The history of the growth of society appears, however, in one respect entirely different from that of nature. In nature are to be found as far as we leave the reaction of man upon nature out of sight--mere unconscious blind agents which act one upon another, and in their interplay the universal law realizes itself. From all that happens, whether from the innumerable apparent accidents which appear upon the surface, or from the final results flowing from these accidental occurrences, nothing occurs as a desired conscious end. On the contrary, in the history of society the mere actors are all endowed with consciousness; they are agents imbued with deliberation or passion, men working towards an appointed end; nothing appears without an intentional purpose, without an end desired. But this distinction, important as it is for historical examination, particularly of single epochs and events, can make no difference to the fact that the course of history is governed by inner universal laws. Here also, in spite of the wished for aims of all the separate individuals, accident for the most part is apparent on the surface. That which is willed but rarely happens. In the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and interfere with each other, and either these ends are utterly incapable of realization, or the means are ineffectual. So, the innumerable conflicts of individual wills and individual agents in the realm of history reach a conclusion which is on the whole analogous to that in the realm of nature, which is without definite purpose. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which follow from the actions are not intended, or in so far as they appear to correspond with the end desired, in their final results are quite different from the conclusion wished. Historical events in their entirety therefore appear to be likewise controlled by chance. But even where according to superficial observation, accident plays a part, it is, as a matter of fact, consistently governed by unseen, internal laws, and the only question remaining, therefore, is to discover these laws.
Men make their own history in that each follows his own desired ends independent of results, and the results of these many wills acting in different directions and their manifold effects upon the world constitute history. It depends, therefore, upon what the great majority of individuals intend. The will is determined by passion or reflection, but the levers which passion or reflection immediately apply are of very different kinds. Sometimes it may be external circumstances, sometimes ideal motives, zeal for honor, enthusiasm for truth and justice, personal hate, or even purely individual peculiar ideas of all kinds.
But on the one hand, we have seen in history that the results of many individual wills produce effects, for the most part quite other than what is wished--often, in fact, the very opposite--their motives of action, likewise, are only of subordinate significance with regard to the universal result. On the other hand, the question arises: What driving forces stand in turn behind these motives of action; what are the historical causes which transform themselves into motives of action in the brains of the agents?
The old materialism never set this question before itself. Its philosophy of history, as far as it ever had one in particular, is hence essentially pragmatic; it judges everything from the standpoint of the immediate motive; it divides historical agents into good and bad and finds as a whole that the good are defrauded and the bad are victorious, whence it follows that, as far as the old materialism is concerned, there is nothing edifying that can be obtained from a study of history, and for us, that in the realm of history the old materialism is proved to be false, since it fixes active ideal impulses as final causes instead of seeking that which lies behind them, that which is the impulse of these impulses. The lack of logical conclusion does not lie in the fact that ideal impulses are recognized, but in this, that there is no further examination into the more remote causes of their activity.
The philosophy of history, on the contrary, particularly as it was treated by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and even the real motives of the men who figure in history, are by no means the final causes of historical events, that behind these events stand other moving forces which must be discovered; but it seeks these forces not in history itself, it imports them mostly from the outside, from philosophical ideology, into history. Instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece from its own inner connection, Hegel, for example, explains it solely as if it were nothing but the working out of a beautiful individuality, the realization of art, as such. He says much about the old Greeks that is fine and profound, but this does not prevent our dissatisfaction, now-a-days, with such an explanation, which is mere phraseology.
If, therefore, we set out to discover the impelling forces, which, acknowledged, or unacknowledged, and for the most part unacknowledged, stand behind historical figures, and constitute the true final impulses of history, we cannot consider so much the motives of single individuals, however pre-eminent, as those which set in motion great masses, entire nations, and again, whole classes of people in each nation, and this, too, not in a momentarily flaring and quickly dying flame, but to enduring action culminating in a great historical change.
To establish the great impelling forces which play upon the brains of the acting masses and their leaders, the so-called great men, as conscious motives, clear or unclear, directly or ideologically or even in a supernatural form, that is the only method which can place us on the track of the law controlling history as a whole, as well as at particular periods and in individual lands. All that sets men in motion must act upon their minds, but the force which acts upon the brain depends very largely upon circumstances. The workers have by no means become reconciled to the machine power of the capitalists although they no longer break the machines to pieces as they did on the Rhine in 1848.
But while the discovery of these impelling forces of history was entirely impossible in all other periods, on account of the complicated and hidden interrelations with their effects, our present period has so far simplified these relations that the problem can be solved. Since the establishment of the great industry, at least since the peace of Europe in 1815, it has been no longer a secret to anyone in England that the whole political fight has been for supremacy between two classes, the landed aristocracy and the middle-class. In France, with the return of the Bourbons, the same fact was perceived; the writers of history, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers in particular, pronounce it as a key to an understanding of French history, especially since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized as the third competitor for mastery in both countries.
Circumstances had become so simplified that one would have had to close his eyes not to see in the fight of these three classes and in the conflict of their interests, the moving forces of modern history, at least in the two most advanced countries.
But how came these classes into existence? If the great feudal ancient property in land can have its origin ascribed to political causes through forcible seizure of territories, this could not be done as regards the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There are in this case clearly exposed the origin and progress of two great economic classes from plain and evident economic causes. And it was just as clear that in the fight between the landholding class and the bourgeoisie, no less than in that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, economic interests were the most important, and that political force served only as a mere means of furthering these.
The bourgeoisie and the proletariat both arose as results of a change in economic conditions, or, strictly speaking, in methods of production.
The transition, first from hand labor, controlled by the gilds, to manufacture and thence from manufacture to the greater industry, with steam and machine force, has developed these two classes. At a certain stage new forces of production were set in motion by the bourgeoisie, following upon the division of labor and the union of many different kinds of labor in one united manufacture, and the methods of exchange and requirements of exchange developed by their means, were incompatible with the existing historical surviving methods of production consecrated by the law, that is to say the gilds and the innumerable personal and other privileges (which for the unprivileged were only so many fetters) of the feudal social organization. The forces of production brought into being by the bourgeoisie rebelled against the methods of production originated by the gildmasters and the feudal landlords; the result is known; the feudal fetters were struck off, in England gradually, in France at one blow; in Germany the process is not yet quite complete. As manufacture came into conflict at a certain stage of progress with feudal methods of production, so has the greater industry now joined battle with the bourgeois organization of industry established in their place. Bound by this system, owing to the narrow limits of the capitalistic methods of production, there occurs on the one hand an ever increasing conversion of the mass of the people into proletarians, and on the other hand an ever increasing amount of products which cannot be disposed of. Over-production, and suffering on the part of the masses, the one the cause of the other, that is the absurd contradiction in which it runs its course, and which of necessity requires a control of the forces of production, through a change in the methods of production.
In modern history, at least, it is therefore proved that all political contests are class contests and that all fights of classes for emancipation, in spite of their necessarily political form (for every class struggle is a political struggle), finally, are directed towards economic emancipation. Here, at least, therefore, the State, the political arrangement is the subordinate, bourgeois society, the rule of economic relations, the deciding element. The old fashioned philosophy which even Hegel respected saw in the State the determining element and in bourgeois society the element determined by it. Appearances corresponded with this idea. As all the impulses of each single agent pass through his individual brain and must transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him to work, so must also the desires of bourgeois society, no matter which class happens to be dominant, penetrate the will of the state in order to secure universal validity in the form of laws. That is the formal side of the matter which is self evident, the question only is what content has this merely formal will--of the individual as well as of the State--and whence comes this content--why is just this desired and nothing else? And if we enquire into this we discover that in modern history the will of the State, as a whole, is declared through the changing needs of bourgeois society, through the domination of this or that class, in the last instance through the development of the forces of production and the conditions of exchange.
But if in our modern times, with their gigantic methods of production and commerce, the State is not an independent affair with an independent development, but its existence as well as its evolution is to be explained in the last resort from the economic conditions of the life of society, so much the more must the same thing be true of all earlier times when the production of the necessities of existence was not furthered by these extensive aids, where, therefore, the necessities of this production must exercise a greater control over men. If the State is today, at the time of the great industries and steam railways, merely, as a whole, the summarized, reflected form of the economic desires of the class which controls production, it must, therefore, have been still more so at a period when a generation of men must spend the greater portion of their united life-time in the satisfaction of their material needs, and man was, therefore, much more dependent on them than we are today. The examination of the earlier epochs of history, as far as it is earnestly conducted in this direction, establishes this abundantly, but manifestly this cannot here be taken in hand.
If the State and public law are the creatures of economic conditions, so, obviously, is private law, which only sanctions relations between individuals under given normal economic circumstances. The form in which this appears may, however, vary considerably. One can, as happened in England in accordance with the whole national development, retain, for the most part, the forms of the old feudal law, and give them a middle-class content, even read a middle-class meaning into the feudal names, but one may also, as in the western part of the European continent, use as a foundation the first general law of a society producing commodities, the Roman, with its unsurpassably keen elaboration, of all the legal relations of possessions of commodities (sellers and buyers, creditors and debtors, contracts, obligations, etc.), by which we can bring it down as common-law to the use and benefit of a still small bourgeois and half feudal society; or, with the help of pseudo-enlightened and moralizing jurists, a code (which is bad from a legal point of view) can be worked out suitable to the conditions of the particular society (as the Prussian land law). And, still again, after a great bourgeois revolution, a classical code for bourgeois society, such as the French "Code Civil," may be worked out. If, therefore, the bourgeois laws only declare the economic circumstances of society, these may be good or bad according to conditions.
In the State appears the first ideological force over men. Society shapes for itself an organ for the protection of its general interests against attack from the outside or inside. This organ is the force of the State. Hardly did it come into being before this organ dominated society, and as a matter of fact, in proportion as it becomes the organ of a particular class, it brings into existence the supremacy of that class. The fight of the subject against the dominant class becomes of necessity political, a fight in the next place against the political control of this latter class. This consciousness of the connection of the political fight with its underlying economic causes becomes more and more obscure and may be altogether lost. Where this is not altogether the case with the combatants it becomes nearly altogether so with the historians. Of the ancient sources of history with regard to the contest within the Roman Republic, Appian alone gives us plain and clear information respecting its final cause, which was property in land. But the State, once become an independent power over society, forthwith displayed a further ideology. Among the practical politicians and the theorists in jurisprudence, and among the jurists in particular, this fact is first completely lost sight of. Since in each single instance the economic facts must take the form of juristic motives so as to be sanctioned in the form of law, and since, therefore, a backward view must be taken over the whole existing system of law, it follows therefrom that the juristic form appears to be the whole and the economic content nothing at all. Public and private law are considered as independent realms which have their own independent historic evolution, which are considered capable of a systematic representation, and stand in need of it through persistent elimination of all inner contradictions.
Still higher ideological conceptions, i. e., still further removed from the economic foundations, take the form of philosophy and religion.
Here, the connection of the ideas with the material conditions of existence become more and more complicated and obscured by reason of the increasing number of links between them, but it exists. As the whole Rennaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century was an actual product of the city, and therefore of the bourgeois domination, so was also the philosophy, since that time newly awakened. Its content was actually only the philosophical expression of the thoughts corresponding with the development of the small and middle bourgeois into the great bourgeois. Among the English and French of the preceding century, who were for the most part as good political economists as they were philosophers, this is quite evident, and we have proofs on its very face, as regards the Hegelian school.
Let us now give a slight glance at religion since it appears to stand furthest away from and to be most foreign to material life. Religion arose at a very remote period of human development, in the savage state, from certain erroneous and barbaric conceptions of men with regard to themselves and the outside world of nature around them. Every ideological notion develops, however, when once it has arisen; it grows by additions to the given idea, and develops it further, otherwise there would be no ideology, that is, no occupation with thoughts as with independent thought-existence, developing independently and subject only to its own laws. That the material conditions of life of the men within whose heads this thought force is at work finally determine the course of this thought-process necessarily remains still unknown to these men, otherwise there would be an entire end of the ideology. These original religious notions, therefore, which are for the most part common to each kindred group of peoples, develop after the separation of the group in a special manner peculiar to each tribe, according to its particular conditions of existence, and this process is for a class of groups of people, and particularly for the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) shown individually by comparative mythology. The gods developed by each tribe were national gods, whose power extended no further than to protect the national territory; beyond the frontier other gods held undisputed sway.
They could only be conceived of as existing as long as the nation existed. They fell with its decline. This doctrine of the old nationalities brought about the Roman Empire, whose economic conditions we do not need to examine just now. The old national gods fell, as those of the Romans did also, which were only attached to the narrow limits of the city of Rome. The desire to make the empire a world-empire, by means of a world-wide religion, is clearly shown in the attempts to provide recognition and altars in Rome for all the respectable foreign gods, next to the indigenous ones. But a new world-religion was not to be made in this fashion by imperial decrees. The new world-religion, Christianity, had already arisen in secret by a mixture of combined oriental religions, Jewish theology and popularized Greek philosophy and particularly Stoic philosophy. We must first be at the pains to discover how it originally made its appearance, since its official form as it has come to us is merely that of a State religion, and this end was achieved through the Council of Nice. Enough, the fact that after two hundred and fifty years it was a state religion shows that it was a religion answering to the circumstances of the times. In the Middle Ages it showed itself clearly. In proportion as feudalism developed it grew into a religion corresponding with it, with a hierarchy corresponding to the feudal. And when the rule of the bourgeois came in, it developed into Protestant heresy in antagonism to feudal Catholicism, at first in the South of France, among the Albigenses at the time of the highest growth of the free cities. The Middle Ages had annexed all the surviving forms of ideology, philosophy, politics and jurisprudence, to theology as subordinate parts of theology. It constrained, therefore, all social and political movement to assume a theological form; finally, to the minds of the masses stuffed with religion it was necessary to show their interests in religious guise, in order to raise a tremendous storm. And as the rule of the bourgeois from the beginning brought into being an appendage of propertyless plebeians, with day laborers and servants of all sorts, without any recognized position in their cities, the forerunners of the later proletarians, so the heresy was very early subdivided into a moderate one, on the part of the citizens, and a plebeian revolutionary one, which was an abomination to the bourgeois heretics.
The failure to exterminate the protestant heresy corresponded with the invincibility of the rising power of the bourgeois of that time; as this power grew, the fight with the feudal nobles, at first pre-eminently local, began to assume national proportions. The first great conflict occurred in Germany, the so-called Reformation. The power of the bourgeois was neither sufficiently strong nor sufficiently developed for an open rebellious stand, by uniting under the standard of revolt the city plebeians, the smaller nobility, and the peasants of the country districts. The nobility was struck first, the peasants took up a position which was the high-water mark of the entire revolution, the cities left them in the lurch, and so the revolution was left to the leaders of the country gentry who gathered the whole victory to themselves. Thenceforth for three hundred years Germany disappeared from the ranks of independent, energetic progressive countries. But after the German Luther, arose the French Calvin. With natural French acuteness he showed the bourgeois character of the revolution in the Church, republicanised and democratised. While the Lutheran Reformation fell in Germany and Germany declined, the Calvinistic served as a standard to the republicans in Geneva, in Holland, in Scotland, freed Holland from German and Spanish domination, and gave an ideological dress to the second act of the bourgeois revolution which proceeded in England. Here Calvinism proved itself to be the natural religious garb of the interests of the existing rule of the bourgeois and was not realised any further than that the revolution of 1689 was completed by a compromise between a portion of the nobility and the middle-class. The English Established Church was restored, but not in its earlier form with the king for Pope, but was strongly infused with Calvinism. The old-established Church had kept up the merry Catholic Sunday and fought against the tedious Calvinistic one, the new bourgeois Church introduced the latter and added thereby to the charms of England.
In France the Calvinistic minority was subdued in 1685, either made Catholic or hunted out of the country. But what was the good? Directly after that the free thinker Pierre Bayle was at work, and in 1694 Voltaire was born. The tyrannical rule of Louis XIV. only made it easier for the French bourgeoisie to be able to make its revolution in the political form finally suitable to the progressive atheistic bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, free-thinkers took their seats in the National Assembly. Thereby Christianity entered upon the last lap of the race. It had become incapable of serving a progressive class any further as the ideological clothing of its efforts, it became more and more the exclusive possession of the dominant classes, and these used it merely as a simple means of government to keep the lower classes in subjection. So then each one of the different classes employed its own suitable religion, the landholding squires catholic jesuitism or protestant orthodoxy, the liberal and radical bourgeois rationalism, and it makes no difference therefore whether people themselves believe in their respective religions or not.
Thus we see religion once arisen contains material of tradition, hence in all ideological matters religion is a great conservative force. But the changes which take place in this material spring from class-conditions, that is from the economic circumstances of the men who take these changes in hand. And that is enough on this part of the subject.
It is only possible at this time to give a general sketch of the Marxian philosophy of history, and particularly as regards illustrations of it.
The proof is to be discovered in history itself, and in this regard I may say plainly that it has been sufficiently furnished in other writings. This philosophy, however, makes an end of philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectic philosophy of nature renders every philosophy of nature useless or impossible. Practically there is no further need to devise interrelations but to discover them in facts rather. Instead of a philosophy forced from nature and history there remains then only the realm of pure thought--as far as any is left--the teaching of the laws of the thinking process itself, logic and the dialectic.
With the Revolution of 1848 "educated" Germany delivered the challenge to theory and proceeded to action. Hand-labor dependent upon small production and manufacture was done away with by the great industry--Germany again appeared in the world-market. The new particularistic Germany, at all events did away with the most crying anomalies, which the rule of the petty states, the remnants of feudalism and the bureaucratic economy, had placed in the way of their development, but just in proportion as speculation abandoned the studies of philosophers to attain its temple in the Bourse, that great theoretic thought which had been the glory of Germany in the period of its deepest political humiliation, the zeal for pure scientific progress, irrespective of practical, profitable results, and of the disapproval of the police, became lost in educated Germany. It is true that the German official natural science maintained its position, particularly in the field of individual discovery, at the head of its time, but now the American journal "Science" justly remarks that the decisive advances in the matter of the broadest inclusive statement of the relations between single facts, and the harmonising of them with law, are making the greater headway in England, instead of, as earlier, in Germany. And with regard to the sciences of history, philosophy included, with the classical philosophy, the old theoretical spirit, with its carelessness of personal results, first completely disappeared. Thoughtless eclecticism, eager backward glances at a career, and income down to the meanest sycophancy occupy their places. The official representatives of this sort of science have become the open ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state, but at a time when they both stand in open antagonism to the working classes.
Only among the working classes does the German devotion to abstract thought steadily continue to exist. Here it cannot be got rid of. Here we find no backward glances at a career, at profit making, at kindly protection from the upper classes, but on the contrary the more independent and unrestricted the path of science, just so much the more does it find itself in accord with the interests and endeavors of the working class. The new tendency, which in the history of the development of labor made known the key to the understanding of the universal history of society addressed itself in the first place to the working class and found in them the ready acceptance which it neither sought nor expected from official science. The German working-class movement is the heir of the German classical philosophy.
FOOTNOTE: [2] It is incumbent upon me to make a personal explanation at this place. People have lately referred to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly refrain from saying a few words here in settlement of that particular matter. I cannot deny that I had before and during my forty years' collaboration with Marx a certain independent share not only in laying out the foundations, but more particularly in working out the theory. But the greatest part of the leading essential thinking, particularly in the realm of economics, and especially its final sharp statement, belongs to Marx alone. What I contributed Marx could quite readily have carried out without me with the exception of a pair of special applications. What Marx supplied, I could not have readily brought. Marx stood higher, saw further, took a wider, clearer, quicker survey than all of us. Marx was a genius, we others, at the best, talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today, by a long way. It therefore rightly bears his name.
APPENDIX.
MARX ON FEUERBACH.
(_Jotted down in Brussels in the spring of 1845._) I.
The chief lack of all materialistic philosophy up to the present, including that of Feuerbach, is that the thing, the reality, sensation is only conceived of under the form of the object which is presented to the eye, but not as human sense-activity, "praxis," not subjectively. It therefore came about that the active side in opposition to materialism was developed from idealism, but only abstractly; this was natural, since idealism does not recognize real tangible facts as such. Feuerbach is willing, it is true, to distinguish objects of sensation from objects existing in thought, but he conceives of human activity itself not as objective activity. He, therefore, in the "Wesen des Christenthums," regards only theoretical activity as generally human, while the "praxis" is conceived and fixed only in its disgusting form.
II.
The question if objective truth is possible to human thought is not a theoretical but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is the reality and force in his actual thoughts. The dispute as to the reality or non-reality of thought which separates itself, "the praxis," is a purely scholastic question.
III.
The materialistic doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated. It necessarily happens therefore that society is divided into two parts, of which one is elevated above society (Robert Owen for example).
The occurrence simultaneously of a change in conditions and human activity can only be comprehended and rationally understood as a revolutionary fact.
IV.
Feuerbach proceeds from a religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary, and a real world. His work consists in the discovery of the material foundations of the religious world. He overlooked the fact that after carrying this to completion the important matter still remains unaccomplished. The fact that the material foundation annuls itself and establishes for itself a realm in the clouds can only be explained from the heterogeneity and self-contradiction of the material foundation. This itself must first become understood in its contradictions and so become thoroughly revolutionized by the elimination of the contradiction. After the earthly family has been discovered as the secret of the Holy Family, one must have theoretically criticised and theoretically revolutionised it beforehand.
V.
Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thought, invokes impressions sensory activities.
VI.
Feuerbach dissolves religion in humanity. But humanity is not an abstraction dwelling in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the conditions of society.
Feuerbach, who does not enquire into this fact, is therefore compelled: 1. To abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself, and to pre-suppose an abstract, isolated, human individual.
2. Humanity is therefore only comprehended by him as a species, as a hidden sort of merely natural identity of qualities in which many individuals are embraced.
VII.
Therefore Feuerbach does not see that religious feeling is itself a product of society, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs in reality to a certain form of society.
VIII.
The life of society is essentially practical. All the mysteries which seduce speculative thought into mysticism find their solution in human practice and in concepts of this practice.
IX.
The highest point to which materialism attains, that is the materialism which comprehends sensation, not as a practical fact, is the point of view of the single individual in bourgeois society.
X.
The standpoint of the old materialism is "bourgeois" society; the standpoint of the new, human society, or associated humanity.
XI.
Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but the point is to change it.