Edward Aveling in 1892 (authorised by Engels)
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version:
Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999, 2003.
Introduction:
Preface to the First German Edition, Engels 1882
[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]
[History of the English middle-class]
Introduction to the French Edition, Karl Marx 1880
Contents:
Part I: [Utopian Socialism]
Part II: [Dialectics]
Part III: [Historical Materialism]
“At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now
representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three
chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title: Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique. From this
French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German
friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish,
Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been
published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book circulates in 10
languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist
Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany,
it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.” [from the Preface to
the 1892 English Edition]
1892
English Edition Introduction
[General
Introduction and the History of Materialism]
The present little book is, originally, part of a larger
whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who
formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin
University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to
Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist
theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of
society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he
honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.
This took place about the same time when the two sections of
the Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected
their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an
immense increase of strength, but, was what more, the faculty of employing the
whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany
was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was
that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly
proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate
party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us,
and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.
This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was
evidently a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a
terribly ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality,
whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he
considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising
system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the
fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other
purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And
Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less
than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism";
and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big
volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of
arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in
general, and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete
"revolution in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I
had to treat of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space
to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable
nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of
youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my
opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a
more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and
myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason
which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles in the
Leipzig Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1], and later on as a
book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft" (Mr. E.
Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which
appeared in Zurich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now
representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three
chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique".
From this French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883,
our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian,
Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text,
have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book
circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not
even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often
translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.
The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the
intention of spreading among the German Socialist party some elementary
knowledge of the history and development of landed property in Germany. This
seemed all the more necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of
the working-people of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the
agricultural laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has
been included in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land
common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less
known in England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the
original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim
Kovalevsky, according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands
among the members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for
joint-account by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several
generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and
that the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so
as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably
quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].
The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are
new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital. We call
"production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are
produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose of
exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase extends from
the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it
attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under
conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs,
for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their
own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products
over his outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the
Middle Ages into three periods:
handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and
apprentices, where each laborer produces a complete article;
manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in
one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of
division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that
the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands
of all;
modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery
driven by power, and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending
and correcting the performance of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will
meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if
we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British
"respectability", we should be even worse off than we are. This book
defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word
materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers.
"Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly
inadmissible.
And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from
the 17th century onwards, is England.
"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.
Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible
for the matter to think?'
"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in
God's omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was
a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among
the English schoolmen.
"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon.
To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon
the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as
his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of
all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting
the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation.
Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal
forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion
is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical
motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a
'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's [2] — of matter.
"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still
occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand,
matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole
entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine
pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.
"In its further evolution, materialism becomes
one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge
based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract
experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of
sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent,
misanthropic, flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground,
materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a
sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all
the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all
human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but
the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy
can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one
of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if,
on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of
sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that, besides
the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals,
there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily
substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance,
are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate
thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes
going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that
our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material
things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of
God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical
movement, which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we
call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are
identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however,
furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human
knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the
Human Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of
Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly
shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's
sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Deism is but an
easy-going way of getting rid of religion."
Karl Marx
The Holy Family
p. 201 - 204
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern
materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he
paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that
Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French
materialism which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and
sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French
century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we
outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this century,
what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was
what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the
English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists, or,
at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that
almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible
miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the
facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book
of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own
intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst
the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were then called, the
working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been "civilized" since then. The
exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England
became gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much
headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here. Anyhow,
the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only to the
aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental scepticism
in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism, though not yet
considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England, is yet
very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and
decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that
under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and
condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany",
like so many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than
their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive
Lancashire term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception
of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by
law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he
adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of
some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the
time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's
Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly
replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in
our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for
either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the
whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me,
a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based
upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive
through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects,
or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely
the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of
reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before
there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from
Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action
had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of
the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these
objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an
infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these
perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object
can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed
in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea
of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof
positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with
reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a
failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us
fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and
superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not
warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care
to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits
prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall
find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions
with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance,
so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically
controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by
their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent
incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may
correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or
mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is
beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the
qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact
that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you
that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant's
time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might
well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious
"thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable things
have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant
progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as
unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century, organic
substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to build them up one after
another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes.
Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of
no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are
still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the
albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after
centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial
albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced
organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal
mode of existence of albuminous bodies.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal
mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.
He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called,
energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of
their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this
admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of
court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have
none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there
is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter
and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of
energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed
by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far
as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres
about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls
it agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an
agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history
sketched out in this little book as "historical agnosticism".
Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I
making fun of them? And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be
overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the
term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course
of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all
important historic events in the economic development of society, in the
changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of
society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against
one another.
This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the
sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to
British respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years
ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English
respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable English
middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the
intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.
Notes
1. Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha
Unification Congress.
2. "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual
literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the
same time, the mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning
of the Latin qualitas; his "qual" was the activating principle
arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the
thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain
inflicted from without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]
1892
English Edition Introduction
[History
(the role of Religion) in the English middle-class]
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising
middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had
conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but this
position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development
of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance
of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the
Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in
spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to
the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized its own
hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most
powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil of the
Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each
country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be
destroyed.
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on
the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy,
physiology were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of
its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature.
Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not
been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been
no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could
not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion.
The above, though touching but two of the points where the
rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established
religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly
interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the
bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time,
had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in
the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities
started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses
of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their
very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism
culminated in three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in
Germany. The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by
two insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were
defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most
interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes of which
we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated into a fight
between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out
Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The
Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to
absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted
to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed
was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world
of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or
cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that
willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic
powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when
all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and
America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic
articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break
down. Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized, could the
kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While
German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism
founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and,
above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its
doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The
middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country
districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois
risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the
economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the
yeomanry of england had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that
yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would
never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have
brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of
the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to
be carried considerably further – exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in
Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois
society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the point
where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations, the new
centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point. The
grand period of English history, known to respectability under the name of
"the Great Rebellion", and the struggles succeeding it, were brought
to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians
"the Glorious Revolution".
The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising
middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now,
the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them to become what
Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period: "The first
bourgeois of the kingdom". Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons
had killed one another during the War of the Roses. Their successors, though
mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of
descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far
more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at
once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and
replacing them with sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands,
created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the
whole of the 17th century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry
VII, the English "aristocracy", far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to
indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great
landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to cooperate with the
leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and
place" were left to the great landowning families, provided the economic
interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class were
sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that time
powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There might be
squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a
recognized, component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them,
it had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the
nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,
or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his
clerks, his work-people, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they had to be trained
to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had supplied the
standard under which he had fought the king and the lords; he was not long in
discovering the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon
the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the behests of
the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In short, the English
bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower
orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one of the means
employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.
There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the
religious leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in
England. This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the
middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and
cultivated men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for
the uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes, it stepped on
the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called upon
absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus ["Robust
but malicious boy"] – to wit, the people. Similarly, with the successors
of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form of
materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore,
hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its
anti-bourgeois political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the
materialism and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had
furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to
furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even today
the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".
In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France,
where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a
branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively
aristocratic doctrine. But, soon, its revolutionary character asserted itself.
The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of religious
belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political
institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their doctrine to
universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all
subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named – the
Encyclopaedia. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms – avowed materialism
or deism – it became the creed of the whole cultures youth of France; so much
so that, when the Great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by English
Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and Terrorists, and
furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Great French
Revolution was the third uprising of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had
entirely cast off the religious cloak, and was fought out on undisguised
political lines; it was the first, too, that was really fought out up to the
destruction of one of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph
of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary
and post-revolutionary institutions, and the compromise between landlords and
capitalists, found its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and
in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France, the
Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it
cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the Code Civil
a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law – that almost perfect expression of
the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the
production of commodities – to modern capitalist conditions; so masterly that
this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law
of property in all other countries, not excepting England. Let us, however, not
forget that if English law continues to express the economic relations of
capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the
thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation
– vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople, said a Frenchman –
that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and
transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part of that old Germanic
personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from all interference
(but that of the law courts), which on the Continent has been lost during the
period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been as yet fully recovered.
To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution
gave him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies,
to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush the
last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why he fought
it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his
grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt to
carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois do without
his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were, and invented
fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army, which kept order at
home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets
aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that
minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise;
this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class, did sympathize
with the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament.
Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French
Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his
religion. Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if
the religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free
thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a
cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its
manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another, but they
were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the
bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others,
initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of
gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably
faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself, the
financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed into the
background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual
changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to
the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these parties,
too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the
preceding century. The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used
by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became
incompatible with the new economic interests. A fresh struggle with the
aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a victory of the new economic
power. First, the Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance,
under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie
a recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws
[a move toward free-trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of
the bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers,
over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.
Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social power
– first its ally, but soon its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of large
manufacturing capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of
manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in
proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture
after another, and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it
proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts
forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen
constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having
excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's
Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first
working-men's party of modern times.
Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March
1848, in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the point
of view of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction. First, the
defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then the crushing of the Paris
workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year; then the disasters of 1849
in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte
over Paris, December 2, 1851. For a time, at least, the bugbear of
working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost! If the British
bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common
people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all
these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he
continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the
evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own native religious
machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan 1), the greatest organizer in
existence of religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody
and Sankey, and the like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the
Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to
the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters
an element of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become
troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.
It seems a law of historical development that the
bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of political power – at least
for any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism was
completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession of
the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's reign,
1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom; by far the
larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification. Under
the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for three years
only; their incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is only now, in the
Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the
helm for more than 20 years; and they are already showing lively signs of
decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in
countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very
beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, the
successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already knocking at the
door.
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even
the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession
of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the middle-class
submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech, implored the young men of
Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from
his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to
move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as English! The fact
was, the English middle-class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated
upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior
Government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular
narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business sharpness. 2) Even now the
endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show that the English
middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for the best education,
and looks to something more modest. Thus, even after the repeal of the Corn
Laws, it appeared a matter of course that the men who had carried the day – the
Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc. – should remain excluded from a share in the
official government of the country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act
opened to them the door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the
present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that
they keep up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste
of drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they
consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found worthy
of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by
themselves.
The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore,
not yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage. The
reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions, as well
as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66 (ascribed vulgarly
to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development of railways,
ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again driven the
working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which they formed,
as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to the franchise,
however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the Liberals
"funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories seize
the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the boroughs, along
with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot; then, in 1884, the
extension of household suffrage to the counties and a fresh redistribution of
seats, by which electoral districts were, to some extent, equalized. All these
measures considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class, so
much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now furnished the
majority of the voters. But parliamentary government is a capital school for
teaching respect for tradition; if the middle-class look with awe and
veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called "our old
nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect and
deference to what used to be designated as "their betters", the
middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the model
workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master, and whose
self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled our German
economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable communistic and
revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.
But the English middle-class – good men of business as they
are – saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their powers but
reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist years,
what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the people, is capable of. And since
that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better part of the
People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now, if ever, the
people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first and foremost of all
moral means of action upon the masses is and remains – religion. Hence the
parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of
the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to
the Salvation Army.
And now came the triumph of British respectability over the
free thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen of
France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected with
Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular as to the
legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy. The puer
robustus, here, turned from day-to-day more malitiosus. Nothing remained to the
French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop their
free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps upon him, quietly drops
the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board; one-by-one, the scoffers
turned pious in outward behavior, spoke with respect of the Church, its dogmas
and rites, and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped.
French bourgeois dined maigre on Fridays, and German ones say out long
Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays. They had come to grief with
materialism. "Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden" – religion
must be kept alive for the people – that was the only and the last means to
save society from utter ruin. Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find
this out until they had done their level best to break up religion for ever.
And now it was the turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say:
"Why, you fools, I could have told you that 200 years ago!"
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the
British, nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem
the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force, is the vis
inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is sure to be broken down; and
thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist society. If our
juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more or less remote
offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas
cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a complete change in these
relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural revelation, we must admit
that no religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a tottering society.
In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to
move again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds.
Bourgeois traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two
parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out
its salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Working-men's traditions,
inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such as the
exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not
gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding, by every such
union, of its own blacklegs. But, for all that, the English working-class is
moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother
Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things in England, with a slow and
measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative
attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious mistrust of the
name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance; and the movement
spreads and seizes one layer of the workers after another. It has now shaken
out of their torpor the unskilled laborers of the East End of London, and we
all know what a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return.
And if the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of some people, let
them not forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest
qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in advance is once
gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the
old Chartists, for reasons unexplained above, were not quite up to the mark,
the grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.
But the triumph of the European working-class does not
depend upon England alone. It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at
least, England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries, the
working-class movement is well ahead of England. In Germany, it is even within
measurable distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last
25 years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the
German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political
capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German
working-class have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years
ago, Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European
middle-class; as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that
Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European
proletariat?
Frederick Engels
London
April 20, 1892
Notes
1. "Brother Jonathan" – A sort of Anglo-Christian
"Uncle Sam".
2. And even in business matters, the conceit of national
Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English
manufacturer considered it derogatory for an Englishman to speak any language
but his own, and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact that "poor
devils" of foreigners settled in England and took off his hands the
trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never noticed that these
foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a very large part of British
foreign trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade of
Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China, the United
States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with
other Germans abroad, who gradually organized a complete network of commercial
colonies all over the world. But, when Germany, about 40 years ago [c.1850],
seriously began manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in
her transformation, in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a first-rate
manufacturing country. Then, about 10 years ago, the British manufacturer got
frightened, and asked his ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no
longer keep his customers together. The unanimous answer was:
(1) You don't learn customer's language but expect him to
speak your own;
(2) You don't even try to suit your customer's wants,
habits, and tastes, but expect him to conform to your English ones.
I.
The Development
of Utopian Socialism
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of
the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the
society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists
and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production.
But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as
a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French
philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had,
at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its
hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the
coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no
external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society,
political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing
criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of
reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It
was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head [1]; first in
the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought,
claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by,
also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these
principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and
government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room
as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by
prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for
the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth
superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by
eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable
rights of man.
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more
than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found
its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to
bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as
one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat
Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a
democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no
more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their
epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal
nobility and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society,
was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and poor
workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing
not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further. From
its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot
exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval
burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman
and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And
although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility,
could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different
working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there
were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less
developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German
Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the
great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution,
Babeuf.
These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with
these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and
17th centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the 18th
century, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably)[2]. The demand for
equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the
social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were
to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing
all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching.
Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class
movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance;
Fourier; and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most
developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked
out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in
direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as
a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical
development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they
do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity
at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal
justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from
that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world,
based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and
unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as
feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice
have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men
have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of
genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now
arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable
event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a
mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier,
and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the
forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that
is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything
that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We
saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized
understanding of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving into the
bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and
government.
But the new order of things, rational enough as compared
with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The
state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had
found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who
had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in
the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the
Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war
of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism
between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had
become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had
to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable
institutions of the Church. The “freedom of property” from feudal fetters, now
veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small
proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the
overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these
great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors
were concerned, became “freedom from property”. The development of industry
upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses
conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in
Carlyle’s phrase [See Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, London 1843], the sole
nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year.
Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though
not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their
stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all
the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating.
The “fraternity” of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and
rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by
corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the
first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois
manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never heard of. Marriage itself
remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of
prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.
In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the
philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of
reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the
men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the
century. In 1802, Saint-Simon’s Geneva letters appeared; in 1808 appeared
Fourier’s first work, although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799; on
January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.
At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production,
and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was
still very incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in
England, was still unknown in France. But Modern Industry develops, on the one
hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of
production, and the doing away with its capitalistic character – conflicts not
only between the classes begotten of it, but also between the very productive
forces and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand, it
develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of ending these
conflicts. If, therefore, about the year 1800, the conflicts arising from the
new social order were only just beginning to take shape, this holds still more
fully as to the means of ending them. The “have-nothing” masses of Paris,
during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and
thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie
themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their
domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which
then for the first time evolved itself from these “have-nothing” masses as the
nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action,
appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help
itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.
This historical situation also dominated the founders of
Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude
class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social
problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the
Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing
but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to
discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon
society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the
example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as
Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they
could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment
longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can
leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies,
which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own
bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity”. For ourselves, we delight in
the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out
through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
St. Simon Saint-Simon was a son of the great French
Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet 30. The Revolution was the
victory of the 3rd estate – i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in
production and in trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the
priests. But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively
the victory of a smaller part of this “estate”, as the conquest of political
power by the socially privileged section of it – i.e., the propertied
bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the
Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the
Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon
the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers
that, under the Directorate, brought France to the verge of ruin, and thus gave
Napoleon the pretext for his coup d’état.
Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate
and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between “workers” and
“idlers”. The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes, but also all
who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived on their
incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the
manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the
capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved,
and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had
not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign
of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science
and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that
unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation
– a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic “new Christianity”. But science,
that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the working
bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were, certainly,
intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public
officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-à-vis of the
workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers
especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by
the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in
which Modern Industry in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and
proletariat was only just coming into existence. But what Saint-Simon
especially lays stress upon is this: what interests him first, and above all
other things, is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and the most
poor (“la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre”).
Already in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the
proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he recognizes also
that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses.
“See,” says he to them, “what happened in France at the time
when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” [Lettres d’un
habitant de Genève à ses contemporains, Saint-Simon, 1803]
But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and
not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility,
bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant
discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and
foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that
economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only
in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the
future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things
and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of
the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise.
Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his
contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into
Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the
alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries, with
Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.
To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo
required as much courage as historical foresight.
Fourier If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of
view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not
strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of
the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon
that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their
inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after
it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery
of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers’ dazzling
promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in
which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility,
and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.
He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most
high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with
his mordant sarcasm.
Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene
nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all
time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that
blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit
prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more
masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes,
and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare
that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural
measure of the general emancipation.
But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the
history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of
evolution – savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is
identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today – i.e., with
the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves “that the
civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion
into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical” – that
civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly
reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the
very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain,
so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”.
[Théorie de l’unite universelle, Fourier, 1843 and Le nouveau monde industriel
et sociétaire, ou invention du procédé d'industrie attrayante et enaturelle
distribuée en séries passionnées, Fourier, 1845]
Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same
masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues
against talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical
phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies
this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into
natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier
introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the
human race.
Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over
the land, in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous,
revolution was going on. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were
transforming manufacture into modern industry, and thus revolutionizing the
whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the
manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress period of
production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up into large
capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of
the former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of artisans and small
shopkeepers, the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a
precarious existence.
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the
beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of
production – the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless,
even then it was producing crying social abuses – the herding together of a
homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of
all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations;
overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete
demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new
conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern
industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change
from day to day.
Owen At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a
manufacturer 29-years-old – a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of
character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen
had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man’s
character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the
environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his
period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only
chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters
and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into
practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had
already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a
Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New
Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with
greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European
reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for
the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to
2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police,
magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by
placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by
carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant
schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two, the
children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could
scarely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people 13 or 14
hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only 10 and a half hours. When a
crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full
wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value,
and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence
which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy
of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively
favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a
rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions,
much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.
“And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500
persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half
a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of
600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the
wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by
600,000?” [3]
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the
proprietors of the establishment 5 per cent on the capital they had laid out,
in addition to over £300,000 clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark
held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.
“If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,
imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to
Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have
been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the
working-classes.”
Note, l. c., p.22.
To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged.
The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich
individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a
reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all,
to be worked for the common good of all.
Owen’s communism was based upon this purely business
foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it
maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of
the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates
of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. And in his
definite plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed
with such practical knowledge – ground plan, front and side and bird’s-eye
views all included – that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there
is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual
arrangement of details.
His advance in the direction of Communism was the
turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was
rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most
popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes
listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his Communist theories
that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to
block the path to social reform: private property, religion, the present form
of marriage.
He knew what confronted him if he attacked these – outlawry,
excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position.
But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of
consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official
society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his
unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his
fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their
midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on
behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced
through in 1819, after five years’ fighting, the first law limiting the hours
of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first
Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great
trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete
communistic organization of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for
retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given
practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite
unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of
the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit was a
single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely
anticipating Proudhon’s bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing
entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social
ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.
The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed
the Socialist ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until
very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier
German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all
these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and
has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power.
And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development
of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this,
absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each
different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and
justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of
existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is
no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they
shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come
but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up
to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in
France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of
opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures
of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of
opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp
edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate,
like rounded pebbles in a brook.
To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed
upon a real basis.
Next: Dialectics
Notes
1. This is the passage on the French Revolution:
“Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt,
and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this
conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and
henceforth everything must be based upon this. Since the Sun had been in the
firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of
man standing upon his head – i.e., on the Idea – and building reality after
this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, Reason, rules the world; but
now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the
mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have
participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that
time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the
reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world.”
[Hegel: “The Philosophy of history”, 1840, p.535]
Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action
against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late
Professor Hegel?
2. Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists
Thomas More (16th century) and Tommaso Campanella (17th century). See Code de
la nature, Morelly, Paris 1841 and De la législation, ou principe des lois,
Mably, Amsterdam 1776.
3. From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a
memorial addressed to all the “red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe,” and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and also “to
Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers.”
II.Dialectics
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy
of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.
Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as
the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural
dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already
analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy,
on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g.
Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more
and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by
which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all
events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the
restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic.
We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours
sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here,
in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the
history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the
picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but
everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore,
at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less
kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections,
rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive,
naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient
Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is
and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming
into being and passing away.[A]
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general
character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain
the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not
understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to
understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special
causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and
historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on
very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first
of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount
of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any
critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species.
The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out
by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period [B], and later on, in the Middle Ages,
by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th
century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity.
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different
natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal
anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the
fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that
have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left
us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation,
apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose,
not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death,
not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by
Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow,
metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes,
ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from
each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He
thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea, yea;
nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a
thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be
itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one
another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.
At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very
luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound
commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four
walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide
world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and
necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the
nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit,
beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the
connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets
the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their
motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.
For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an
animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many
cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have
cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the
killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible
to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death
is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the
same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from
without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die
and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of
its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter,
so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than
itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two
poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they
are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate.
And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only
hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider
the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole,
they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that
universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally
changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and
then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the
framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends
things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned
above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for
modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials
increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works
dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal
oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical
evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt
the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all
organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process
of evolution going on through millions of years. But, the naturalists, who have
learned to think dialectically, are few and far between, and this conflict of
the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking, explains the
endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of
teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike.
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution,
of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the
minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with
its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death,
of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German
philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar
system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had
once been given, into the result of a historical process, the formation of the
Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous mass. From this, he at the
same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the Solar system, its
future death followed of necessity. His theory, half a century later, was
established mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that, the
spectroscope proved the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas
in various stages of condensation.
Picture of Hegel This
new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and
herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural,
historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant
motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace
out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement
and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer
appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally
condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are
best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man
himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of
this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law
running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it
propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded
the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to
solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of
his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own
knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and
conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an
idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less
abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and
their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea",
existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking
turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of
things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were
grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is
botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian
system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its
kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable
contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception
that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot
find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute
truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this
absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing
everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law
of dialectic reasoning.
This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the
contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external
universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in
German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to
the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th
century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of
irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of
evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French
of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as
a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal
celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus,
taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural
science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial
bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them,
being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to
move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In
both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer
requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended
to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound
to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge
of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or
unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science
of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is
subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature
could only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials
furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had
occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831,
the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the
first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached
its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the
front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to
the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the
newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. facts more and more
strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the
identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and
universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition.
All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and
English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect,
expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet
dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew
nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared
in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of
civilization".
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past
history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its
primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring
classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of
exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the
economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from
which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole
superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the
religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel
has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception
of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its
last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of
history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's
"knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his
"being" by his "knowing".
From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an
accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome
of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society
as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of
events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung,
and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the
conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this
materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists
was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days
certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its
consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the
mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly
this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class,
inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this
exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary —
to present the capitalistic mode of production in its
historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical
period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and
to lay bare its essential character, which was still a
secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the
basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the
worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power
of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts
more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this
surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly
increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The
genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both
explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of
history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through
surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a
science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.
Next: Historical Materialism
Notes
[A] Unknown to the Western world until the 20th-century, the
Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu was a predecessor of or possibly contemporary to
Heraclitus. Lao Tzu wrote the renowned Tao Te Ching in which he also espouses
the fundamental principles of dialectics.
[B] The Alexandrian period of the development of science
comprises the period extending from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century
A.D. It derives its name from the town of Alexandria in Egypt, which was one of
the most important centres of international economic intercourses at that time.
In the Alexandrian period, mathematics (Euclid and Archimedes), geography,
astronomy, anatomy, physiology, etc., attained considerable development.
China also been began development in natural sciences in the
third century B.C.E.
III.Historical
Materialism
The materialist conception of history starts from the
proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social
structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in
which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is
dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are
exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and
political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's
better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of
production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in
the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing
social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become
unreason, and right wrong [1], is only proof that in the modes of production
and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order,
adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it
also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been
brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition,
within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be
invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in
the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this
connection?
The present situation of society — this is now pretty
generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the
bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since
Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal
system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks
and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination
which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie
broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of
society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality,
before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist
blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in
freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery
transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces,
evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in
a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and
handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into
collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in
its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the
capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have
already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between
productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the
mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in
fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of
the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in
thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of
the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
Now, in what does this conflict consist?
Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages —
the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private
property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the
agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the
handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural
implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single
individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity,
small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a
rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of
production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of
production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of
capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth
section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century
this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple
co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is
shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty
productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of
production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a
collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer,
were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the
individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and
thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series
of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual
to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out
of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they
had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of
them: "I made that; this is my product."
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of
production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and
not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of
commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual
producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle
Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought
from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers,
of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst
of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan,
which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a
definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual
production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the
same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But
organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of
labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity
of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual
small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after
another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of
production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little
recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing
and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made,
and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of
commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production
thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was
a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in
full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of
commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise.
The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to
himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by
the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to
appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course.
His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even
where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and
very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices
and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for
education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of production and
of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation
into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the
socialized producers and means of production and their products were still
treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means
of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the
instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule,
it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the
owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product,
although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor
of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by
those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually
produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and
production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to
a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of
individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings
it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of
appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter
rests. [2]
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of
production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the
social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode
of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing
countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant
residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized
production with capitalistic appropriation.
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of
other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural
laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres
of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds
were so organized that the journeyman to today became the master of tomorrow.
But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and
concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as
the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there
was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist.
Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and
basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole
remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a
wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further enormously
increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same
time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of
the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete
between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists,
on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power,
on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic
appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and
bourgeoisie.
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust
its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose
social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon
the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have
lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for
himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such
exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how
much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will
be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual
demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to
sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of
production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws
work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the
only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here
they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They
are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered
by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out,
therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as
inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product
governs the producers.
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries,
production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the
individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his
family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it
also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was,
therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the
character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they
wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when
it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the
payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce
commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for
sale, became commodities.
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to
produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of
their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their
cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and
firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of
exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange
was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was
local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in
the town, the guild.
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and
especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws
of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with
greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken
through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated
producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at
large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy
grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the
capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production
was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of
production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment.
By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this
organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked
no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a
battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization
following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of
handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the
individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in
their turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th
centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market
made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of
virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now
decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of
whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It
is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from
Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence
natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The
contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents
itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the
individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.
The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms
of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get
out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered.
What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is
gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must
come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the centre. It
is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that
more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and
it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to
anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social
production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern
industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist
must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor
superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the
displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in
machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers
themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of
available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation
of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3], available at
the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the
street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs
of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator
for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.
Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes
the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that
the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the
hands of the laborer; that they very product of the worker is turned into an
instrument for his subjugation.
Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments
of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of
labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor
functions; that machinery,
"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor
time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the
laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the
purpose of expanding the value of his capital." (Capital, English edition,
p. 406)
Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the
preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry,
which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of
the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its
own home market.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-
population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of
accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the
wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of
misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth
at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of
toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,
i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of
capital (Marx's Capital, p. 661)
And to expect any other division of the products from the
capitalist mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a
battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the
positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the
battery.
We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of
modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a
compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to
improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare
possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a
similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry,
compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a
necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all
resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets
for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive
and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws
that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep
pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as
this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces
the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist
production has begotten another "vicious circle".
As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general
crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and
exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric
hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a
stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as
they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed,
the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they
have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon
bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years;
productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the
accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in
value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by
little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a
canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect
steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally,
after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so
over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five
times, and at the present moment (1877), we are going through it for the sixth
time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit
all of them off when he described the first "crise plethorique", a
crisis from plethora.
In these crises, the contradiction between socialized
production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The
circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of
circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and
circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has
reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of
exchange.
The fact that the socialized organization of production
within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with
the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and
dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent
concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many
large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of
the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive
forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means
of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the
industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of
subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general
wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of
distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents
the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For
in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they
have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of
exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital
of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these
and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and
personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to
function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the
capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to
further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces
themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the
existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the
practical recognition of their character as social production forces.
This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more
and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger
command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capital
class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as
this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high
pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash
itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring
about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production
which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of
these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal
that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic
expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes
insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of an
industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a union for the
purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be
produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price
fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are
generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater
concentration of association. The whole of a particular industry is turned into
one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the
internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in 1890 with the
English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in
the hands of one company, conducted upon a single plan, and with a capital of
6,000,000 pounds.
In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very
opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic
society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading
socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and
advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so
palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production
conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a
small band of dividend-mongers.
In any case, with trusts or without, the official
representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to
undertake the direction of production. [4] This necessity for conversion into
State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and
communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie
for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the
great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock
companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are
for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further
social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and
gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one
another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces
out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as
it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not
immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies
and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic
nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this
is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that
bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the
capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers
as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is
essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal
personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the
taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national
capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers
— proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather,
brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of
the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within
it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
This solution can only consist in the practical recognition
of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the
harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this
can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the
productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a
whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products
today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and
exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly,
destructively. But,with the taking over by society of the productive forces,
the social character of the means of production and of the products will be
utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and
instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become
the most powerful lever of production itself.
Active social forces work exactly like natural forces:
blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon
with, them. But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action,
their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them
more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends.
And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As
long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of
these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of
the capitalist mode of production, and its defenders — so long these forces are
at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have
shown above in detail.
But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the
hand working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants.
The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the
lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the
voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the
service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the
productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a
social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of
the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of
appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer, and then the
appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is
based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand,
direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of
production — on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of
subsistence and of enjoyment.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more
completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians,
it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to
accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the
transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State
property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The
proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State
property.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat,
abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State
as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the
State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro
tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing
any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and,
therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited
classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of
production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official
representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a
visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that
class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:
in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the
whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer
any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the
individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production,
with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more
remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer
necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself
the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means
of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last
independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in
one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the
government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the
conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It
dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free
State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to
its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called
anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.
Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of
production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has
often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by
sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a
historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were
there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men
understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice,
equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by
virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an
exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the
necessary consequences of the deficient and restricted development of
production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields a
produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of
all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the
great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society
is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond
slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which
looks after the general affairs of society: the direction of labor, State
business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of
labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not
prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence
and robbery, trickery and fraud. it does not prevent the ruling class, once
having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the
working-class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified
exploitation of the masses.
But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a
certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only
under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production.
It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces.
And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of
historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that
particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the
existence of class distinction itself, has become a obsolete anachronism. It
presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree
at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and,
with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of
intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only
superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to
development.
This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual
bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their
economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society
is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products,
which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd
contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are
wanting. The expansive force of the means of production burst the bonds that
the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from
these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated
development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited
increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of
the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial
restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation
of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable
concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further,
it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of
products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes
of today, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for
every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not
only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an
existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their
physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time,
here, but it is here. [5]
With the seizing of the means of production by society,
production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery
of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by
systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence
disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally
marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal
conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the
conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes
under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real,
conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social
organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face
with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used
with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization,
hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now
becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that
have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only
from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own
history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him
have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by
him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of
freedom.
Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.
I. Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small
scale. Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive,
ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action. Production for immediate consumption,
either of the producer himself or his feudal lord. Only where an excess of production
over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into
exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its infancy. But
already it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production of
society at large.
II. Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at
first be means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the
means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops. As a
consequence, their transformation from individual to social means of production
— a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange.
The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears. In his
capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates the products
and turns them into commodities. Production has become a social act. Exchange
and appropriation continue to be individual acts, the acts of individuals. The
social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental
contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present-day
society moves, and which modern industry brings to light.
A. Severance of the producer from the means of production.
Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the
laws governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition.
Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and
social anarchy in the production as a whole.
C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by
competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a
constantly growing displacement of laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the
other hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under
competition, for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of development of
productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production and products —
excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence.
But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to work
together, because the capitalist form of production prevents the productive
forces from working and the products from circulating, unless they are first turned
into capital — which their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction has
grown into an absurdity. The mode of production rises in rebellion against the
form of exchange.
D. Partial recognition of the social character of the
productive forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the
great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock
companies, later in by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated
to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by
salaried employees.
III. Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the
contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this
transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the
bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means
of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives
their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized
production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The
development of production makes the existence of different classes of society
thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production
vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the
master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the
lord over Nature, his own master — free.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the
historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the
historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the
now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the
meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task
of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific
Socialism.
Notes
1. Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust
2. It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out
that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the character of the
appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production is by the changes
described above. It is, of course, a very different matter whether I
appropriate to myself my own product or that of another. Note in passing that
wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalist mode of production in embryo,
is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form, it existed for centuries alongside
slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of
production only when the necessary historical pre-conditions had been
furnished.
3. "The Conditions of the Working-Class in
England" — Sonnenschein & Co., p.84.
4. I say "have to". For only when the means of
production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by
joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State
has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of
today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of
another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society
itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and
again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all
State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if
the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then
Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.
If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and
financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not
under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian
lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to
bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and
especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of
parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or
indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime
Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the
army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed
by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of
the brothels.
5. A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of
the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production, even under
capitalist pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain
and Ireland amounted, in round numbers in
1814 to £ 2,200,000,000,
1865 to £ 6,100,000,000,
1875 to £ 8,500,000,000.
As an instance of the squandering of means of production and
of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone,
in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress
(Berlin, February 21, 1878), as 22,750,000 pounds.
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