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part of this book, inseparably connected with the real existence of the bourgeois mode of production and the "social laws" which hold good for this particular epoch of society. As long as that material foundation of the existing bourgeois society is only attacked and shaken, but not completely overthrown, through the revolutionary proletarian struggle, also the socially entrenched thought-forms of the bourgeois epoch can only be criticized and not definitely superseded by the revolutionary theory of the proletariat. The critique of Political Economy, which Marx began in Capital, can therefore only be completed by proletarian revolution, i.e., by a real change of the present bourgeois mode of production and of the forms of consciousness pertaining to it. It is only after the full accomplishment of this revolution that, in the further development of the Communist society, all "fetishism of commodity production" and the whole "fetishistic" science of Political Economy will be finally merged into a direct social theory and practice of the associated producers.1

Until that time, the terms and propositions by which Political Economy had expressed the scientific results of its investigation into the material foundations of the present order of society, in a manner befitting its period in spite of their fetish form, remain valid even for that materialistic science by which Marx and his followers have criticized, the standpoint of bourgeois economy from the new historical and theoretical standpoint of a new social class. Notwithstanding his revolutionary criticism of all preceding Political Economy, Marx remained, in his theoretical work, first and foremost, an economic investigator. He did not dissipate economics in history, sociology, and in the Utopias but, on the contrary, he condensed the general and indefinite form of the traditional historical and social studies into a materialistic investigation of their economic foundations. He was less and less disposed, the farther he went in his exact scientific analysis of the bourgeois mode of production, to leave aside

1 See Marx, Marginal Motes to the Programme of the German Labour Party, 1877 (Neue Zeit, IX, pp. 566-67).
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that exceedingly important material, available in the results of classic bourgeois economy, and which only needs further logical development and critical utilization. Nor did he want to leave it to the minor disciples of the great classical economists, who misinterpreted it for the purpose of a social apology for the existing capitalist system.

This positive attitude of Marx towards economic science is evident in his relation to all other standpoints which were represented within bourgeois and, to a certain extent, also within socialist science at his time.

Marx stood, in spite of his historical criticism of the "eternal laws of nature" of traditional Political Economy, in a much sharper contrast to the so-called "Historical School" which, by its dispersal of all definite economic concepts, represented nothing but a self-destruction and abdication of economics as a science.

Similarly, already in his first philosophical period, he had opposed the ideological manner, in which such writers as Bruno Bauer, Stirner and Feuerbach had considered all human "self-alienation" as a mere philosophical category. He had emphasized the fact that the actual "self-alienation" of the wage labourer who sells his own labour power to the capitalistic owner of the means of production can not be abolished by a mere process of thought, but only by a social action. In the same realistic mood he dismissed with contempt, in his later period, that superficial "sociological" theory which, in contrast to the "economic realism" of the classicists, "regarded value as nothing more than a conventional form, or, rather, as the ghost of such a form."1 (We may add in passing that this brief remark which Marx seventy years ago bestowed on the views held at that time by a few remaining supporters of a "restored Mercantile system" is still very pertinent, and perhaps particularly so to-day, as a criticism of the theoretical suggestions and practical schemes

1 See Capital, I, pp. 47-48, footnote 32.
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disseminated by the modern "money theorists" and "credit reformers," who likewise look upon commodity prices and more particularly upon "money" as arbitrary, conventional, and manageable forms.) While Marx and Engels had no quarrel with such practical exponents of revolutionary force as Blanqui, they pointed at every possible opportunity to the scientific emptiness of so-called sociological "theories of violence,"2 They were not deceived by the clamorous ways of those would-be “progressive” and even half "socialistically-minded" people who, candidly unconscious of the real motive force of historical development and deliberately ignoring all economics with the possible exception of a few general and unchangeable economic "laws of nature," endeavoured to trace the existing forms of production, of class relationship and other disagreeable facts to pure force, politics, etc., in order to appeal from such "brute" forms of violence to the organizing power of reason, of justice, of humanity, or similar classless immaterialities. Marx and Engels, as against such "sociological" despisers of economies, always affirmed their allegiance to the deeper and richer historical knowledge of bourgeois society which is contained in the economic concept of "value" and in the analyses based on it by the bourgeois classicists.

Finally, Marx, whose "materialistic" and scientific socialism arose in direct contrast to the "doctrinary” and "Utopian" socialism of the preceding phase of the workers' movement, remained throughout Ins life a sworn enemy of all merely "imaginary" constructions to a degree that already on this ground the tenets of economic science which in spite of their formal deficiencies are at least based on definite historical and social facts, were for him of an incomparably greater significance than than any future type existing as yet only in the thought of an individual reformer.

This holds good even for the rare cases where Marx himself
1 See e.g., the three fulminating sections under this heading in Engels' Anti-Dühring, 1878.
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in the course of his exposition endeavoured to elucidate his theoretical standpoint by confronting the present-day capitalistic commodity production with some other, past historical or possible future, forms of social production. It applies above all to four short paragraphs of the section dealing with the the “Fetich Character of the Commodity and its Secret"1 in which Marx, to dispel "all the mystery of the world of commodities, all the enchantment and bewitchment which befog the products of labour in a system based on commodity production," calls up successively four different social modes of production : that of Robinson Crusoe (the lonely islander), the feudal mode of production of the Middle Ages, the patriarchial management of a peasant family working on the land, and, finally, "for a change," an association of free men who work with common means of production and consciously expend their many individual labour powers as a combined social labour power. Similarly, the detailed description of one of those ancient small Indian communities in which "there is a social division of labour, but the products of labour do not become commodities,"2 is not of any particular significance for the economic theory of Capital, though it is more important with regard to the broader aspects of the materialistic theory of history and society. In the particular context in which it appears within the exposition of Marx's fundamental economic concepts in Capital, it serves only as a supplementary historical illustration of the theoretical contrast between the division of labour inside the workshop and the division of labour in society as a whole.3

The main theoretical purpose of all such "quasi-historical" comparisons is the same which is served, in another way, by Marx's favourite comparison of the economic "fetishism of the commodity" with the "reflection of the real world in religion."4 Just as a real criticism of religion must not content itself with

1 See Capital, I, pp. 43-51.

2 Ibid, pp. 8 and 322 et seq.

3 Ibid, I, pp. 8 and 315-324.

4 See, for example, pp. 39 and 45-46.

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finding out, through scientific analysis, the earthly kernel of the foggy forms of the religious phantasms, so a criticism of the economic categories is imperfect as long as it restricts itself to a closure of the actual material conditions underlying their apparent "fetishistic" form. Materialistic criticism of religion is aware of the fact that the ideological reflection of the real world in religion cannot be totally dissolved until the practical conditions of every day offer to the human beings concerned a continuous display of perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations both between man and nature and between men and men. Similarly, the life process of society, i.e. material production does not strip off its mystical veil until it is transformed into the result of the conscious and self-controlled activities of freely associated men.1 Till then a scientific critique of Political Economy must supplement its theoretical analysis of the fetish form of the economic categories by a positive understanding of their transitory historical necessity and rationality, and must utilize the real knowledge contained therein for a materialistic investigation of the social development going on with the present historical epoch.

Only in some passages of Capital did Marx replace the economic categories hitherto applied in the presentation of his theory by a direct historical description of the bourgeois mode of production and the real conflict of the social classes concealed behind the two economic categories "capital" and "wage-labour."2 Here belong, for instance, two passages in the eighth chapter of the first volume where Marx winds up a detailed discussion of the economically undetermined and indeterminable limits of the working day by the statement that “the regulation of the working day is, in real history, the outcome of a protracted civil war between the capitalist class and the working class," and calls upon the workers "to put their heads together

1 See Marx, Capital, I, p. 46.

2 See Introduction to the author's edition of Capita, 1932, pp. 19 et seq.

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for protection against the worm gnawing at their vitals and, by united action as a class, to compel the passing of a law which will put in place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable man' the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day that shall at length make it clear when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins."1

Here belong many other not very bulky, but significant passages leading up to the famous investigation of the "So-Called Primitive Accumulation" which, together with the immediately following analysis of Modern Colonization finally concludes the case of Socialism against Capitalism as presented by Marx in his theory.2

Marx has in the preceding chapters fully described the economic nature of the existing mode of production. He has gone through the economic analysis of value and labour, of surplus value and surplus labour, of reproduction, of the accumulation both of the individual capital and of the sum total of the capitals available in a given society. When thus all has been said that can be said about the origin of capital in terms of economic science, there still remains an unsolved residue in form of the question, "Whence came the first capital?"3 Whence arose, before all capitalistic production, the first capitalistic relation between an exploiting capitalist and the exploited wage-labourers? Whence descended the Vampire that preys upon the toiling masses of modern society and will not loose its hold "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited?"4 This question — unanswered by the bourgeois economists and, indeed, unanswerable economically — has already been repeatedly examined by Marx in the foregoing exposition.5 It is now taken up again to be treated no longer as an economic question at all. Instead, the problem is grimly and
1 See Capital, I, pp. 196 and 262-66.

2 Ibid, xxiv and xxv.

3 Ibid, pp. 679 et seq.

4 Ibid, pp. 265-66 and the 1850 essay by Engels, there quoted.

5 See Capital, I, pp. 531, 545, 588.
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thoroughly cleared up in a direct historical investigation and solved by a practical rather than a theoretical conclusion. The “Historical Tendency of Capitalistic Accumulation," as illustrated by the classic example of the capitalist production in England, leads to a result which, if it emanates with "the inevitability of a process of nature" from the objective development of capitalism itself, yet requires a practical social act to set it free. "The last hour of capitalistic private property strikes. The expropriators are expropriated."1 A similar line of argument prevails throughout the remaining parts of Marx's work. Just as the first book of Capital actually leads up to the outbreak of the proletarian revolution, so the whole of the Marxian theory as presented in the three books of Capital, was meant to result in the historical event of the revolutionary class war.2

But even at these extreme points where the revolutionary principle is definitely laid open in Capital, Marx did not entirely abandon economic theory. He merely revealed in a more outspoken manner the historical and social barrier which was

already reflected in the "fetish-character" of the economic categories and on account of which an uncritical adoption of those categories was excluded from the new socialistic theory from the outset. Some end and border problems of Political Economy which were now first discovered from the new standpoint of the proletarian class, so far transcended the horizon of the bourgeois economist that they could no longer be approached, much less solved within the realm of the economic science. The categories by which the classical economists had elucidated the material foundations of the then arising bourgeois society, were scientifically sufficient for the time. With certain critical amendments, they represent even now, within
1 See Capital, I, pp. 726 et seq.

2 See Marx's letter to Engels of 30.4.1868 (MEGA, III, iv, p. 49) and the outlines for the intended continuation of the final chapter (chap. lii), on Classes, of which only a few pages were worked out in the Marxian MSS) as sketched by Engels in his Preface to the third vol. of Capital, pp. IX-X.

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limited fields and for short periods of time, a valuable instrument for the scientific analysis of definite sections of the bourgeois mode of production. However, they prove to be unsuitable for a more extensive investigation which embraces the total historical development of bourgeois commodity production, including its origin and decay, and its revolutionary transition to a direct social organization of production. They are, as Marx and Engels emphasized in their later period, even more unsuitable for a comprehensive materialistic history of human society, looking backwards to primaeval times and forwards to the fully developed Communist Society.
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PART 3

HISTORY
CHAPTER I

THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

MARX and Engels never considered their new principle of economic and social research as more than a new scientific approach to a strictly empirical investigation of the historical development of the modern capitalistic mode of production. Marx referred to it in 1859 as a "general result" at which he had arrived during the first period of his economic research and which, once gained, served as a "guiding principle" to his subsequent studies.1 Twenty years later he refuted the erroneous conclusion of the Russian sociologist Michaelovsky who had misinterpreted the general description of the "Historical Tendency of Capital Accumulation" in Marx's Capital as a "supra-historique" principle, that without a previous investigation of the actual historical facts could be applied to any other period and indeed to the whole history of human society. He pointed out that that description, despite its general form, was merely a "resume" of the materials which had already been examined in detail in the previous chapters and thus was nothing more than a historical sketch of the rise of capitalism in Western Europe.2 His attitude was fully shared by Friedrich Engels who about the same time opposed the old traditional conception of the historical process which "knew nothing of the class struggles based upon material interests, in fact, of no material interests at all," and dealt with such topics as production and all economic conditions only accessorily, as "subordinate elements of the history of culture." He confronted that old "idealistic conception of history"
1 See Preface 1859.

2 See Marx's letter to the editor of Otetshestvenneye Sapiski, written at the end of 1877 — first published in Russian in the Viestnik Narodnoj Voli, 1886, and re-translated into German for the New York "Volkszeitung" 1887; this translation has since taken the place of the lost original MS.

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with the new principle of the proletarian science and, incidentally, gave the "Materialistic Conception of History"1 its later and universally accepted name. This name, by the way, was never applied to it by Marx himself who was quite content to describe it as a "materialistic and thus scientific method."2

Just as any other experimental natural and social science, the Marxian theory of society cannot take its departure from a preconceived and dogmatic principle; even less so because the science of Marx is a "critical" rather than a positive science. He criticizes theoretically the doctrines of bourgeois social science which are no longer tenable, just as during the same period the existing forms of bourgeois society which have become untenable at the present stage of historical development are practically criticized and transformed by the revolutionary action of the working class.

Even where Marx departs from that purely critical position, he does not lay down any general propositions as to the essential nature of all society but merely describes the particular conditions and developmental tendencies inherent in the historical form of contemporary bourgeois society.

The critical principle of Marx's social science was during the subsequent development of Marxism converted into a general social philosophy. From this first misconception, it was only one step further to the idea that the historical and economic science of Marx must be based on the broader foundation not only of a social philosophy but even of an all-comprehensive "materialistic philosophy" embracing both nature and society, or a general philosophical interpretation of the universe. Thus the definitely scientific forms which the real kernel of the philosophical materialism of the 18th century had assumed in the historical materialism of Marx were ultimately carried back to what Marx himself had once unmistakably repudiated as "the philosophical phrases of the Materialists about matter."3

1 See Engels, "Anti-Dühring," 1878.

2 See Capital, I, pp. 335-36, footnote 89.

3 See MEGA, I, v, p. 83.
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Marx's materialistic science, being a strictly empirical investigation into definite historical forms of society, does not need a philosophical support. This most important point made in Marx's historical materialism was later missed even by those "orthodox" Marx-interpreters who themselves combated with the utmost energy all attempts made by the later critics, within and without the Marxist camp, to "revise Marxism" by basing it on some or other contemporary non-materialistic philosophy. In their painstaking efforts to protect the true Marxist materialism from what they quite correctly regarded as an undesirable dilution of the genuine Marxian thought, they overlooked the fact that that most highly developed form of materialistic science which is embodied in Marx's empirical investigation of society is not only far in advance of all idealistic philosophy, but of all philosophical thought whatever. They wanted to strengthen the materialistic character of the Marxian science by giving it a philosophical interpretation. They have, in fact, only superfluously re-introduced their own backward philosophical attitudes into a theory which Marx had previously transformed from a philosophy into a veritable science. It was the historical fate of the Marx-orthodoxy that its opponents, while repulsing the attacks of the "revisionists" ultimately arrived, on all important issues, at the same standpoint as that taken by their adversaries. For example, the leading representative of this school, the philosophical materialist and orthodox Marxist Plechanov, in all his eager search for that "materialistic philosophy" which might be the true foundation of Marxism, finally hit upon the idea of presenting Marxism as "a form of Spinoza's philosophy, freed by Feuerbach from its theological additions."1

While both schools of the philosophical interpreters of Marxism ultimately coupled Marx's materialistic theory with a

1 See Plechanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Russian, 1908; German 1910 and 1929) and, against that wrong conception of Marxism, Marx's and Engels' own statements in The Holy Family (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 308 et seq., 313 et seq.) and The German Ideology (MEGA, I, v, pp. 76 et seq.)
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philosophical, that is, an idealistic form of thought, there is still a considerable difference between them historically and theoretically. The association of Marx with Spinoza connects him with an early bourgeois philosophy, which, while in form idealistic, comprised also the germ of the future materialistic mode of thought. On the other hand, those modern philosophical improvisators who wanted to fill a presumed gap in Marx's system with Kant's, Mach's, Dietzgen's, or any other kind of non-materialistic philosophy, utterly ignore the whole historical and theoretical situation.1 The only reason why the materialistic philosophers Marx and Engels, up from a certain point in their development, turned their backs upon every philosophy, even the materialistic philosophy (leaving far behind such less consistent anti-philosophical gospels as those of Feuerbach and Moses Hess who for a time had preceded them in this tendency) is the fact that they wanted to go one step further and to outbid the materialism of philosophy by a direct materialistic science and practice.2 This did not prevent them from opposing, in their own scientific work, every non-materialistic standpoint, no matter in what disguise it appeared. They expressly included in these "non-materialistic" or "not univocally materialistic" standpoints, also the whole modern positivism (as represented by Comte and others) which seems on the surface to be closely related to their anti-philosophical materialism, and that "agnostic" attitude which is derived by modern scientists from Hume's philosophy and which in Marx's lifetime was represented in England by Thomas Huxley.3 The fight against all shades of philosophical
1 See the author's Marxism and Philosophy, second edition 1930, pp. 21 and 53, and footnote 8.

2 See Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 1845-46 (MEGA, I, v; particularly pp. 8 et seq. 24, 76 et seq., 215-16). See also Marx's later statement in Preface 1859, that he and Engels, in that earlier work, "worked out together the contrast between their view and the ideology of German philosophy and, in fact, settled accounts with their former philosophical conscience." For a more detailed discussion see the author's Marxism and Philosophy, pp. 67 et seq. and pp. 8 et seq.