A division of atheneum publishers, inc

3 See Marx's letter to Engels of 12.12.1866 (MEGA, III, iii, p. 368).
170

THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

idealism became even more important when, in the period immediately after Marx's death "classical German philosophy underwent a kind of revival mainly in England and Scandinavia, but also in Germany."1 That is why now even an altogether scientifically and empirically minded Marxist like Friedrich Engels, rehearsed the philosophical materialism of his youth and set himself to work out once more, against the new obscurantist tendencies which were rapidly gaining ground among the various schools of contemporary bourgeois philosophy, the persisting affinity between the materialistic science of Marxism and a general, and therefore in a certain sense "philosophical," materialistic view of the universe. The same reason applies in a later historical period, to the philosophical battles waged against the so-called "Empirio-Criticism" and other idealistic philosophies by the militant materialist Lenin.2

There is then, no reasonable doubt as to the affiliation of Marxism to the most definitely materialistic creed to be found in present-day philosophy and science. But the position is different in regard to the often recurring statement that Marx's historical materialism sprang directly from, and is still now theoretically dependent upon, one or another form of philosophical materialism, as for example the revolutionary bourgeois materialism of the 18th century, or the materialistic criticism of religion from Strauss to Feuerbach.

1 See Engels' Introduction to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy, 1888.

2 See Marxism and Philosophy, pp. 27 et seq.

171
CHAPTER II

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

THERE is no doubt that Marx fully shared, for a time, the tremendous enthusiasm felt during the 40's by the whole school of Left Hegelians for the materialistic message of Feuerbach.1 The influence exerted upon his theory by this experience may, perhaps, be best compared with that of Hume on Kant as summed up by the latter in the formula that "Hume aroused me from the dogmatic slumber." Yet there is an important difference in the degree to which Marx on the one hand, and the other Hegelians including Engels, were impressed by the particular form of materialism represented by Feuerbach. It is no wonder that Friedrich Engels who had suffered much in his childhood under the pietistic cant of the Wupper valley and had received his first lesson in philosophical materialism from the gospel criticism of the Hegelian David Friedrich Strauss and then passed from the disciple to the master discovering behind the idealistic formulae of Hegel the germs of an altogether different atheistic and materialistic creed, was later decisively influenced by the outspoken materialism to which those germs were developed by Feuerbach.2 It was certainly otherwise with Marx. He was brought up in a freethinking family and reached his ultimate materialistic standpoint by a much longer road through a study of Democritus and Epicurus, of the materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries, and finally through a detailed critical revision of the whole idealistic philosophy of Hegel. His progress toward materialism was indeed, from the begin-
1 See the later testimony of Engels in his essay On Feuerbach, 1888.

2 See the detailed references in Gustav Mayer's Friedrich Engels, 1933. See further the recent study by Reinhart Seeger on Friedrich Engels, the Religious Development of a Late Pietist and Early Socialist. (Christianity and Socialism, Sources and Studies, published by Ernst Barnikol, 1935).

172

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

ning and through all its phases, a progress to revolutionary materialistic politics.1 He was already a revolutionary materialist in this political sense although still using the language of Hegel's idealism, when he raved against the "reprobate materialism" of the Prussian State Gazette which "in considering a Statute on the stealing of wood thought only of wood and did not solve that single and material task politically, i.e., not in connection with the reason and ethics of the State as a whole."2 He was already a materialistic critic of all existing realizations of the State-idea when he reproached Hegel for "proceeding from the State to make man a subjective form of the State" instead of, "in the sense of modern democracy," proceeding from man to make the State an objective form of man. He described as early as this "democracy" as being "the general form of the State in which the formal principle is at the same time the material principle," and added the far-reaching remark that "the modern French have understood this to mean that in true democracy the political State must disappear."3

For all these reasons the materialistic rupture with all theological and philosophical idealism which was effected by Feuerbach in his book on the Essence of Christendom, 1841, and, even more powerfully, in his Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, 1842, did not have that sweeping effect upon Marx that it had upon Engels and, even more persistently, upon Strauss, Bruno Bauer, etc., who, all through their lives, did not emerge from the phase of religious criticism. Thus becomes evident the real meaning of the sentence by which Marx in 1843 described the criticism of religion as "the premise of all criticism."4 This oft-

1 See Marx's thesis on The Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. 1841, and the detailed report on the progress of his philosophical studies given by young Marx to his father in a letter of 10.11.1837 (MEGA, I, i, I, pp. 1-144, and I, i, 2, pp. 213-21).

2 See Marx's article On the Debates of the 6th Rhineland Diet in Rheinische Zeitung of 3.11.1842, No. 307 (MEGA I, I, I ; p. 304).

3 See MEGA, I, i, I, p. 435.

4 See Marx, Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, 1843 (MEGA, I, i, I, p. 607).

173

KARL MARX

quoted phrase had at the time when it was formulated by Marx under the conditions prevailing in Prussia after the change of government, besides its general theoretical a definite political significance. Marx proclaimed the attack of the bourgeois freethinkers against the reactionary religious policy of the new régime to be the first phase of that "political movement" which beginning in 1840 was to lead up to the 1848 revolution. By the same reason a criticism restricted to religion lost the positive significance it had borne for a time as soon as that first phase was brought to a close by the "socialist ideas circulating in Germany since 1843." While in the first phase the "critique of religion" had served as a veil concealing the political aims of the speedily growing revolutionary movement of the early 4o's, that movement had now reached a point at which, according to Marx, even a political struggle had become a mere transparent veil concealing the social struggle beneath.1 Marx had already declared before and, in fact, in the very sentence in which he spoke of the criticism of religion as being "the premise of all criticism," that "the criticism of religion, for all practical purposes, has been concluded in Germany."2 It is true that both he and Engels, one year later, reaffirmed their allegiance to the "real humanism" of Feuerbach;3 they did so with a view to retain an ally indispensable in the impending revolutionary fight. They did not, for that matter, retract their criticism of that "merely naturalistic, not historical and economic materialism" which was represented by Feuerbach then and at all later times.4 Nor did they except Feuerbach from the final attack they directed during the following year against the whole of the Left Hegelians who still remained rooted in philosophical ground. Marx was by now definitely tired of "any criticism of religion
1 See MEGA, I, iii, p. 287.

2 Ibid, I, i, I, p. 607.

3 See Marx and Engels, Holy Family, 1844 (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 179, 316). See also the further acknowledgments to Feuerbach (not quite so unrestricted) in the draft Preface and text of the Critique of National Economy of the same year (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 35, 123, 151 et seq).

4 See MEGA, I, iii, p. 327.

174

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

which does not go beyond its proper sphere."1 That is to say, he had left religious criticism far behind and had progressed from the "premise" to its political and social consequences, from "criticism of heaven" to "criticism of earth," from "criticism of religion" to "criticism of law," from "criticism of theology" to "criticism of politics,"2 and from there, in a subsequent stage, to a criticism of the still more earthly forms which the religious reflexion of the real world assumes in the economic sphere, i.e., of the "fetish character of the commodity world" and of the categories of Political Economy derived from it.3

A materialistic criticism of the prevailing social and political conditions could not be built upon the mainly naturalistic materialism which had been professed by Feuerbach.4 Feuerbach had conceived of the human being as "an abstract entity inherent in the single individual." He had not, like Marx, described it as "the ensemble of the social conditions."5 He understood the world "only in the form of an object or of contemplation. It was, however, of decisive importance for historical materialism to understand the given reality and its development also from a subjective viewpoint as "a human sensual activity, i.e., practice," and thus to conceive of human action itself as an "objective activity."6 The naturalistic materialism of Feuerbach which "excluded the historical process," was not capable of fulfilling that most important task even in its own peculiar and limited sphere, the criticism of religion. Only "historical materialism" which on an economic, historical, and social (not only natural and biological) basis "explains the active behaviour of man

1 See German Ideology, 1845-46 (MEGA, I, v, p. 214).

2 See MEGA, I, i, I, p. 608.

3 See above pp. 131 et seq.

4 See Marx's letter to Ruge of 13.3.1843: "Feuerbach's aphorisms are unsatisfactory in my opinion only in this respect that he refers too much to nature and too little to politics."

5 See the sixth of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, posthumously published by Engels as an Appendix to his On Feuerbach, 1888. (Now also MEGA, I, v, pp. 533 et seq).

6 Ibid, p. 533, first thesis.

175

KARL MARX

towards nature, the direct production of his life, and thus also of his social conditions and of the ideas arising from them," provides a truly materialistic development of the religious ideas." All history of religion which ignores this material basis is uncritical."1 It was in this context that Marx added the statement quoted in a previous chapter that "it is, in fact, much easier to find by analysis the secular kernel of the religious mysteries than, conversely, to derive their exalted forms from the prevailing real conditions. The latter is the unique materialistic and therefore the scientific method."2

While the "Feuerbach cult" which Marx had shared with the other young Hegelians for an extremely short time, did on the whole not leave a deep mark on his materialistic theory,3 he was much more impressed by that earlier form of bourgeois materialism which had been inaugurated by "the English and French" in the course of the 17th and i8th centuries. The attitude of Marx and Engels to the different phases of bourgeois social theory and economics which we have dealt with in the First and Second Parts of this book exactly repeats itself in their attitude towards the different historical phases of bourgeois materialism. They dismissed with utter contempt that "shallow and vulgarized form in which 18th century materialism continues to-day in the minds of the natural scientists and physicians, and which was preached on their lecture tours in the 50's by Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott."4 On the other hand, they always regarded their new proletarian and revolutionary mate-

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

2 See above, pp. 160-161.

3 See Marx's remarks on this subject in German Ideology (MEGA, I, v, p. 85) and in his letter to Engels of 24.4.1867 (MEGA. III, iii, p. 383). See further Engels' letters to Marx of 19.11.1844, 19.8.1846, and of the middle of October, 1846 (MEGA, III, i, pp. 7, 27-28, 44-47) and Marx's final judgment on Feuerbach in his letter to the editor of the Social Democrat of 24.1.1865: "Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is poor. Nevertheless he was epoch-making after Hegel because he emphasized certain points unpleasant to the Christian conscience and important for the progress of criticism, which Hegel had left in a mystical chiaroscuro."

4 See Engels, On Feuerbach, 1888.

176

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

tialism as a continuation and more highly developed stage of that classical bourgeois materialism which had formed the driving force of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary epoch and had then already temporarily begun to branch off directly into socialism and communism.1 This relation, however, is more of a general affiliation than a. definite adoption of methods and results. On the entirely new field now opened by the extension of the materialistic principle to the historical and social sciences, and under the changed historical conditions of the 19th century, Marx and Engels could no longer utilize the primitive forms of those early forerunners for their own research, although they went on to admire and to praise the bourgeois materialism of the 18th century for its militant revolutionary tendency.

The bourgeois materialists had not developed any adequate principles for the historical and social studies. They had, indeed, boldly proclaimed their materialistic principle as fundamental for all fields of existence and knowledge. They did not dream of the half-heartedness of present-day natural scientists who actually apply a materialistic principle within the limited branch in which they happen to do their professional scientific work, but carefully avoid any further extension of that materialism and cheerfully regard themselves (to use an expression applied to Feuerbach by Engels) as "materialists underneath and idealists on top." Yet even the early bourgeois materialists had in fact directed their attention mainly to the field which of necessity attracted them because of its importance for modern industry, the very basis of bourgeois society. Thus they had worked out primarily a materialistic science of nature, and dealt with "society" only in passing as a secondary part of the natural world. The more definite and more threatening the forms of the proletarian class-movement became in the further development of bourgeois society, the more was bourgeois materialism driven back from the thorny ground of "society" to "nature"

1 See Marx, Holy Family (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 300-310).
177

KARL MARX

as a field of scientific research. The bourgeois social science of the 19th and 2Oth centuries, in forgetting its revolutionary character generally, also forgot the materialism of its youthful phase and was able to reproduce it, if at all, only in the spasmodic and counter-revolutionary form, in which it appears for instance in Pareto's "materialistic" doctrine of ideologies.

Bourgeois materialism has revolutionized the natural sciences. The proletarian materialism of Marx and Engels proposed from the outset to subject the historical and social world to the same materialistic principle. Just as the materialism of natural science had built up its theoretical form in a critical fight against the surviving remainders of the theological metaphysics of the Middle Ages, so did historical and social materialism work out its new theoretical form by opposing that new metaphysics which in the meantime had settled on the field neglected by the old materialism, i.e., of historical and social phenomena, and had found its temporary conclusion in the German idealistic philosophy from Kant to Hegel.1

Marx found hidden beneath the idealistic speculative forms of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, History, Aesthetics, Religion, etc., of Logic and History of Philosophy, just that which he had not been able to find anywhere else in the whole of past and contemporary philosophy and science: namely, a methodical starting point for an empirical investigation of the so-called "spiritual nature of man," i.e., the realm of history or society as opposed to nature. The first importance of Hegel's philosophy for Marx's materialist science derives from the fact that here the sphere of "nature" had been confronted for the first time with the new sphere of the social relations of men as an equally comprehensive Universe of Research, both to be ultimately subordinated to one and the same supreme principle of knowledge. There is, of course, the difference that for Hegel that ultimate principle had been spiritual, while for Marx it was material.
1 See the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach 1845 (MEGA, I, v, p. 533).
178

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Hegel started from the "idea." Marx, on the contrary, in all his philosophical, juridical, and political studies took his start from a strictly empirical principle. He approached the historical, social, and practical world of man with the firm decision to investigate this so-called "world of the mind" which until then had been treated as something essentially different from physical and material nature, with the same "precision" which had been applied for several centuries by the great scientists to their study of physical nature. In so doing he carried out the programme which he had first formulated as a student of nineteen years when he was still inspired by the "idealism of Kant and Fichte," but just on the verge of succumbing to the lure of the great Hegelian philosophy. It was at that time, that young Karl Marx confessed to his alarmed father that he had now resolved "to plunge into the sea once more," but this time "with a definite intention of finding the nature of mind to be just as necessary, concrete, and tightly rounded as the nature of physics."1 Hegel had indeed introduced into the investigation of the history of society and of the so-called "mind," somewhat more of the empirical attitude of the scientist who aims at a precise description and definition of really existing and verifiable connections than up to that time had been usual with the idealistic philosophers, adherents of the "organic" theory of the State, and the whole of the so-called "historical school." It was just this fact which definitely won over young Marx to the Hegelian philosophy, and held him under its spell for a considerable period of his life. He adhered, in truth, from the very beginning only to the "natural scientist" of society whom he had discovered beneath the mystifying disguise of the philosophical explorer of the human mind. He left Hegel at once when he felt able to represent in a direct and rational way those material connections between men and things, and between men and men which
1 See Marx's letter to his father of 10.11.1837 (MEGA, I, i, 2, pp. 218-19).
179

KARL MARX

formed the real contents hidden under an apparent speculative connection of ideas. The real contribution of Hegel to a materialistic investigation of society was that he had seen this material connection, in an idealistic form, and made it the subject of a philosophico-scientific exposition.

Hegel's philosophical system, the latest and most complete elaboration of that "natural system of the sciences of the mind" by which the theologico-metaphysical system of the Middle Ages had been replaced during the practical and theoretical struggles of the previous centuries, can be traced everywhere in the materialistic scheme of society. In an as comprehensive though idealistic and not materialistic sense had already Hegel (therewith translating into his "profound" philosophical slang the empirical discoveries of the English and French of the 17th and 18th centuries) distinguished between the two realms of reality, i.e., the "world of the mind" or "history" on the one hand, and the external world or "nature" on the other. He too, had subdivided that historical world into definite strata. Above the world of the "objective mind" (Family, Civil Society, State) there came the world of the "absolute mind" (Religion, Philosophy, Art).1 He too, had regarded this world, at variance with itself, as a world in a process of development. There was only the characteristic difference that Hegel had superimposed on the real dependence of the "higher" strata of society upon the "lower," and on the real process of an historical development going on in time, of which he was fully aware, another reversed, and "idealistic" order of the universe in the shape of an imagined, timeless development and a similarly imagined dependence of the lower forms of reality from the higher and more "spiritual" forms. Hegel, too, had "dialectically" presented this development as being a "contradictory" process, in which the driving force is the negation of each position, the conflict resulting from that contradiction to be ultimately readjusted through the negation

1 See Hegel Encyclopedia, Part III, §§ 2 and 3.
180

THE GENESIS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

of the negation in a higher "synthesis." This order of the historico-social world, which in Hegel's philosophy "stood on its head," was put on its feet again by Marx through his "materialistic reversal of the Hegelian idealism."

Marx struck out of Hegel's scheme the idea of the State which Hegel had presented as the crowning conclusion and consummation of the mind standing in the world and consciously realizing itself within it. One must not confound the Hegelian "idea of the State" with that ordinary earthly phenomenon which with him is merely "the State as a civil society."1 "One must not think of particular States, or particular institutions, one must consider rather the real God, the idea."2

When the real God was dethroned the whole kingdom fell. Just as the "State" and the "law," so all the "higher" forms of the mind—religion, art, philosophy—were now ousted from their superhuman position and degraded to the rank of simple "forms of social consciousness," dependent upon the material conditions of existence. Marx had "materialistically" criticized those "higher" ideological manifestations of the social consciousness even before he extended his materialistic criticism to the phenomena of the legal and political spheres. He began his attack on the existing world with a materialistic criticism of religion, art, and philosophy, and thus criticized, at first religion philosophically, and afterwards religion and philosophy politically.3 Since he had now discovered the real basis of law and State in material production, it was only obvious that he would trace to the same real basis also those "higher" ideologies, which he had already previously traced to law and politics.

In the same way the Hegelian idea of "development" was completely "reversed" by Marx. He put in the place of the timeless development of the "idea" the real historical development of

1 See Encyclopedia, § 523.

2 See Hegel, Philosophy of Law, Addition to § 258.

3 See the author's Marxism and Philosophy, second edition, pp. 102 et seq.
181

KARL MARX

society on the basis of the development of its material mode of production. The Hegelian "contradiction" was replaced by the struggle of the social classes ; the dialectical "negation" by the proletariat and the dialectical "synthesis" by the proletarian revolution and the transition to a higher stage of society.