(b) The Materialist Interpretation of History and Historic Necessity

“We had to emphasise face to face with our opponents the chief principle (the economic side) denied by them, and there was not always time, place, and opportunity to do justice to the other considerations concerned in and affected by it.” – FRIEDRICH ENGELS: Letter of 1890 reprinted in the Sozialistischen Akademiker, October, 1895.

The question of the correctness of the materialist interpretation of history is the question of the determining causes of historic necessity. To be a materialist means first of all to trace back all phenomena to the necessary movements of matter. These movements of matter are accomplished according to the materialist doctrine from beginning to end as a mechanical process, each individual process being the necessary result of preceding mechanical facts. Mechanical facts determine, in the last resort, all occurrences, even those which appear to be caused by ideas. It is, finally, always the movement of matter which determines the form of ideas and the directions of the will; and thus these also (and with them everything that happens in the world of humanity) are inevitable. The materialist is thus a Calvinist without God. If he does not believe in a predestination ordained by a divinity, yet he believes and must believe that starting from any chosen point of time all further events are, through the whole of existing matter and the directions of force in its parts, determined beforehand.

The application of materialism to the interpretation of history means then, first of all, belief in the inevitableness of all historical events and developments. The question is only, in what manner the inevitable is accomplished in human history, what element of force or what factors of force speak the decisive word, what is the relation of the different factors of force to one another, what part in history falls to the share of nature, of political economy, of legal organisations, of ideas.

Marx, in the already quoted passage gives the answer, that he designates as the determining factor, the material productive forces and the conditions of production among men at the time. “The method of production of the material things of life settles generally the social, political, and spiritual process of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their mode of existence, but on the contrary their social existence that determines [the nature of] their consciousness. At a certain stage in their development the material productive forces of society come into opposition with the existing conditions of production or, which is only a legal expression for it, with the relations of property within which they have hitherto moved. From forms of development of the forces of production, these relations change into fetters. Then enters an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the whole gigantic superstructure (the legal and political organisations to which certain social forms of consciousness correspond) is more slowly or more quickly overthrown. One form of society never perishes before all the productive forces are evolved for which it is sufficiently comprehensive, and new or higher conditions of production never step on to the scene before the material conditions of existence of the same have come to light out of the womb of the old society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production ..... but the productive forces developing in the heart of the bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The previous history of human society, therefore, terminates with this form of society.

It must first be observed by anticipation that the concluding sentence and the word “last” in the preceding sentence are not capable of proof but are hypotheses more or less well founded. But they are not essential to the theory and even belong much more to the applications of it, and they may therefore be passed over here.

If we look at the other sentences we are struck, above all, by their dogmatic wording, except the phrase the “more slowly or more quickly” (which indeed hides a good deal). In the second of the quoted sentences “consciousness” and “existence” are so sharply opposed that we are nearly driven to conclude that men were regarded solely as living agents of historical powers whose work they carry out positively against their knowledge and will. And this is only partly modified by a sentence omitted here as of secondary consideration in which is emphasised the need of discriminating in social revolutions between the material revolution in the conditions of production and the “ideologistic forms” in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. On the whole the consciousness and will of men appear to be a very subordinate factor of the material movement.

In the preface to the first volume of Capital we come across a sentence savouring no less of predestination. “We are concerned,” it reads, with reference to the “natural laws” of capitalist production, “with these tendencies working and forcing their way with iron necessity.” And yet just when he was speaking of law, a milder concept comes forward – that of tendency. And on the next page stands the sentence so often quoted, that society can “shorten and soften” the birth pains of phases of development in conformity with nature.

The dependence of men on the conditions of production appears much more qualified in the explanation Friedrich Engels gives of historical materialism, during the lifetime of Karl Marx and in agreement with him, in his book against Dühring. There it reads that the “final causes of all social changes and political revolutions” are to be sought, not in the brains of men but “in changes of methods of production and exchange.” But “final causes” includes concurrent causes of another kind – causes of the second or third degree, etc., and it is clear that the greater the series of such causes is, the more limited as to quantity and quality will be the determining power of the final causes. The fact of its action remains, but the final form of things does not depend on it alone. An issue which is the result of the working of different forces can only be reckoned upon with certainty when all the forces are exactly known and placed in the calculation according to their full value. The ignoring of a force of even a lower degree involves the greatest deviations, as every mathematician knows.

In his later works Engels has limited still further the determining force of the conditions of production – most of all in two letters reprinted in the Sozialistischen Akademiker of October, 1895, the one written in the year 1890, the other in the year 1894. There, “forms of law,” political, legal, philosophical theories, religious intuitions or dogmas are enumerated as forces which influence the course of historical struggles and in many cases “are factors preponderating in the determination of their form.” “There are then innumerable forces thwarting one another,” we read, “an endless group of parallelograms of forces, from which one resultant – the historical event – is produced which itself can again be looked upon as the product of a power working as a whole without consciousness or will. For what every single man wills is hindered by every other man, and the result of the struggle is something which no one had intended.” (Letter of 1890.) “The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic evolution rests on the economic evolution. But they all react on one another and on the economic basis.” (Letter of 1895.) It must be confessed that this sounds somewhat differently from the passage from Marx quoted above.

It will, of course, not be maintained that Marx and Engels at any time overlooked the fact that non-economic factors exercise an influence on the course of history. Innumerable passages from their early writings can be quoted against such suppositions. But we are dealing here with a question of proportion – not whether ideologic factors were acknowledged, but what measure of influence, what significance for history were ascribed to them, and in this respect it cannot be denied that Marx and Engels originally assigned to the non-economic factors a much less influence on the evolution of society, a much less power of modifying by their action the conditions of production than in their later writings. This corresponds also to the natural course of the development of every new theory. Such a one always first appears in sharp categoric formulation. In order to gain authority, the untenability of the old theory must be shown, and in this conflict one-sidedness and exaggeration are easily manifested. In the sentence which we placed as a motto to this section of the volume, Engels acknowledges it unreservedly, and in the following sentence he remarks : “It is unfortunately only too common for a man to think he has perfectly understood a theory and is able forthwith to apply it, as soon as he has made the chief propositions his own.” He who to-day employs the materialist theory of history is bound to employ it in its most developed, not in its original, form – that is, he is bound in addition to the development and influence of the productive forces and conditions of production to make full allowance for the ideas of law and morals, the historical and religious traditions of emery epoch, the influences of geographical and other circumstances of nature – to which also the nature of man himself and his spiritual disposition belong. This must be kept quite particularly in view when it is a question no longer of simple research into earlier epochs of history, but of foretelling coming developments, if the materialist conception of history is to be of use as a guide to the future.

In a letter to Conrad Schmidt dated October 27th, 1890, Friedrich Engels showed in an excellent manner how from being products of economic development, social institutions become independent social forces with actions of their own, which in their turn may react on the former, and according to circumstances, promote or hinder them or turn them into other directions. He brings forward in the first place the power of the state as an example, when he completes the definition of the state mostly given by him – as the organ of the government of the classes and of repression – by the very important derivation of the state from the social division of labour. Historical materialism by no means denies every autonomy to political and ideologic forces – it combats only the idea that these independent actions are unconditional, and shows that the development of the economic foundations of social life – the conditions of production and the evolution of classes – finally exercises the stronger influence on these actions.

But in any case the multiplicity of the factors remains, and it is by no means always easy to lay bare the relations which exist among them so exactly that it can be determined with certainty where in given cases the strongest motive power is to be sought. The purely economic causes create, first of all, only a disposition for the reception of certain ideas, but how these then arise and spread and what form they take, depend on the co-operation of a whole series of influences. More harm than good is done to historical materialism if at the outset one rejects as eclecticism an accentuation of the influences other than those of a purely economic kind, and a consideration of other economic factors than the technics of production and their foreseen development. Eclecticism – the selecting from different explanations and ways of dealing with phenomena – is often only the natural reaction from the doctrinaire desire to deduce everything from one thing and to treat everything according to one and the same method. As soon as such desire is excessive the eclectic spirit works its way again with the power of a natural force. It is the rebellion of sober reason against the tendency inherent in every doctrine to fetter thought.

Now, to whatever degree other forces besides the purely economic, influence the life of society, just so much more also does the sway of what, in an objective sense, we call historic necessity change. In modern society we have to distinguish in this respect two great streams. On the one side appears an increasing insight into the laws of evolution and notably of economic evolution. With this knowledge goes hand in hand, partly as its cause, partly again as its effect, an increasing capability of directing the economic evolution. The economic natural force, like the physical, changes from the ruler of mankind to its servant according as its nature is recognised. Society, theoretically, can be freer than ever in regard to the economic movement, and only the antagonism of interests among its elements – the power of private and group elements – hinders the full transition of freedom from theory to practice. Yet the common interest gains in power to an increasing extent as opposed to private interest, and the elementary sway of economic forces ceases according to the degree in which this is the case, and in all places where this is the case. Their development is anticipated and is therefore accomplished all the more quickly and easily. Individuals and whole nations thus withdraw an ever greater part of their lives from the influence of a necessity compelling them, without or against their will.

But because men pay ever greater attention to economic factors it easily appears as though these played a greater part to-day than formerly. That, however, is not the case. The deception is only caused because in many cases the economic motive appears freely to-day where formerly it was concealed by conditions of government and symbols of all kinds. Modern society is much richer than earlier societies in ideologics which are not determined by economics and by nature working as an economic force. Sciences, arts, a whole series of social relations are to-day much less dependent on economics than formerly, or, in order to give no room for misconception, the point of economic development attained to-day leaves the ideological, and especially the ethical, factors greater space for independent activity than was formerly the case. In consequence of this the interdependency of cause and effect between technical, economic evolution, and the evolution of other social tendencies is becoming always more indirect, and from that the necessities of the first are losing much of their power of dictating the form of the latter.

“The Iron Necessity of History” receives in this way a limitation, which, let me say at once, signifies in regard to the practice of social democracy, no lessening but an increasing and qualifying of its social political tasks.

Thus we see the materialist conception of history to-day in another form than it was presented at first by its founders. It has gone through a development already, it has suffered limitations in absolutist interpretation. That is, as has been shown, the history of every theory. It would be the greatest retrogression to go back from the ripe form which Engels has given it in the letters to Conrad Schmidt to the first definitions and to give it a “monistic” interpretation based on these.

The first definitions are rather to be supplemented by those letters. The fundamental idea of the theory does not thereby lose in uniformity, but the theory itself gains in scientific character. Only with these supplements does it become truly a theory of the scientific treatment of history. In its first form it could become in the hand of a Marx a lever of mighty historical discoveries, but even his genius was led by it to all kinds of false conclusions.

Finally, the question arises, up to what point the materialist conception of history has a claim to its name, if we continue to widen it in the above-mentioned manner through the inclusion of other forces. In fact, according to Engels’ explanations, it is not purely materialist, much less purely economic. I do not deny that the name does not completely fit the thing. But I seek progress not in making ideas confused, but in making them precise; and because it is of primary importance in the characterisation of a theory of history to acknowledge in what it differs from others, I would, far from taking offence at the title “Economic Interpretation of History”, keep it, in spite of all that can be said against it, as the most appropriate description of the Marxist theory of history.

Its significance rests on the weight it lays on economics; out of the recognition and valuation of economic facts arise its just services to the science of history, and the enrichment which this branch of human knowledge owes to it. An economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that only economic forces, only economic motives, are recognised; but only that economics forms an ever recurring decisive force, the cardinal point of the great movements in history. To the words “materialist conception of history” still adhere all the misunderstandings which are closely joined with the conception of materialism. Philosophic materialism, or the materialism of natural science, is in a mechanical sense deterministic. The Marxist conception of history is not. It allots to the economic foundation of the life of nations no unconditioned determining influence on the forms this life takes.