ESSAYS
ON THE
Materialistic Conception
of History


BY

ANTONIO LABRIOLA
Professor in the University of Rome
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES H. KERR

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

---

COPYWRIGHT 1908
BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY CHICAGO

   On the tenth of March, 1896, the same year that the last despairing revolt of the small producer against capitalism in America was to end in the overwhelming defeat of Bryan, an Italian scholar published in the city of Rome the remarkable work which is now for the first time offered to American readers.

   To publish this book in America at that time would have been an impossibility. The American socialist movement was then hardly more than an association of immigrants who had brought their socialism with them from Europe. Today it numbers at least half a million adherents, and its platform is an embodiment of the ideas first adequately stated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and now first adequately explained and elaborated in this remarkable work of Labriola.

   The central and fundamental proposition of socialism is not any scheme for reconstructing society, on a cut-and-dried programme; nor again is it any particular mathematical formula showing to what extent the laborer is robbed by the present system of the fruits of his labor; it is precisely this Historical, Materialism, which Labriola has so admirably explained in the present work.

   Some idea of the place accorded to this book by European socialists may be gathered from the preface to the French edition by G. Sorel, one of the most prominent socialists of France.

   He says: "The publication of this book marks a date in the history of socialism. The work of Labriola has its place reserved in our libraries by the side of the classic works of Marx and Engels. It constitutes an illumination and a methodical development of a theory which the masters of the new socialist thought have never yet treated in a didactic form. It is therefore an indispensable book for whoever wishes to understand something of proletarian ideas. More than the works of Marx and Engels it is addressed to that public which is unacquainted with socialist preconceptions. In these pages the historian will find substantial and valuable suggestion for the study of the origin and transformation of institutions."

   The economic development of the United States has reached a point where the growth of the Socialist Party must henceforth go forward with startling rapidity. That the publication of this volume may have some effect in clarifying the ideas of those who discuss the principles of that party, whether with voice or pen, is the hope of the TRANSLATOR

   In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgments and all our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last fifty years. That date marks the beginning of the new era. This is arising, or, rather, is separating itself from the present era, and is developing by a process peculiar to itself and thus in a way that is necessary and inevitable, whatever may be the vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet be foreseen.

   All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their

   Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its distinctive character?

   We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter for the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the proletariat -- or again the indications of political relationship to the other revolutionary parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth chapter. These indications and these measures, although they deserved to be taken into consideration at the moment and under the circumstances where they were formulated and suggested, and although they may be very important for forming a precise estimate of the political action of the German communists in the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850, henceforth no longer form for us a mass of practical judgments for or against which we should take sides in each contingency. The political parties which since the International have established themselves in different countries, in the name of the

   Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this essence, this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the other forms of socialism

   That was, to anticipate, the attitude of mind of those who wrote it. By the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they had anticipated the events which have occurred and they contented themselves with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what they had outgrown. Critical communism -- that is its true name, and there is none more exact for this doctrine -- did not take its stand with the feudalists in regretting the old society for the sake of criticising by contrast the contemporary society -- it had an eye only to the future. Neither did it associate itself with the petty bourgeois in the desire of saving what cannot be saved -- as, for example, small proprietorship, or the tranquil life of the small proprietor whom the bewildering action of the modern state, the necessary and natural organ of present society, destroys and overturns, because by its constant revolutions it carries in itself the necessity for other revolutions new and more fundamental.

   Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into sickly sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed those contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the society of the future upon a

   The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less

   The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception, communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture, and expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization of its very necessity, that is to say, in the realization that it is the outcome and the solution of the struggles of existing classes. These struggles have varied according to times and places and out of them history has developed; but, they are all reduced in our days to the single struggle between the capitalist bourgeois and the workingmen inevitably forced into the ranks of the proletariat. The Manifesto gives the genesis of this struggle; it details its evolutionary rhythm, and predicts its final result.

   In that conception of history is embodied the whole doctrine of scientific communism. From that moment the theoretical adversaries of socialism have no longer had to discuss the abstract possibility of the democratic socialization of the means of production;* as if it were possible in this question to

   That is why we voluntarily accept the epithet of scientific, provided we do not thus confuse ourselves with the positivists, sometimes embarrassing guests, who assume to themselves a monopoly of science; we do not seek to maintain an abstract and generic

   Not one of the previous or subsequent works of the authors of the Manifesto themselves, although they have a much more considerable scientific leaning, can replace the Manifesto or have the same specific efficacy. It gives us in its classic simplicity the true expression of this situation; the modern proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows and develops in contemporary history as the concrete subject, the positive force whose necessarily revolutionary action must find in communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this work while giving a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it in brief, rapid and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and

   It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its classic strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the synthesis of so many series and groups of ideas.*

   It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the imprecations, or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all political refugees and to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their country to breathe elsewhere freer air. Neither do we find in it the direct reproduction of the conditions of their own country, then in a deplorable political state and which could not be compared to those of France and England socially and economically, except as regards certain portions of their territory. They brought to their work, on the contrary, the philosophical thought which alone had placed and maintained their country upon the level of contemporary history: -- this philosophic thought which in their hands was undergoing that important transformation which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach combined with dialectics, to embrace and understand the movement of history in its most secret and until then unexplored causes, -- unexplored because hidden and difficult to observe. Both were communists and revolutionists, but they were so neither by instinct, by impulse nor by passion. They had elaborated an entirely new criticism of economic science

   Engels had already published a critical essay in which passing over all subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time in an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the antitheses inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself, and he had become celebrated by the publication of a book on the condition of the working class which was the first attempt to represent the movements of the working class as a result of the workings of the forces and means of production.* Marx, in the few years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist in Germany, Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically victorious criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions from his doctrine, and had given the first precise explanation of the origin of surplus value as a consequence of the purchase and the use

   These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find here the line which separates it from all the rest.

   The Communist League grew out of the League of the Just; the latter in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical under Gruen and utopian with Weitling. Having its principal seat at London it was interested in the Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a sect, how painfully and difficult was the formation of a proletarian political party.

   A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion and the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the International of the Arbeiterbildungsverein of London, from the International properly so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to put unity into the struggle of the proletariat of Europe and America. The action of the proletariat had other interruptions especially in France, and with the exception of Germany, from the dissolution of the International of glorious memory up to the new International

   There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors. They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid but sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we are traversing in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our precursors to those who followed ways which they later had to abandon, or to those who, to speak without metaphor, formulated doctrines and started movements, doubtless explicable by the times and circumstances of their birth, but which were later outgrown by the doctrine of critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian revolution. This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing irrational in the historic course of things because nothing comes into existence without reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We cannot even

   The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the appearance of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern socialism, this writing, which gives only the most general and the most easily accessible features of its teaching, bears within itself traces of the historic field within which it was born, which was that of France, England and Germany. Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since become wider and wider, and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized world. In all countries in which the tendency to communism has developed through antagonisms under aspects different but every day more evident between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the process of its first formation is wholly or partly repeated over and over. The proletarian parties which are formed little by little have traversed anew the stages of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but his process has become from country to country and from year to year always more rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the

   But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism today, as before, and as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic necessity, that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its genesis; and this is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of observation and in a hasty example, in the formation of the Manifesto. It was intended for a weapon of war and thus bears upon its own exterior the traces of its origin. It contains more substantial declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration rests entirely in the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace the process of this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the doctrine of the Manifesto. There is an analysis which while separating in theory the factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another analysis, and this alone permits us to understand history, which only distinguishes and separates the elements to find again in them the objective necessity of their co-operation toward the total result.

   It is now a current of opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus and inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in future involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total absorption, begin with the International. Nevertheless, the Manifesto precedes it. Its teaching is of prime importance in the light which it throws on the proletarian movement, which movement indeed had its birth and development independently of any doctrine. it is also more than this light. Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction. It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history. It was also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome and to what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat is a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social order in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a revolution -- but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised millennium. It is the scientific and reflected revelation of the way which our civil society is traversing (if the shade of Fourier will pardon me!).

   The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of

   The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the name of socialism was then given.

   To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory which should explain them, -- and a theory which should not be a simple complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of the disadvantages, thenceforth recognized, of the economy of competition: although many were then concerned with this. This new theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the conception of historical progress through the process of antitheses from the abstract form, which

   This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity of the new social revolution more or less explicit in the instinctive consciousness of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which might be favored, sustained, and assisted. The revolution became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate itself without at the same

   Just as the League of the Just had become The Communist League by stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbès and Blanqui, so likewise the new doctrine, which the League accepted and made its own, definitively abandoned the ideas which inspired the action of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a process, that which the conspirators believed to be the result of a pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism.

   At that point begins a new ascending line in the order of facts and another connection of concepts and of doctrines.

   The communism of conspiracy, the Blanquism of that time, carries us up through Buonarotti and also through Bazard and the "Carbonari" to the conspiracy of Baboeuf, a true heir of ancient tragedy who hurled himself against fate because there was no connection between his aim and the economic condition of the moment, and he was as yet incapable of bringing upon the political scene a proletariat having a broad class consciousness. From Baboeuf and certain less known elements of the Jacobin period, past Boissel and Fauchet we ascend to the intuitive Morelly and to the original and

   These precursors of the socialism of violence, protest and conspiracy were all equalitarians; as were also most of the conspirators. Thus by a singular but inevitable error they took for a weapon of combat, interpreting it and generalizing it, that same doctrine of equality which, developing as a natural right parallel to the formation of the economic theory, had become an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie which was winning step by step its present position to transform the society of privilege into that of liberalism, free exchange and the civil code.*

   Following this immediate deduction which at bottom was a simple illusion, that all men being equal in nature should also be equal in their enjoyments, it was thought that the appeal to reason carried with it all the elements of propaganda and persuasion, and that the rapid, immediate and violent taking possession of the exterior instruments of

   But whence come and how persist all these inequalities which appear so irrational in the light of a concept of justice so simple and so elementary? The Manifesto was the clear negation of the principle of equality understood so naively and so clumsily. While proclaiming as inevitable the abolition of classes in the future form of collective production, it explains to us the necessity, the birth and the development of these very classes as a fact which is not an exception, or a derogation of an abstract principle, but the very process of history.

   Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter cannot exist without the former. And both are the result of a process of formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether on the manner of economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. To describe the origin and the progress of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to explain its successes in the colossal development of technique and in the conquest of the world market, and to point out the political transformations which followed it, which are the expression, the defense and

   It is for these reasons which I have explained here as simply as possible that equalitarian communism remained vanquished. Its practical powerlessness blended with its theoretical inability to account for the causes of the wrongs or of the inequalities which it desired, bravely or stupidly, to destroy or eliminate at a blow.

   To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the theorists of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to the hard reality of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary state of human life in all times and in all places and the whole course of historic formations cannot be considered as a series of deviations and wanderings. One does not reach communism by Spartan abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be, still more it must be and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist society. But the dissolution cannot be inoculated into it artificially nor imported from without. It will dissolve by its own weight as Machiavelli would say. It will disappear as a form of production which engenders of itself and in itself the constant and increasing rebellion of it productive forces against the conditions (juridical and political) of production and it continues to live only

   The Manifesto did not make, and it was not its part to make the picture of a future society. It told how our present society will dissolve by the progressive dynamics of its forces. To make this understood it was necessary above all to explain the development of the bourgeoisie and this was done in rapid sketches, a model philosophy of history, which can be retouched, completed and developed, but which cannot be corrected.*

   Saint-Simon and Fourier, although neither their ideas nor the general trend of their development were accepted, found their justification. Idealists both, they had by their heroic vision transcended the "liberal" epoch which in their horizon had its culminating point at the epoch of the French revolution. The former in his interpretation of history substituted social physics for economic law and politics, and in spite of many idealistic and positivistic uncertainties, he almost discovered the genesis of the third estate. The other, ignorant of details which were still unknown or neglected, in the exuberance of his undisciplined spirit imagined a great chain of historic epochs vaguely distinguished

   It is not in the name of a school, but as the promise, the threat, and the desire of a party that the new doctrine of critical communism presented. Its authors and its adherents did not feed upon the utopian manufacture of the future but their minds were full of the experience and the necessity of the present. They united with the proletarians whom instance, not as yet fortified by experience, impelled to overthrow, at Paris and in England, the rule of the bourgeois class with a rapidity of movement not guided by well-considered tactics. These communists disseminated their revolutionary ideas in Germany: they were the defenders of the June martyrs, and they had in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung a political organ, extracts from which, reproduced occasionally after so many years,

   But from the day when the doctrine appeared it made its anticipated criticism of that socialismus vulgaris which was flourishing in Europe and especially in France from the Coup d'Etat to the International; the latter moreover in its short period of life had not time to vanquish and eliminate it. This vulgar socialism found its intellectual food (when nothing even more incoherent and chaotic was at hand) in the doctrine and especially in the paradoxes of Proudhon who had already been vanquished theoretically by Marx but who was not

   From the time of its appearance, this new communist doctrine carried and implied criticism of all forms of State socialism, from Louis Blanc to Lassalle. This State socialism, although mingled with revolutionary doctrines, was then summed up in the empty dream, in the abracadabra, of the Right to Work. This is an insidious formula if it implies a demand addressed to a government even of revolutionary bourgeois. It is an economic absurdity if by it is meant to suppress the unemployment which ensues upon the variations of wages, that is to say upon the conditions of competition. It may be a tool for politicians, if it serves as an expedient to calm a shapeless mass of unorganized proletarians. This is very evident for any one who conceives clearly the course of a victorious proletarian revolution which cannot proceed to the socialization of the means of production by taking possession of them, that is to say, which cannot arrive at the economic form in which there is neither merchandise nor wage labor and in which the right to work and the duty of working are one and the same, mingle in the common necessity of labor for all.

   The mirage of the right to work ended in the tragedy of June. The parliamentary discussion of which it was the object in the sequel was nothing but a parody. Lamartine, that tearful rhetorician,

   The brevity and simplicity of the Manifesto were wholly foreign to the insinuating rhetoric of faith or creed. It was of the utmost inclusiveness by virtue of the many ideas which it for the first time reduced to a system and it was a series of germs capable of an immense development. But it was not, and it did not pretend to be a code of socialism, a catechism of critical communism, or the handbook of the proletarian revolution. We may leave its "quintessence" to the illustrious Dr. Schaeffle, to whom also we willingly leave the famous phrase, "The social question is a question of the stomach."

   The "ventre" of Dr. Schaeffle has for long years cut a fine enough figure in the world to the great advantage of the dilletanti in socialism and to the delight of the politicians. Critical communism, in reality, scarcely begun with the Manifesto it needed to develop and it has developed effectively.

   The sum total of the teachings customarily designated by the name of "Marxism" did not arrive at maturity before the years 1860-70. It is certainly a long step from the little work Wage Labor and Capital*) in which is seen for the first time in

   It is a long step also from the proletarian movement which succumbed in 1848 to the present proletarian movement which through great difficulties after having re-appeared on the political scene has developed with continuity and deliberation. Until a few years ago this regularity of the forward march of the proletariat was observed and admired only in Germany. The social democracy there had normally increased as upon its own field (from the Workingmen's Conference of Nuremberg, 1868, to our day.) But since then the same phenomenon has asserted itself in other countries, under various forms.

   In this broad development of Marxism and in this increase of the proletarian movement in the limited forms of political action, has there not been, as some assert, an alteration from the militant character

   These reflections and these objections have arisen and arise continually both among the most enthusiastic and most passionate of the socialists and among the adversaries of socialism whose interest its is to give an appearance of uniformity to the special defeats, checks and delays, so as to affirm that communism has no future.

   Whoever compares the present proletarian movement and its varied and complicated course with the impression left by the Manifest when one reads it without being provided with knowledge from other sources, may easily believe that there was something juvenile and premature in the confident boldness of those communists of fifty years ago. There is in them the sound as of a battle cry and an echo of the vibrant eloquence of some of the orators of Chartism; there is the declaration of a new `93 with no room left of a new Thermidor.

   And Thermidor has re-appeared several times since in various forms, more or less explicit or disguised, and their authors have been since 1848 French ex-radicals, or Italian ex-patriots, or German bureaucrats, adorers of the god State and practically slaves of the god Mammon, English parliamentarians broken by the artifices of the art of government,

   There are others who go further and who theorize upon the objective improbabilities of the assertions of critical communism. That affirmation of the Manifesto that the reduction of all class struggles to a single one carries within itself the necessity of the proletarian revolution, would seem to them intrinsically false. That doctrine would be without foundation because it assumes to draw a theoretical deduction and a practical rule of conduct from the prevision of a fact which, according to these adversaries, would be a simple theoretical point which might be displaced and set ahead indefinitely. The assumed inevitable collision between the productive forces and the form of production would never take place because it is reduced, as they claim, to an infinite

   The historic forecast which is found in the doctrine of the Manifesto and which critical communism has since developed by a broad and detailed analysis of the actual world, has certainly taken on by reason of the circumstances in which it was produced a warlike appearance and a very aggressive form. But it did not imply, anymore than it implies now, either a chronological datum or a prophetic picture of the social organization like those in the apocalypses and the ancient prophesies.

   The heroic Father Dolcino did not re-appear with the prophetic war cry of Joachino del Fiore. We

   Here, on the contrary, in the doctrine of critical communism, it is society as a whole which at a moment of its general process discovers the cause of its destined course and at a critical point asserts itself to proclaim the laws of its movement. The foresight indicated by the Manifesto was not chronological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision.

   Beneath the noise of the passions over which our daily conversation extends itself, beyond the visible movements of the persons who formed the material at which the historians stop, beyond the juridical and political apparel of our civil society, far enough from the meanings which religion and art give to

   When the Manifesto declared that all history up to the present time has been nothing but the history of class struggles and that these are the case of all revolutions as also of all reactions, it did two things at the same time, it gave to communism the elements of a new doctrine and to the communists the guiding thread to discover in the confused events of political

   In these last fifty years the generic foresight of a new historic era has become for socialists the delicate art of understanding in every case what it is expedient to do, because this new era is in itself in continual formation. Communism has become an art because the proletarians have become, or are on the point of becoming a political party. The revolutionary spirit is embodied to-day in the proletarian organization. The desired union of communists and proletarians is henceforth an accomplished fact.* These last fifty years have been the ever stronger proof of the ever growing revolt of the producing forces against the forms of production. We "utopians" have no other answer to offer than this lesson from events to those who still speak of meteoric disturbances which, as they would have it, will disappear little by little and will all resolve themselves into the calm of this final epoch of civilization. And this lesson suffices.

   Eleven years after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx formulated in clear and precise fashion the directing principles of the materialistic interpretation of history in the preface to a book which is the forerunner of "Capital."

   "The first work which I undertook for the purpose of solving the doubts which perplexed me was a critical re-examination of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. The introduction to this work appeared in the German-French Year Books, published in Paris in 1844.

   My investigation ended in the conviction that legal relations and forms of government cannot be explained either by themselves or by the so-called general development of the human mind, but on the contrary, have their roots in the conditions of man's physical existence, whose totality Hegel, following the English and French writers of the eighteenth century, summed up under the name of civil society; and that the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy.

   The study of the latter which I began at Paris was continued at Brussels wither I had betaken myself in consequence of an order of Guizot expelling me from France.

   The general result which I arrived at and which, once obtained, served as a guide for my subsequent studies, can be briefly formulated as follows:

   In making their livelihood together men enter into certain necessary involuntary relations with each other, industrial relations which correspond to whatever stage society has reached in the development of its material productive forces.

   The totality of these industrial relations constitutes

   The method of producing the material livelihood determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

   It is not men's consciousness which determines their life; on the contrary, it is their social life which determines their consciousness.

   At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production or, to use a legal expression, with the old property relations under which these forces have hitherto been exerted. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters of production. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic basis the whole vast superstructure undergoes sooner or later a revolution.

   In considering such revolutions one must constantly distinguish between the industrial revolution, to be carefully posited scientifically, which takes place in the economic conditions of production, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological, forms wherein men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. As little as we judge an individual by what he himself thinks he is, just as little can we judge such a revolutionary epoch by its own consciousness. We must rather explain this consciousness out of the

   A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of production are never established, until the material conditions of life to support them have been prepared in the lap of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are at least in process of growth.

   We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive epochs in the economic evolution of society.

   The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of individuals.

   But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society, therefore, brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society."

   Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not return to it until later with the International. The reaction had triumphed in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic, liberal or democratic revolution. the bourgeoisie on its side had overcome the proletarians of France and England. The indispensable conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian movement suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had participated in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against reaction saw its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne. The survivors of the movement tried to make a new start at London, but soon Marx, Engels and others separated themselves from the revolutionaries and retired from the movement. The crisis was passed. A long period of repose followed. this was shown by the slow disappearance of the Chartist movement, that is to say, the proletarian movement of the country which was the spinal column of the capitalist system. History had for the moment discredited the illusions of the revolutionaries.

   Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the already discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx illustrated in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850 and especially the class struggles in France, showing thus that if the revolution in the forms which it had taken on at that moment had

   Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was the first attempt to apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained within precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise for the apparent movement to the real movement of history and to discover their intimate connection. There are indeed great difficulties in rising from the phenomena of passion, oratory, Parliaments, elections and the like to the inner social gearing to discover in the latter the different interests of the large and small bourgeois, of the peasants, the artisans, the laborers, the priests, the soldiers, the bankers, the usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously or unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man.

   The crisis was passed and this was precisely true in the countries which constituted the historic field from which critical communism proceeded. All

   The heroic resignation with which Marx after 1850 abandoned political life was shown again when he retired from the International after the congress at the Hague in 1872. These two facts have their value for biography because they give glimpses of his personal character. With him, in fact, ideas, temperament, policy and thought were one and the same. But, on the other hand, these facts have a much greater bearing for us. Critical communism does not manufacture revolutions, it does not prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms for revolts. It mingles itself with the proletarian movement in the full intelligence of the connection which its has, which it can have, and which it must have, with all the relations of social life as a whole. In a word it is not a seminary in which superior officers of the proletarian revolution are trained, but is it neither more nor less than the consciousness of this revolution and especially the consciousness of its difficulties.

   The proletarian movement has grown in a colossal fashion during these last thirty years. In the midst of numberless difficulties, through gains and losses, it has little by little taken on a political form. Its methods have been elaborated and gradually applied. All this is not the work of the magic action of the doctrine scattered by the persuasive virtue of written and spoken propaganda. From their first beginnings the communists had this feeling that they were the extreme left of every proletarian movement, but in proportion as the latter developed and specialized it became their necessity and duty to assist, (through the elaboration of programmes, and through their participation in the political action of the parties) in the various contingencies of the economic development and of the political situation growing out of it.

   In the fifty years which separate us from the publication of the Manifesto the specialization and the complexity of the proletarian movement have become such that there is henceforth no mind capable of embracing it in its completeness, of understanding it in its details and grasping its real causes and exact relations. The single International, from 1864 to 1873, necessarily disappeared after it had fulfilled its task. The preliminary equalization of the general tendencies and of the ideas common and indispensable to all the proletariat, and no one can assume or will assume to re-constitute anything like it.

   Two causes, notably, contributed in a high degree

   Have we not there, some ask, a deviation from the simple and imperative doctrine of the Manifesto? Others again say, have we not lost in intensity and precision what we have gained in extension and complexity?

   These questions, in my opinion, arise from an inexact

   Whatever be the concessions that the bourgeoisie can make in the present economic order even it it be a very great reduction in the hours of labor, it always remains true that the necessity of exploitation upon which the whole present social order rests imposes limits beyond which capital as a private instrument of production has no more reasons for existence. If a concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in the proletariat, the concession itself can do nothing less than to give rise to the need of new and ever increasing concessions. The need of labor legislation arose in England before the Chartist movement and it had its first successes in the period which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. the principles and the reasons of this movement in their cause and their effects were studied in a critical manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards passed, through the International, into the programmes of the different socialist parties. Finally this whole process, concentrating itself into the demand for eight hours, became with the 1st of May an international marshaling of the proletariat, and a means for estimating its progress. On the other hand, the political struggle in which the proletariat takes part democratizes its habits; still more real

   Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political situation of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were precursors, and this they have been; they hoped that the political conditions of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland might approximate to modern forms, and this has happened later, in part, and through other means; if they had a hope, it was that the proletarian movement of France and England might continue to develop. The reaction which intervened upset many things and stopped more than one development which had already begun. It upset also the old revolutionary tactic, and in these

   The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding thread to a science and a practice which nothing but experience and time could develop. It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general march of the proletarian movement.

   It is perfectly evident that the communist were influenced by the experience of the two movements which they had before their eyes, that of France, and especially the Chartist movement which the manifestation of April 10th was soon to strike with paralysis. But this scheme does not fix in any invariable fashion a tactic of war, which indeed had already been made frequently. The revolutionists had often indeed explained in the form of catechism what ought to be a simple consequence of the development of events.

   This scheme became more vast and complex with the development and extension of the bourgeois system. The rhythm of the movement has become more varied and slower because the laboring mass has entered on the scene as a distinct, political party, which fact changes the manner and the measure of their action and consequently their movement.

   Just as in view of the improvement of modern weapons the tactic of street riots has become inopportune, and just as the complexity of the modern state shows the insufficiency of a sudden capture of a municipal government to impose upon a whole people the will and the ideas of a minority, no matter how courageous and progressive, even so, on its side, the mass of the proletarians no longer holds to the word of command of a few leaders, nor does it regulate its movements by the instructions of captains who might upon the ruins of one government raise up another. The laboring mass where it has developed politically has made and is making its own democratic education. It is choosing its representatives and submitting their action to its criticism. It examines and makes its own the ideas and the propositions which these representatives submit to it. It already knows, or it begins to understand according to the situation in the various countries, that the conquest of political power cannot and should not be made by others in its name, and especially that it cannot be the consequence of a single blow. In a word it knows, or it is beginning to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat which shall have for its task the socialization of the means of production cannot be the work of a mass led by a few and that it must be, and that it will be, the work of the proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves and through long practice a political organization.

   The development and the extension of the bourgeois

   Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists, even those charlatans who encumber with their presence the press and the meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not come to understand,

   Social democracy! But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so ringing and so decisive?

   This is not the moment to recall that the phrase social democracy has had in France many significations from 1837 to 1848, all of which were based upon vague sentimentalism. Neither is it necessary to explain how the Germans have been able in this nomenclature to sum up all the rich and vast development

   We must insist upon the second term of the expression in order to avoid any equivocation. Democratic was the constitution of the Communist League; democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new teaching; democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and its participation in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of reaction; democratic finally was the very way in which the League was dissolved. In this first type of our present parties, in this first cell so to speak of our complex organism, elastic and highly developed, there was not only the consciousness of the mission to be accomplished as precursor, but there was already the form and the method of association which alone are suitable for the first initiators of the proletarian revolution. It was no

   All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the wily bourgeoisie often than not stirs up of itself and which it makes the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of socialism during these last years.

   Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but also in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism, sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow varied, complex movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many people from seeing the increasing reduction of all class struggles to the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized workers.

   Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience. Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history.

   Upon this road of contemporary socialism which constitutes its development because it is its experience, we have met the mass of the peasants.

   Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called, has turned its activity toward that mass in which peasant stupidity blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The elimination and the capture of domestic industry into the capitalist form, the disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domains, usury, taxes and militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains assumed to be props of the existing order.

   The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult; this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been and will be committed.* As long as the peasant shall not be

   The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a precise fashion from original documents in all its phases. It partly returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the reaction and conspiracies, and under circumstances known to all, and Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of militarism and of finance without having at the same

   Thence came the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas and tendencies. The Italian Phillipe Buoanaroti, at first the friend of the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism made its first appearance

   After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say, Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other circumstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable influence over politics and science

   As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of Engels is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere and always political conditions and events find their explanation in economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with

   I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said.

   On all sides and on all camps protests arise and objections are urged against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled here and there by newly converted socialists, socialist who are philosophical, socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical. Then reappears, as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote themselves to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of egoism and altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for existence always turns up at the right moment.

   Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this morality of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville, who was contemporary with the first projection of classic economics.

   And has not the politics of this morality been explained

   But let us return to our subject.

   Critical communism has never refused, and it does not refuse, to welcome the multiple and valuable suggestions, ideological, ethical, psychologic and pedagogic which may come from the knowledge and from the study of all forms of communism from

   But the partisans of critical communism differentiate themselves clearly on one point from all other forms or manners of communism, or of socialism, ancient, modern or contemporaneous, and this point is of capital importance.

   The cannot admit the that ideologies of the past have remained without effect and that the past attempts of the proletariat have been always overcome by pure chance, by pure accident, by the effect

   This orientation which seems harsh to the sentimentalists because it is too true, too realistic and too real, permits us to retrace the history of the proletariat and of the other oppressed classes which preceded it. We see their different phases; we take account of the failures of Chartism, of the Conspiracy

   If the bourgeoisie has not arrived everywhere at the final stage of its evolution, it surely has arrived in certain countries at its accomplishment. In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting the various older forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to the action and to the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it tends to simplify, the different class struggles of former times, which then obscured each other by their multiplicity, into this single struggle between capital which is converting into merchandise all the products of human labor indispensable to life and the mass of proletarians which sells its labor power, -- now also become simple merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. It is all prosaic. And just as the present class struggle is the simplification of all other, so likewise, the

   Thus there are in the Manifesto neither rhetoric nor protestations. It does not lament over pauperism to eliminate it. It sheds tears over nothing. The tears are transformed of themselves into a spontaneous revolutionary force. Ethics and idealism conceit henceforth in this, to put the thought of science at the service of the proletariat. If this ethics does not appear moral enough for the sentimentalists, usually hysterical and silly, let them go and borrow altruism from its high priest Spencer who will give a vague and insipid definition of it, such as will satisfy them.

   But, again, should the economic facto serve alone to explain the whole of history. Historic factors! But that is an expression of empiricists or ideologists who repeat Herder. Society is a complex whole or an organism according to the expression of some who waste their time in discussions over the value and the analogical use of this expression. This complexus has formed itself and has changed several times. What is the explanation of this change?

   Even long before Feuerbach gave a final blow to the theological explanation of history (man makes

   Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history, which is actually made, and we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development. The very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has not yet reach its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its processus, and it puts

   As I have already indicated

   This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of production had thrown light upon itself and its processus in creating the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.

   Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was associated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to accumulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex sides of the problem of wealth: it developed in the passage from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the

   In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed the elements and the forms of the processus of production, of circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, accumulating its analyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it illustrated was the natural order, and that private property in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income from land rents.

   The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the "natural order" is overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social antitheses without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry. The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This antithesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic constancy and unequaled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical precision even into his thoughts of its details.

   The antithesis between production and distribution

   In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain.? Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc. These demands reduce the things, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasoning, and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and gearing.

   The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of classical economics. What is the doctrine of the structure of present society? No one can combat this structure

   The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has a right to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it will be. But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of these consists in the fact that they grow and develop in certain determined conditions, but their relativity is not simply the opposite of necessity, a mere appearance, a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear and they will disappear by the very fact of the change of society, but they do not yield

   The theory of the class struggle was found. It was seen to appear both in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic processus was already illustrated by the science of economics), and in this new appearance of the proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was discovered, but at the same time their relative necessity was understood. Herein lies the whole method and justification of the new materialistic conception of history. Those deceive themselves who, calling it the economic interpretation of history, think they understand it completely. That designation is better suited, and is only suited, to certain analytic attempts,* which, taken separately and in a distinct fashion on the one side the economic forms and categories, and on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs, -- proceed to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life considered in an abstract fashion. Quite different is our position. Ours is the organic conception of history. The totality of the unity of

   At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did not go beyond the classic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the prosaic conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now quite another thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to the ancient deposits of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the Semitic traditions. And it extends still further back into prehistory, that is to say, into unwritten history. Morgan has given us a knowledge of ancient society, that is to say a pre-political society, and the key to understand

   At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable. One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. We must not be over-hasty in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics relative to each epoch,* in order to explain specifically the classes which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of

   The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history. Soon this fashion of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus' egg. And perhaps before and army so scientists has made an application of this conception to

To understand is to leave behind
(Hegel).

   When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the circumference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual passion. The probable circumference in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circumference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach. The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself.

   All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or even prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the reign

   This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called verbalism. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social complexus, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things.

   In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called -- there the myth and superstition of words are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the passions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect, class and

   We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history." Many have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple analysis of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from the context of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation of the doctrine,* or from the polemical writings in which its partisans refute the objections of its opponents. Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense complexus of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in them nothing but questions of nomenclature.

   If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds

   Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the meaning of this doctrine ought, before all

   Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word matter in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception, or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human association in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology, but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of human association, which form and develop through the succession and the growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable conditions, and to

   And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn, give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and employ certain means and certain tools and associate themselves in certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the prose of reality and halting there.

   There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects I will call it phraseology, although

   For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately practical to the interests purely esthetic, have moved different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition. These different types have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten. This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Taine, an infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators by the natural voices of

   In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the non plus ultra of intelligence -- in all these a great part of the human processus is revealed and reflected; and, consequently. We should not consider them as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings are mingled and confounded in the accepted opinions of cultured people, or of those who pass for such, they make up an immense mass of prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance opposes to the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.

   To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions, these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively acting -- that is to say, men in their various and diversified social relations -- this is the revolutionary

   A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of individuals, but a plexus of men organized in such and such a fashion by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason of permanent proximity; -- this nation, on a certain circumscribed and limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous labor; -- this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which has already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes; -- this nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle, which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products conformably to its way of producing; -- this nation, which by all these relations constitutes a society in which either by habits of mutual accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of giving birth

   Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are, passing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man. It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and the motives which are real and which belong to all human development, including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the rhythm of their own development.

   But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who narrate, explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life to this enormous mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations

   Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific explanation of the history of the past.

   The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood as speaking exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves with what is delivered

   But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which they often found both the motives and the justification of their action, we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure appearance,

   From the fact that history must be taken in its

   First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism, the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism. It is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way, we begin with motives religious, political, aesthetic, passionate, etc., but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at that form which reveals them to the consciousness

   And thence follows indubitably this second consequences that in our doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the last analysis (Engels) all the historic facts by means of the underlying economic structure (Marx), which necessitates analysis and reduction and then interlinking and construction.

   It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche nor to the concept of an assumed collective spirit which by its own laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that mass of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of which some attribute to the social being, as Schaeffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment,

   But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history. This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.

   I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the data, evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design, and of the auxiliary conceptions of the action,

   Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into confusing this order of problems with another order of problems, that is to say, into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the material world in general and of the animal world in particular. And because Darwinism succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the transformation of species, the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity of things, and in discerning, in the organisms, phases, as it were, and moments of a real and proper natural history, it has been imagined that it was a commonplace and simple enterprise to borrow for an explanation of the future and the history of human life the concepts, the principles and the methods of examination to which that animal life is subjected which in consequence of the immediate conditions of the struggle for existence is unfolding to topographical environments not modified by the action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has, like an epidemic, for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker, and many more of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been reflected as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the daily language of the politicians.

   It seems at first sight that there is something immediately evident and instinctively plausible in this fashion of reasoning, which it may be said is principally distinguished by its abuse of analogy and by its haste in drawing conclusions. Man is without doubt an animal, and he is linked by connections of descent and affinity to other animals. He has no privileges of origin or of elementary structure, and his organism is merely one particular case of general physiology. His first immediate field was that of simple nature not modified by work, and from thence are derived the imperious and inevitable conditions of the struggle for existence, with the consequent forms of adaptation. Thence are born races in the true and authentic sense of the word; that is to say, in so far as they are immediate determinations of black, white, yellow, woolly-haired, straight-haired, etc., and not secondary historico-social formations, that is to say, peoples and nations. Thence are born the primitive instincts of sociability and in life in promiscuity arise the first rudiments of sexual selection.

   But if we can reconstruct in imagination the primitive savage, by combining our conjectures, it is not given us to have an empirical intuition of him, just as it is not given us to determine the genesis of that hiatus, that is to say, that break in continuity, thanks to which human life is found detached from animal life to rise, in the sequel, to an ever higher level. All men who live at this moment on the earth's surface and all those who, having lived in

   History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part of the human processus whose traditions are fixed in the memory, begins at a moment when the artificial basis has been formed for a considerable length of time. For example, the canalization of Mesopotamia gives us the ancient pre-Semitic Babylonian state, while the extremely ancient Egyptian civilization rests upon the application of the Nile to agriculture. Upon this artificial basis, which appears in the extreme horizon of known history, lived, as now, not shapeless masses of individuals, but organized groups whose organization was fixed by a certain distribution of tasks, that is to say, of labor and by consecutive methods of co-ordination and subordination. These relations, these connections, these ways of living were not and are not the result of the crystallization of customs under the immediate action of the animal struggle for existence. What is more, they presuppose the discovery of certain instruments, and, for example, the domestication of certain animals, the working of minerals and even of iron,

   At the dawn of traditional history economics is already operating. Men are working to live, on a foundation which has been in great part modified by their work and with tools which are completely their work. And from that moment they have struggled among themselves to conquer each from the other a superior position in the use of these artificial means; that is to say, they have struggled among themselves whether as serfs and masters, subjects and lords, conquered and conquerors, exploited and exploiters, both where they have progressed and where they have retrograded and where they have halted in a form which they have not been capable of outgrowing, but never have they returned to the animal life by the complete loss of their artificial foundation.

   Historical science has, then, as its first and principal

   The human race, in fact, lives only in earthly conditions, and we cannot suppose it to be transplanted elsewhere. Under these conditions it has found from its very first beginnings down to the present day the immediate means necessary for the development of labor, that is to say, for its material progress as for its inner formation. These natural conditions were and they are always indispensable to the sporadic agriculture of the nomads, who sometimes cultivated the earth merely for the pasturage of animals, as well as for the refined products of intensive modern horticulture. These earthly conditions, precisely as they have furnished the different sorts of stones suited for the fabrication of the first weapons, furnish now also, with coal, the elements of the great industry; precisely as they gave the first laborers osiers and willows to plait, they give now all the materials necessary to the complicated technique of electricity.

   It is not, however, the natural materials themselves which have progressed. On the contrary, it is only men who progress, through discovering little by little in nature the conditions which permit them to produce in more and more complex forms, thanks to the labor accumulated in experience. This

   History is the work of man in so far as man can create and improve his instruments of labor, and with these instruments can create an artificial environment whose complicated effects react later upon himself, and which by its present state and its successive modifications is the occasion and the condition of his development. There are, then, no reasons for carrying back that work of man which is history to the simple struggle for existence. If this struggle modifies and improves the organs of animals, and if in given circumstances and methods it produces and develops new organs, it still does not produce that continuous, perfected and traditional movement which is the human processus. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism, and it need not invoke anew the conception of a mythical,

   Nevertheless, this expression of naturalizing history, which, understood in too broad and too generic a sense, may be the occasion of the equivocations of which we have spoken, when it is, on the contrary, employed with proper precaution and in a tentative fashion, sums up briefly the criticism of all the ideological views which, in the interpretation of history, start from this hypothesis, that human work or activity are one and the same with free will, free choice and voluntary designs.

   It was easy and convenient for the theologians to carry back the course of human events to a preconceived plan or design, because they passed directly from the facts of experience to an assumed mind which ruled the universe. The jurists, who first had occasion to discover in the institutions which formed the object of their studies a certain guiding thread through the forms which manifestly succeeded each other, carried over, as they still carry over as cheerfully, the reasoning faculty which is their own duality, to serve as an explanation for the whole vast social fabric, however complicated. The men of politics, who naturally take their point of departure in this datum of experience, that the officers of the state, whether by the acquiescence of the subject masses or profiting by the antitheses of interests of the different social groups, may set aims for themselves and realize them voluntarily and in deliberate fashion -- these men are brought to see in the succession of human events only a variation of these designs, these projects and these intentions. Now our conception, while revolutionizing in their foundations the hypotheses of the theologians, the jurists and the politicians, terminates in this affirmation, that human labor and activity in general are not always one and the same thing in the course of history with the will which acts with design, with preconceived plans and with its free choice of means; that is to say, that they are not one and the same thing with the reasoning faculty. All that has happened in history is the work of man,

   In this fashion a serious ambiguity is dissolved and the errors carried with it are removed. Reasonable and well founded is the tendency of those who aim to subordinate the sum total of human events in their course to the rigorous conception of determinism. There is, on the contrary, no reason for confusing this derived, reflex and complex determinism with the determinism of the immediate struggle for existence which is produced and developed on a field not modified by the continued action of labor. Legitimate and well founded, in an absolute fashion, is the historical explanation which proceeds in its course from the volitions which have voluntarily regulated the different phases of life, to the motives and objective causes of every choice, discovered in the conditions of environment, territory, accessible means of existence and conditions of experience. But there is, on the contrary, no foundation for that opinion which tends to the negation of every volition by consequence of a theoretical view which would substitute automatism for voluntarism. There is nothing in it, as a matter of fact, but a pure and simple conceit.

   Wherever the means of production have developed,

   But that is not all.

   Our doctrine, like others, may lead to reverie and offer an occasion and a theme for a new inverted ideology. It was born on the battlefield of communism. It assumes the appearance of the modern proletariat on the political stage, and it assumes that alignment upon the origins of our present society which has permitted us to reconstruct in a critical manner the whole genesis of the bourgeoisie. It is a doctrine revolutionary from two points of view: because it has found the reasons and the methods of development of the proletarian revolution which is in the making, and because it proposes to find the causes and the conditions of development of all other social revolutions which have taken place in the past, in the class antagonisms which arrived at a certain critical point, by reason of the contradiction between the forms of production and the development of the producing forces. And this is not all. In the light of this doctrine what is essential in history is summed up in these critical moments, and it abandons, momentarily at least, what

   Thus it may happen, and that has already resulted, that the imagination of people unfamiliar with the difficulties of historic research, and the zeal of fanatics, find a stimulus and an opportunity even in historic materialism for forming a new ideology and drawing from it a new philosophy of systematic history, that is to say, history conceived as schemes or tendencies and designs. And no precaution can suffice. Our intellect is rarely contented with purely critical research; it is always attempting to convert into an element of pedantry and into a new scholasticism every discovery of thought. In a word, even the materialistic conception of history may be converted into a form of argumentation for a thesis and serve to make new fashions with the ancient prejudices like that of a history based on syllogisms, demonstrations and deductions.

   To guard against this, and especially to avoid the reappearance in an indirect and disguised fashion of any form whatever of finality, it is necessary to resolve positively upon two things: First, that

   Only a part, and, until recent times, only a small part of the human race, has traversed completely all the stages of the processus by the effect of which the most advanced nations have arrived at modern civil society, with the advanced technical forms founded upon the discoveries of science and with all the consequences, political, intellectual, moral, etc., which correspond to this development. By the side of the English -- to take the most striking example -- who, transporting European manners with them to New Holland, have created there a center of production which already holds a notable place in the competition of the world's market, there still live, like fossils of prehistoric times, the Australian aborigines, capable only of disappearing, but incapable of adapting themselves to a civilization which was not imported among them, but next to them. In America, and especially in North America, the series of events which have brought on the development of modern society began with the importation from Europe of domestic animals and agricultural tools, the use of which in ancient times gave birth to the slow moving civilization of the Mediterranean; but this movement remained entirely inside the circle of those descended from the conquerors and colonists, while the aborigines are

   These differentiations of men on the track of written and unwritten history seem to us easily explicable when they can be referred to the natural and immediate conditions which impose limits upon the development of labor. This is the case with America, which up to the arrival of the Europeans had but one cereal, maize, and but one domestic animal for labor, the llama, and we can rejoice that the Europeans imported with themselves and their tools the ox, the ass and the horse, corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally the vine and the orange tree, creating there a new world of that glorious society which produces merchandise and which with an extraordinary

   This same civilized Europe, which by the continuity of its tradition, presents the most complete diagram of its processus, so much so that upon this model have been conceived and constructed, thus far, all the systems of historical philosophy, this Western and Central Europe, which produced the epoch of the bourgeoisie and has sought and is seeking to impose that form of society upon the whole world by different modes of conquest, direct or indirect -- this Europe is not completely uniform in the degree of its development, and its various agglomerations, national, local and political, appear disturbed, as it were, over a decidedly sloping ladder. Upon these differences depend the conditions of relative superiority and inferiority of one country to another and the reasons, more or less advantageous or disadvantageous, for economic exchange;

   This Europe in itself is highly variegated. Here is the consummate flower of industrial and capitalist production, namely, England, while at other points survives the artisan, vigorous or rickety, at Paris and at Naples, to grasp the fact in its extreme points. Here the land is almost industrialized, as in England and elsewhere vegetates, in various traditional forms, the stupid peasant, as in Italy and in Austria, and in the latter country more than in the former. In one country the political life of the state -- suited to the prosaic consciousness of a bourgeoisie which knows its business because it has conquered the space that it occupies -- is exerted in the surest and most open fashion of an explicit class domination (it will be understood that I am speaking of France). Elsewhere, and particularly in Germany, the old feudal customs, the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the cowardice of a bourgeoisie which exploits favorable economic circumstances without bringing to them either intelligence or revolutionary courage, strengthen the existing state by preserving the lying appearances of an ethical mission to be accomplished. (With how many unpalatable sauces this state ethics, Prussian into the bargain, has been served

   Russia could not have advanced, as it is now advancing, toward the great industry, without drawing from Western Europe, and especially from our charming French Chauvinsim, that money which she would in vain have sought within her own borders, that is to say, from the conditions of her obese territorial mass, where vegetate in ancient economic forms fifty million peasants. Russia, in order to become an economic modern society ripening the conditions of a corresponding political revolution, and preparing the means which will facilitate the addition of a large part of Asia to the capitalist movement, has been led to destroy the last relics of agrarian communism (whether its origins be primitive or secondary) which had been preserved within herself up to this point in such characteristic forms and on so large a scale. Russia must capitalize herself, and to this end she must, to start with, convert land into merchandise capable of producing merchandise, and at the same time transform into miserable proletarians the ex-communists of the land.

   And, on the contrary, in Western and Central Europe we find ourselves at the opposite point of the series of development which has scarcely begun in Russia. Here, with us, where the bourgeoisie, with varied fortunes and triumphing over such a variety of difficulties, has already traversed so many stages of its development, it is not the recollection of primitive or secondary communism, which scarcely survives through learned combinations in the heads of scholars, but the very form of bourgeois production, which engenders in the proletarians the tendency to socialism, which presents itself in its general outlines as an indication of a new phase of history and not as the repetition of what is inevitably perishing in the Slavonic countries under our eyes.

   Who could fail to see in these illustrations, which I have not sought out, but which have come almost by chance, and which can be indefinitely prolonged in a volume of economic-political geography of the present world, the evident proof of the manner in which historic conditions are all circumstanced in the forms of their development. Not only races and peoples, nations and states, but parts of nations and various regions of states, even orders and classes, are found, as it were, upon so many rounds of a very long ladder, or, rather, upon the various points of a complicated and slowly developing curve. Historic time has not marched uniformly for all men. The simple succession of generations has never been the index of the constancy and intensity

   Our doctrine does not pretend to be the intellectual vision of a great plan or of a design, but it is merely a method of research and of conception. It is not by accident that Marx spoke of his discovery as a guiding thread, and it is precisely for this reason that it is analogous to Darwinism, which also is a method, and is not and cannot be a modern repetition

   The first to discover in the notion of progress an indication of something circumstantial and relative was the genial Saint Simon, who opposed his way of seeing to the doctrine of the eighteenth century represented by the party of Condorcet. To that doctrine, which may be called unitary, equalitarian, formal, because it regards the human race as developing upon one line of process, Saint Simon opposes the conception of the faculties and of the aptitudes which substitute themselves and compensate for each other, and thus he remains an ideologist.

   To penetrate the true reasons for the relativity of progress another thing was necessary. It was necessary, first of all, to renounce those prejudices which are involved in the belief that the obstacles to the uniformity of human development rest exclusively upon natural and immediate causes. These natural obstacles are either sufficiently problematical, as is the case with races, no one of which shows the privilege of birth in its history, or they are, as is the case in geographical differences, insufficient to explain the development of the completely different historico-social conditions on one and the same geographical field. And as the historic movement dates precisely from the time when the natural obstacles have already been in great part either vanquished or notably circumscribed, thanks to the creation

   This structure has thus far started in forms of political organization, the object of which is to try to hold in equilibrium the economic inequalities; consequently this organization, as I have said more than once is constantly unstable. From the point where there is a known history, it is the history of society tending to form the state, or having already constructed it completely. And the state is this struggle, within and without, because it is, above all, the organ and the instrument of a larger or smaller part of society against all the rest of society itself, in so far as the latter rests upon the economic domination of man over man in a more or less direct and explicit fashion, according as the different degree of the development of production, of its natural means and its artificial instruments, requires either chattel slavery, or the serfdom of the soil, or the "free" wage system. This society of antitheses, which forms a state, is always, although in different forms and various modes, the opposition of the city to the country, of the artisan to the peasant, of the proletarian to the employer, of the capitalist to the laborer, and so on ad infinitum, and it always ends, with various complications and various methods, in an hierarchy, whether it be in a fixed scaffolding of privilege, as in the Middle Ages,

   To this economic hierarchy corresponds, according to various modes, in different countries, in different times, in different places, what I may call almost a hierarchy of souls, of intellects, of minds. That is to say, that culture, which, for the idealists, constitutes the sum of progress, has been and is by the necessities of the case very unequally distributed. The greater portion of mankind, by the quality of their occupations, are composed of individuals who are disintegrated, broken into fragments and rendered incapable of a complete and normal development. To the economics of classes and to the hierarchy of social positions corresponds the psychology of classes. The relativity of progress is then for us the inevitable consequence of class distinctions. These distinctions constitute the obstacles which explain the possibility of relative retrogression, up to the point of degeneracy and of the dissolution of an entire society. The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants. The progress of technique, which fills the towns with merchandise, makes more miserable and abject the condition of the peasants, and in the cities themselves it further humbles the condition of the humble. All the progress of science has served thus far to differentiate a class of scientists

   Progress has been and is, up to the present time, partial and one-sided. The minorities which share in it call this human progress; and the proud evolutionists call this human nature which is developing. All this partial progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of man by man, has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which economic distinctions have engendered all the social distinctions; from the relative liberty of the few is born the servitude of the greater number, and law has been the protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen and clearly appreciated, appears to us as the moral and intellectual epitome of all human miseries and of all material inequalities.

   To discover this inevitable relativity it was necessary that communism, born at first as an instinctive movement in the soul of the oppressed, should become a science and a political party. It was then necessary that our doctrine should give the measure of value for all past history, by discovering in every form of social organization, antithetical in its origin and organization, as they have all been up to this time, the innate incapacity for producing the conditions of a universal and uniform human progress, that is to say, by discovering the fetters which turn each benefit into an injury.

   There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the belief in historic factors?

   That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to simple historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to find a starting point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at first sight and after first examination, appear so confused and irreducible. This belief, this current opinion, has become for reasoning historians, or even for rationalists, a semi-doctrine, which has recently been urged several times, as a decisive argument, against the unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And indeed, this belief is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of history being only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various factors, that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism, whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save themselves from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine consists in the fact that it attributes the preponderance or the decisive action to the economic factor.

   It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this belief, this opinion, or this semi-doctrine

   Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak, an act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a continuous series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied suppositions and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes a complicated tissue. Thus, to begin with, he must fix a point, a line, a boundary, as he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate the beginning of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to inquire how Louis XVI. was brought to convene the States General. The narrator finds himself, in a word, confronted with a complexus of accomplished facts and of facts on the point of being produced, which in their totality present a certain aspect. Upon the attitude which he takes depends the form and the style of every narration, because to compose it he must take his point of departure from things already accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to develop.

   Yet into this complexus he must introduce a certain degree of analysis, resolving it into groups and

   Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived at a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not revealed itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts, in these most apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms which are the political forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan passions. The narrator, both because he lacks any theoretical doctrine regarding the true sources of the historic movement, and by the very attitude which he takes on the subject of the things which he unites according to the appearances which they have come to assume, cannot reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of a single, immediate intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes on a color in his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action. His task is finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts and events in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look as on a clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography has accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a concourse of physical causes which determine

   It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive, palpable, and, I might almost say, esthetic and artistic occasion for all those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally summed up in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors.

   Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the agglomeration of the latifundium, which was diminishing or causing to completely disappear the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of the free men, who are the foundation and the condition of the democratic life of the ancient city. What were the causes of their failure. Their aim is clear, their spirit, their origin, their character, their heroism are manifest. They have against them other men with other interests and with other designs. The struggle appears to the mind at first merely as a struggle of intentions and passions, which unfolds and comes to an end by the aid of means which are permitted by the political form of the state and by the use or abuse or the public powers. Here is the situation: the city ruling in different manners over other cities or over territories which have lost all character of autonomy; within this city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and facing the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful, stands the immense mass of the proletarians,

   In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little by little take away from the different parts of a given social complexus their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their ensuing generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of factors.

   These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a sequence of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects of the apparent movement, and they have an equal value with that of all other empirical concepts. Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which they arise, they persist until they are reduced and eliminated by a new experience, or until they are absorbed by a conception more general, genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it not necessary that in the empirical analysis and in the immediate study of the

   Was it not inevitable, as a first step of knowledge in what concerns the problem of life, to spend a considerable time in the separate study of the organs and to reduce them to systems? Without this anatomy, which seems too material and too gross, no progress in these studies would have been possible; and nevertheless, above the unknown genesis and co-ordination of such an analytic multiplicity, there were evolving, uncertain and vague, the generic conceptions of life, soul, etc. In these mental creations have long been seen that biological unity which has finally found its object in the certain beginning of the cell and in its processes of immanent multiplication.

   More difficult certainly was the way which the thought had to traverse to reconstruct the genesis of

   The interpretation of the historico-social processus met the same difficulties; it also was obliged to stop at first in the provisional view of factors. And that being so, it is easy for us now to find again the first origin of that opinion in the necessity that the historians have of finding in the facts that they relate with more or less artistic talent and in different professional views, certain points of immediate orientation, such as may be offered by the study of the apparent movement of human events.

   But in this apparent movement, there are the elements of a more exact view. These concurrent factors, which abstract thought conceives and then isolates, have never been seen acting each for itself. On the contrary, they act in such a manner that it gives birth to the concept of reciprocal action. Moreover, these factors themselves arise at a given moment, and it is not until later that they acquired that physiognomy which they have in the particular narration. This State, it is well known, arose at a given moment. As for every rule of law, it may either be remembered or conjectured that it went into effect under such or such circumstances. As

   The reciprocal action of the different factors, without which not even the simplest narration would be possible, like the more or less exact information upon the origins and the variations of the factors themselves, called for research and thought more than did the constructive narration of those great historians who are real artists. And, in effect, the problems which arise spontaneously from the data of history, combined with other theoretical elements, gave birth to the different so-called practical disciplines, which in a more or less rapid fashion and with varying success, have developed from the ancients up to our days, from ethics to the philosophy of law, from politics to sociology, from law to economics.

   Now with the rise and formation of so many disciplines, through the inevitable division of labor, points of view have been multiplied out of all proportion. It is certain that for the first and immediate analysis of the multiple aspects of the social complexus, a long labor of partial abstraction was necessary: which has always inevitably resulted in one-sided views. This can be shown, in a clearer and more evident manner than for any other domain,

   But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in the preliminary and lateral analysis of complex facts. To the methodical division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of knowledge passed into the sieve, systematized, without which social history would always

   It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many speak, and which are mentioned in so

   The provisional orientation, according to the convenient system of what are called factors, may, under given circumstances, be useful also to us who profess an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation, if we do not wish simply to rest in the domain of theory, but wish to illustrate, through personal research, a definite period of history. As in that case we must proceed to direct and detailed research, we must first of all follow the groups of facts that seem pre-eminent, independent, or detached in the aspects of immediate experience. We should not

   The social organization is, as we already know, constantly unstable, although that does not seem evident to every one, except at the time when the instability enters upon that acute period which is called a revolution. This instability, with the constant struggles in the bosom of that same organized society, excludes the possibility for men coming to an agreement which might involve a new start at living an animal life. It is the antagonisms which are the principal cause of progress (Marx). But it is equally true, notwithstanding, that in this unstable organization, in which is given to us the inevitable form of domination and subjection, intelligence is always developed not only unequally, but quite imperfectly, incongruously and partially. There has been and there is still in society what we may call a hierarchy of intelligence, sentiments and conceptions. To suppose that men, always and in all cases, have

   Forms of law, political acts and attempts at social organization were, and they still are, sometimes fortunate, sometimes mistaken, that is to say, disproportionate and unsuitable. History is full of errors; and this means that if all was necessary, granted the relative intelligence of those who have to solve a difficulty or to find a solution for a given problem, etc., if everything in it has a sufficient reason, yet everything in it was not reasonable, in the sense which the optimists give to this word. To state it more fully, the determined causes of all changes, that is to say the modified economic conditions, have ended and end by causing to be found, sometimes through tortuous ways, the suitable forms of law, the appropriate political orders and the more or less perfect means of social adjustment. But it must not be thought that the instinctive wisdom of the reasoning animal has been manifested, or is manifested, definitely and simply, in the complete and clear understanding of all situations, and that we have left only the very simple task of following the deductive road from the economic situation to all the rest. Ignorance -- which, in its turn, may be explained -- is an important reason for the manner in which history is made; and, to ignorance we must add the brutishness which is never completely subdued and all the passions, and all the injustices, and the various

   It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential difficulties by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after all of a purely analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It was necessary too that the mind should pass through even this hypothesis, which so shortly became phraseology pure and simple. It indeed prepares the way for the comprehension of the historic movement as springing from the laws immanent in society itself, and thereby excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational. But the metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical and circumstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete development of economic materialism.

   Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that period of human development, in which were realized the great politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch

   It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by certain shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who first defined this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it

   The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great social upheaval took place in France. These things, mutatis mutandis, have subsequently been reproduced, in various combinations and in milder forms, throughout the whole civilized world. And what else is our thought at bottom if not the conscious and systematic complement of experience, and what is this last if not the reflection and the mental elaboration of the things and the processes which arise and unfold either outside our volition, or through the work of our activity; and what is genius but the individualized, derived and acute form of thought, which rises through the suggestion of experience, in many

   Ideas do not fall from heaven; and what is more, like the other products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in the precise fullness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning.

   To show how the materialistic conception of history arises precisely in given conditions, not as a personal and tentative opinion of two writers, but as the new conquest of thought by the inevitable suggestion of a new world which is in process of birth, that is to say the proletarian revolution, that was the object of my first essay, "In Memory of the Communist Manifesto." That is, to repeat, a new historic situation found its complement in its appropriate mental instrument.

   To imagine now that this intellectual production might have been realized at any time and at any place, would be to take absurdity for the ruling

   Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes capitalist accumulation

   It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent that we find their documents in writers, is something always very instructive, and serving especially to add to our

   But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always drifting between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of grasping intellectually the new world in process of birth, to arrive at the precise analysis of the last elements from which society results, and which the incomparable genius of Aristotle did not see, and did not understand beyond the limits within which passes the life of the typical citizen.

   The investigation of the social structure, considered

   By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its horror at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was traditional and had been organized for centuries, and the presentiment of a renovation of all human life, finally produced a total eclipse of the ideas of historic necessity and social necessity, that is to say, of those ideas which, barely indicated by the ancient philosophers, and so developed in our century, had at this period of revolutionary rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico, Montesquieu, and, in part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave birth to a literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found the reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called individualism. Later some have thought they saw in this word the expression of a permanent fact in human nature, which especially might serve as a decisive argument against socialism.

   A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital,

   Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson of things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical upheaval followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be contrary to all expectations; and this at first produced a profound discouragement among the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave rise to the desire and the need of new investigations. We know that Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom operated precisely at the beginning of the century, in the exclusive forms of the ideas of premature genius, the reaction against the immediate results of the politico-economic revolution, arose resolutely, the first against the jurists, and the second against the economists.

   In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been characteristic of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles, graver and more painful, had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for all was not realized, society remained in its political form as it had been before, an organization of inequalities. It must be, then, that society is something autonomous,

   The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all domains of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been discovered, and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of myths. The embryonic traces of prehistory have been sought out, and, for the first time, the processes of political and legal forms have been arranged into a series. The nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of sociology in the person of Saint Simon, in whom, as happens with the self-taught precursors of genius, we find confused together the germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In this aspect the materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result which is the complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result and a complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and of all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from complex conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by the direct suggestion of new dynamic experience.

   The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be the directing power of social life. The great industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social classes, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many classes of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen the new cities rise around factories and create around their circumference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of history as a sinister illustration of a

   This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the laudatores temporis acti from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology, which had accumulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into contact with the facts which the rapid events of so

   Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never reached the proletarians, either because these had no political consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate and often salutary criticism of economics -- a one-sided criticism, indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception.

   All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is society, itself, which, by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts upon which it rests,

   But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been luminously illustrated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on

   The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage from the old forms to the new forms of production -- or of property, if we borrow the language of jurists-could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex consciousness of its movement.

   The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which

   The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a giant, arising, from all sides, on the shoulders of those most wretched in their poverty, and through all the devious ways of politics; it was especially shameless in its way of taking part in war and its glorious successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened by the urgency of circumstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity of business.

   The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual production in the antagonistic field of competition, revolted furiously, through violence and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a revolutionary government which, strong in its certainty of saving its country, and stronger still in its illusion of founding for eternity the liberty of equals, believed it was possible to suppress gambling by the guillotine, to eliminate Business by closing the Stock Exchange and to assure existence to the common people

   Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the Thermidorians, whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden causes as in its apparent effects, the triumph of Business over democratic idealism. The constitution of 1793, which marks the extreme limit that can be reached by the democratic ideal, was never put into practice. The grave pressure of circumstances, the menace of the foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from the Girondists to the Vendée, rendered necessary an exceptional government, which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against the Business which was bringing into existence the property of new proprietors. The constitution of the year III consecrated the principle of moderate liberalism, whence proceeds all the constitutionalism of the European continent; but it was, before all else, the road leading to the guaranty of property. To change the proprietors while preserving property -- that is the banner, the watchword, the ensign which defied through the years from Aug. 10, 1792, the violent tumults as well as the bold designs of those who attempted to found society upon virtue, equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory was the

   In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution, fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life, which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it

   All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state, also, was becoming a technical appliance, which substituted bureaucracy for hierarchy. And as the ancient titles no longer assured their possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon victorious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever shall be, the typical and classical form of the law of every shopkeeping society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and selling.

   The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular circumstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many other classes and semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology, which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure appeared, as it were, disguised by ideals and obscured by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human race from superstitution, and even from religion, to make of each individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are its beginnings -- and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the most idealistic of today as the work of several centuries to come -- that is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy of the guillotine?

   That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned their property to chance, it was that of the high

   The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by circumstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak, prepared by society

   And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with Saint Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific socialism took its birth. The important thing is in these two points: that historical materialism could not arise but from the theoretical consciousness of socialism; and that it can henceforth explain its own origin with its own principles, which is the greatest proof of its maturity.

   Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas do not descend from heaven.

   The road traversed thus far has enabled us to take exact account of the precise and relative value of the so-called doctrine of factors; we know also how its adherents come to eliminate objectively those provisional concepts, which were and are a simple expression of a thought not fully arrived at maturity.

   And, nevertheless, it is necessary that we speak further of this doctrine, in order to explain better

   Historians have indeed for centuries placed in these forms of social life the essence of development. Moreover, they have perceived this development only in the modification of these forms. History has for centuries been treated as a discipline relative to the juridico-political movement and even to the political movement principally. The substitution of society for politics is a recent thing, and much more recent still is the reduction of society to the elements of historical materialism. In other words, sociology is of quite recent invention, and the reader, I hope, will have understood for himself that I employ this term for the sake of brevity, to indicate in a general manner the science of social functions and variations, and that I do not hold to the specific sense given it by the Positivists.

   It is more satisfactory to say that, up to the beginning of this century, the data bearing upon usages, customs, beliefs, etc., or even upon the natural conditions, which serve as the foundation and connection for social forms, were not mentioned in political histories unless as objects of simple curiosity, or as accessories and complements of the narration.

   All this cannot be a simple accident, and indeed is not. There is, then, a double interest in taking account of the tardy appearance of social history, both

   If we make an exception of certain critical moments in which social classes, by an extreme incapacity for adapting themselves to a condition of relative equilibrium, enter into a crisis of more or less prolonged anarchy, and if we make an exception of those catastrophes in which an entire world disappears, as at the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, or at the dissolution of the Califate, then it may be said that, ever since there has been a written history, the state appears not only as the creation of society but also as its support. The first step that child-like thought had made in this order of considerations is in this statement: That which governs is also that which creates.

   If, moreover, we make an exception of certain short periods of democracy exercised with the vivid consciousness of popular sovereignty, as was the case in a few Greek cities, especially at Athens, and in a few Italian cities, and especially Florence (the former nevertheless were composed of free men were proprietors of slaves, and the latter of privileged citizens who exploited foreigners and peasants) the society organized into a state was always composed of a majority at the mercy of the minority. And thus the majority of men has appeared in history as a mass sustained, governed, guided, exploited and ill treated, or at least as a variegated conglomeration of interests, which a few had to govern, maintaining

   Thence the necessity of an art of government, and as it is this before all else which strikes those who are studying collective life, it was natural that politics should appear as the author of the social order and as the sign of the continuity in the succession of historic forms. To say politics is to say activity, which, up to a certain point, is exercised in a desired direction, until the moment at least when calculations dash themselves against unknown or unexpected obstacles. By taking the state as an imperfect experience would suggest for the author of society, and politics for the author of the social order, it resulted that the narrators or philosophical historians were driven to place the essence of history in a succession of forms, institutions and political ideas.

   Whence the state drew its origin, where the basis of its performance was found, that mattered not, as that matters not in current reasoning. The problems of the genetic order arose, as is known, rather late. The state is and it finds its reason for existence in its present necessity; that is so true that the imagination has not been able to adapt itself to the idea that it has not always existed, and so it has prolonged its conjectural existence back to the first origins of the human race. The gods or demigods and heroes were its founders, in mythology at least, just as in mediaeval theology the Pope is the first and therefore the divine and perpetual source of all authority. Even in our time, inexperienced travelers and imbecile missionaries find the state where there is, as among

   Two things were necessary that these prejudices of the judgment should be overcome. In the first place, it was necessary to recognize that the functions of the state arise, increase, diminish, alter and follow each other with the variations of certain social conditions. In the second place, it was necessary to arrive at a comprehension of the fact that the state exists and maintains itself in that it is organized for the defense of certain definite interests, of one part of society against all the rest of society itself, which must be made in such a way, in its entirety, that the resistance of the subjects, of the ill-treated and the exploited, either is lost in multiple frictions, or is tempered by the partial advantages, wretched though they be, to the oppressed themselves. Politics, that art so miraculous and so admired, thus brings us back to a very simple formula; to apply a force or a system of forces to the total of resistances.

   The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these social conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the theory of classes, the genesis of which is in the manner of the different occupations, granted the distribution of labor, that is to say, granted the relations which co-ordinate and bind men together in a definite form of production.

   Thenceforth the concept of the state has ceased to represent the direct cause of the historic movement as the presumed author of society, because it

   We know now in a positive way the reasons in consequence of which history had necessarily to appear under a purely political form.

   But this does not mean that we ought to believe that the state is a simple excrescence, a mere accessory of the social body, or of free association, as so many Utopians and so many ultra-liberal thinkers of anarchist tendencies have imagined. If society has thus far culminated in the state, it is because it has had need of this complement of force and authority,

   The state, which is and which must be an economic power that in its defense of the ruling classes it may be furnished with means to repress, to govern, to administer and to make war, creates in a direct or an indirect manner an aggregation of new and particular interests, which necessarily react upon society. Thus the state, by the fact that it has arisen and that it maintains itself as a guaranty of the social antitheses, which are a consequence of economic differentiations, creates around itself a circle of persons interested directly in its existence.

   Two consequences follow therefrom. As society is not a homogeneous whole, but a body of specialized

   From the first beginnings of written history the state has increased or diminished its powers, but it has never disappeared, because ever since there have been, in the society of men unequal in consequence of economic differentiation, reasons for maintaining, and for defending, through force or conquest, slavery, monopolies, or the predominance of one form of production, with the domination of man over man. The state has become, as it were, the field of an endless civil war, which is developing always, even if it does not always show itself under the startling form of Marius and Sylla, days of June and wars of Secession. Within the state, the corruption of man by man has always flourished, because, if there is no form of domination which does not meet resistance, there are no forms of resistance which, in consequence of the pressing needs of life, may not degenerate into a passive compact.

   For these reasons, historic events, seen on the surface of the ordinary monotonous narrative, appear like the repetition of the same type, with few variations, like a series of kaleidoscopic pictures. We need not be astonished if the idealistic Herbart and the caustic or pessimistic Schopenhauer arrived at this conclusion, that there is no history, in the sense of any actual processus, which is to say in common language history is a tiresome song.

   When political history is once reduced to its quintessence, the state remains illuminated in all its prose. Thenceforth there is no more trace either of theological divination, nor of metaphysical transubstantiation, so much in vogue among certain German philosophers -- for whom the state is the Idea, the State Idea which is realized in history, the state is the full realization of the personality, and other stupidities of the same sort. The state is a real organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a mode of association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production, or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state assumes either a system of property, or a compact between several systems of property. There is the foundation of all its art, the exercise of which demands that the state itself became an economic power, and that it also dispose of means and processes to make property pass from the hands of some into the hands of others. When, by the effect of an acute and violent change of the forms of production, it is necessary to resort to an unusual and extraordinary readjustment

   If we make an exception of the very ancient times which are unknown to us, all history is developed in the contacts and the antagonisms of the different tribes and communities, and thereafter of the different nations and different states; that is to say, that the reasons for the internal antitheses in the circle of each society are always more and more complicated with frictions with the outside world. These two reasons for antagonism condition each other reciprocally, but in ways which are always varying. Often it is internal disturbance which urges a community or a city to enter into external collisions; at other times it is these collisions which alter the internal relations.

   The principal motive for the different relations between the different communities has been from the beginnings, even as it is to-day, commerce in the broad sense of the word, that is to say, exchange, whether it is a matter of giving up, as in the poor tribes, merely the surplus in exchange for other things, or whether it is a matter, as to-day, of production on a large scale, which is carried on with the exclusive intention of selling so as to draw from a sum of money a larger sum of money. This enormous

   In the presence of these realistic conditions all the ideologies founded on the ethical mission of the state or on any such conception, fall to the ground. The state is, so to speak, fitted into its place, and it remains encased, as it were, in the surroundings of the social development, in its capacity of a form resulting from other conditions, and in its turn, by reason of its existence, reacting naturally upon the rest.

   Here arises another question.

   Will this form ever be outgrown? -- or can there be a society without a state? -- or can there be a society without classes? -- and if we must be more explicit, will there ever be a form of communist production with a distribution of labor and of tasks such that there will be no room in it for the development of

   It is in the affirmative answer to this question that scientific socialism consists, in so far as it affirms the coming of communistic production, not as a postulate, nor as the aim of a free volition, but as the result of the processus immanent in history.

   As is well known, the premise of this prevision is in the actual conditions of present capitalist production. This, socializing continually the mode of production, has subjected living labor more and more with its regulations to the objective conditions of the technical process, it has day after day concentrated the property in the means of production more and ever more into the hands of a few, who as stockholders, or speculators, are always found to be more and more removed from immediate labor, the direction of which passes over to intelligence and science. With the increased consciousness of this situation among the proletarians, whose instruction in solidarity comes from the actual conditions of their employment, and with the decrease of the capacity of the holders of capital to preserve the private direction of productive labor, a moment will come, when in one fashion or another, with the elimination in every form of private rent, interest, profit, the production will pass over to the collectivist association, that is to say, will become communistic. Thus will disappear all inequalities, except those of sex, age, temperament and capacity, that is to say, all those inequalities will cease which engender economic

   In this fashion, scientific socialism, in an ideal fashion at least, has triumphed over the state; and its triumph has given it a complete knowledge both of its mode of origin and the reasons for its natural disappearance. It has understood it precisely because it does not rise up against it in a one-sided and subjective fashion, as did more than once, at different epochs, the cynics, the stoics, the epicureans of all sorts, the religious sectaries, the visionary monks, the utopians and finally, in our days, the anarchists of every stripe. Still more, instead of rising up against it, scientific socialism is proposing to show how the state continually rises up of itself against itself, by creating in the means with which it cannot dispense, as, for example, a colossal system of taxation, militarism, universal suffrage, the development of education, etc., the conditions of its own ruin. The society which has produced it will reabsorb it; that is to say, that just as society in organizing a new form of production will eliminate the antagonisms between capital and labor, so, with the disappearance of proletarians and the conditions which render proletarians possible, will disappear all dependence of men upon his fellow man in any form of hierarchy, whatever it may be.

   The terms in which the genesis and the development

   The State has been reduced till it is but a necessary complement of certain definite economic forms, and thus the theory which would have seen in it an independent factor in history is thenceforth forever eliminated.

   It is henceforth relatively easy to take account of the fashion in which law has been raised up to the rank of a decisive factor of society, and thus of history, directly or indirectly.

   Before all else, we must remember in what fashion arose this philosophic conception of justice generalized, which is the principal foundation of the theory which maintains that history is dominated by the progress of independent legislation.

   With the precocious dissolution of the feudal society in certain parts of Central and Northern Italy, and with the birth of the Communes, which were republics of production grouped in trade guilds and merchant guilds, the Roman law was forced into a place of honor. This law flowered anew in the Universities. It entered into a struggle with the barbaric laws and also in part with the canon law; it was then evidently a form of thought

   In fact, considering the peculiarities of rival laws, which were either customs of barbarous nations, or corporation privileges, or papal or imperial concessions, this law appeared as the universality of written reason. Had it not arrived at the point of regarding human personality in its most abstract and human relations, since a certain Titius is capable of becoming debtor and creditor, of selling and buying, of making a cession, a donation, etc.? Roman law, although elaborated in its last editing at the command of emperors by servile parasites, appeared then, amid the decline of mediaeval institutions, as a revolutionary force, and as such it constituted a great step of progress. This law, so universal that it gave the means of overthrowing barbaric laws, was certainly a law which corresponded to human nature considered under its generic relations; and by its opposition to private laws and privileges it appeared as a natural law.

   We know, moreover, how this ideology of natural law arose. It acquired its greatest distinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but it had long been prepared for by the jurisprudence which took for its base the Roman law, whether it adopted it, revised it, or corrected it. To the formation of the ideology of natural law another element contributed, the Greek philosophy of later epochs. The Greeks, who were the inventors of those definite arts of the mind which are sciences,

   That ideology, whose criticism has served as an arm and an instrument for giving a juridical form to the economic organization of modern society, has had, consequently, various sources. Yet, in fact, this juridical ideology reflects, in the struggle for law and against law, the revolutionary period of the bourgeois spirit. And, although it takes its doctrinal point of departure in a return to the traditions of the ancient philosophy, in the generalization of Roman jurisprudence, in everything else, and in all its development, it is completely new and modern.

   From this faith in rational law arose the blind belief in the power of the legislator, which grew into fanaticism at the critical moments of the French Revolution.

   Thence the belief that society as a whole is to be submitted to one single law, equal for all, systematic, logical, consistent. Thence the conviction that a law guaranteeing to all a legal equality, that is to say,

   The triumph of true law assures the triumph of reason, and the society which is regulated by a law equal for all is a perfect society!

   It is useless to say that there were illusions at the bottom of these tendencies. We all know to what this universal liberation of men was to lead. But what is most important here is the fact that these persuasions arose from a conception of law, which considered it as detached from the social causes which produced it. Likewise that reason, to which these ideologies appealed, reduced itself to relieving labor, association, traffic, commerce, political forms and conscience from all limits and all obstacles which prevented free competition. I have already shown in another chapter how the great Revolution of the eighteenth century may serve us for experience. And if there is still some one to-day who insists on speaking of a rational law which dominates history, of a law, in short, which would be a factor, instead of being a simple fact in historic revolution, that means that he is living out of our time and that he has not understood that our liberal and equalitarian codification has already, in fact, marked the end and the term of that whole school of natural law.

   By different ways we have arrived in this century at reducing law, considered previously as a rational thing, into a material thing, and thus into a thing corresponding to definite social conditions.

   In the first place, the interest in history gained in

   Codified Roman law is a very modern form; that personality, which it assumes as a universal subject, is an elaboration of a very advanced epoch, in which the cosmopolitanism of social relations was dominated by a military-bureaucratic constitution. In this environment, in which a written code of reason had been built up, there was no longer any trace of spontaneity or popular life, there was no more democracy. This same law, before arriving at this crystallization, had arisen and had developed; and if we study it in its origins and in its developments, and especially if, in this study, we employ the comparative method, we recognize that, upon many points, it is analogous to the institutions of inferior societies and nations. It therefore becomes evident that the true science of law can be nothing less than the genetic history of the law itself.

   But, while the European continent had created in the codification of civil law the type and the textbook of practical bourgeois judgment, was there not in England another self-originating form of law,

   This revolution, apparently a revolution in ideas alone, is merely an intellectual reflection of the revolutions which have been produced in practical life.

   In our century, legislating has become an epidemic; and reason enthroned in legal ideology has been dethroned by parliaments. In these the antitheses of class interests have taken on the form of parties; and the parties struggle for or against definite

   The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. The small and the large bourgeoisie, agrarians and manufacturers, advocates of the poor and defenders of accumulated wealth, monarchists and democrats, socialists and reactionaries, have bitterly contended over extracting profit from the action of the public authorities and over exploiting the contingencies of politics and parliamentary intrigue, to find the guaranty and the defense of certain definite interests in the interpretation of existing law, or in the creation of a new law. This new legislation has more than once been revised, and the strangest oscillations may be observed in it; extending from the humanitarianism which defends the poor and even animals, to the promulgation of martial law. Justice has been stripped of its mask and has become merely a profane thing.

   The consciousness of experience has come to us and has given us a formula as precise as it is modest; every rule of law has been and is the customary,

   If the materialistic conception finally came to furnish to these tendencies an explicit and systematic view, it is because its orientation has been determined by the visual angle of the proletariat. This last is the necessary product and the indispensable condition of a society in which all the persons are, from an abstract point of view, equal before the law, but where the material conditions of development and the liberties of each are unequal. The proletarians are the forces through which the accumulated means of production reproduce themselves and reconstitute themselves into new wealth; but they themselves live only by enrolling themselves under the authority of capital; and from one day to the next they find themselves out of work, impoverished and exiles. They are the army of social labor, but their chiefs are their masters. They are the negation of justice in the empire of law, that is to say, that they are the irrational element in the pretended domain of reason.

   History then has not been a processus for arriving at the empire of reason in law; it has thus far been nothing else than a series of changes in the form of subjection and servitude. History then consists entirely in the struggle of interests, and law is but the authoritative expression of the interests which have triumphed.

   These formulae indeed do not permit us to explain,

   Here I must give certain formulae.

   Granted the conditions of the development of labor and the instruments appropriated to it, the economic structure of society, that is to say, the form of production of the immediate means of life, determines, on an artificial field, in the first place and directly, all the rest of the practical activity of those associated, and the variation of this activity in the processus which we call history, that is to say -- the formation, the frictions, the struggles and the erosions of the classes; the corresponding regulations relative to law and morality; and the reasons and modes of subordination and subjection of men toward men and the corresponding exercise of dominion and authority, in fine, that which gives birth to the State and that which constitutes it. It determines, in the second place, the tendency and in great part, in an indirect fashion, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, religion and science.

   The products of the first and of the second stage, in consequence of the interests which they create,

   The variations of the underlying (economic) structure of society which, at first sight, show themselves intuitively in the agitation of the passions, develop consciously in the struggles against law and for law, and become realized in the shaking and in the ruin of a definite political organization, have in reality their adequate expression only in the change in the relations which exist between the different social classes. And these relations change with the change of the relations which previously existed between the productivity of labor and the (legal-political) conditions of co-ordination of those who co-operate in production.

   And finally, these connections between the productivity

   Society is for us a fact, which we cannot solve, unless it be by that analysis which reduces the complex forms to the simpler forms, the modern forms to the older forms: but that is to remain always, nevertheless, in a society which exists. History is but the history of society -- that is to say, the history of the variations of human co-operation, from the primitive horde down to the modern State, from the immediate struggle against nature, by the means of a few very simple tools, down to the present economic structure, which reduces itself to these two poles; accumulated labor (capital) and living labor (proletarians). To resolve the social complexus into simple individuals, and to reconstruct it afterwards by the acts of free and voluntary thought; to construct, in fine, society with its reasons, is to misunderstand the objective nature and the immanence of the historic processus.

   Revolutions, in the broadest sense of the word, and in the specific sense of the destruction of a political organization, mark the real and proper dates of historic epochs. Seen from afar, in their elements, in their preparation and their effects, at long range, they may appear to us as moments of

   Ethics, art, religion, science, are they then but products of economic conditions? -- expositions of the categories of these very conditions? -- effluvia, ornaments, emanations and mirages of material interests?

   Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a convenient assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as a bugbear. The slothful, whose number is great even among the intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess, once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge, and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life! All the problems of ethics, esthetics, philology, critical history and philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all difficulties!

   In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to commercial arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of Dante might give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with

   The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not accustomed to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical use of appropriate means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these problems, but, as it were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose to write an encyclopedia in this short essay.

   And first of all, ethics.

   I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human events in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of those formal analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated from the Sophists down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it is formal science, like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest and with so much profundity defined these ethical relations (Herbart), knew well that ideas, that is to say, the formal points of view of the moral judgment, are in themselves powerless. Therefore he put into the circumstances of life and into the pedagogic formation of character the reality of ethics. He might have been taken for Owen if he had not been a retrograde.

   I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically

   There is the factum; and what is most important is that this factum appears to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life, and variable through history. This factum is the datum of research. Facts are neither true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on the contrary, theologic or rational, may be true or false because they aim to comprehend, explain and complete the fact, by bringing that fact to another fact, or integrating it with another.

   Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that concerns the interpretation of this factum.

   The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of free will, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis not yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of consciousness, are particular expressions

   Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable, as that spiritual entity which has been called the moral conscience, one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations, the perceptions, the intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that is to say, changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed them. To this class of inventions belongs the moral conscience, which was accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always conditioned. The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical fact; it is an index or a summary of the relative ethical formation of each individual. If there can be in it material for science, this cannot explain the ethical relations by means of the conscience, but the very thing it needs is to understand how that conscience is formed.

   If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions of life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is altogether pedagogic.

   There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective, which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility, constructs abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of formation, may be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just, benevolent, and so on through the entire extent of the cardinal or secondary virtues. But again, can subjective pedagogy construct of itself a social background upon which all these beautiful things ought to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a Utopia.

   And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development, never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of Pestalozzi or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do. Considered in an abstract manner, all men can be educated and all are perfectible; as a matter of fact, they have always been perfected and instructed as much as and in the measure that they could, granted the conditions of life in which they were obliged to develop. It is here precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor, and that the use of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always presents itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination has sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a supernatural pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption.

   Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant

   Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations, and, in the last analysis, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of moral statistics: the discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say, socially.

   To recommend morality to men while assuming

   In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models.

   The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort

   Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot always find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical definite conditions. The concrete social psychology of past times often remains impenetrable to us. Often the commonest things remain for us unintelligible, for example, the animals considered as unclean, or the origin for the repugnance at marriage between persons of remote degrees of relationship. A prudent course of study leads us to conclude that the motives of many details will remain always concealed. Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable.

   The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy appearance of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate motives of ideas

   On the subject of science we can be much more brief.

   For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals and encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the appearance of the different formulas, resolving the total of the systematic summary into the elements which have successively served to compose it. The general presupposition was simple enough; underneath this chronology is the rational conception which develops and progresses.

   This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain disadvantage; it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of science being granted, another stage of science may be derived from it by reason, but it did not permit us to discern by what condition of facts men were driven to discover science for the first time, that is to say, to reduce considered experience into a new and definite form. The question was, then, to find why there is an actual history of science, to find the origin of the scientific necessity, and what unites in a genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in the continuity of the social processus.

   The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the intellectual substance of the

   It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science, and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, toward

   It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called antithesis between science

   I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd.

   Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion, that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution, favored

   After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

   Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the fables, which are at the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution

   There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy. We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.

   Here I must state certain difficulties.

   Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion) to the social conditions

   In the second place, through the centuries of history properly so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as obstinate survivals.

   In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one understands, moreover, that a house is not a

   In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not possible to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic demand. Because, in fact, if we assume that the critical communist, the sociologist of economic materialism, or as he is commonly called, the Marxist, has the necessary critical preparation, the habit of historical study, and also the gift required for an orderly and vivacious narration, there is no reason for affirming that he cannot write history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political schools have written it.

   We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which admits of no reply. But he was the first and the principal author of the decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an instrument of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable publicist, during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he applied it with the greatest precision in that essay entitled Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great distance, and after so many publications, if we except certain infinitesimal details and certain false forecasts, that it would be possible to make neither corrections nor important complements. I will not repeat,

   Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories which have been written up to the present time, that there is always at bottom, if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in their spirit, a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so this doctrine, which has enabled us to study the social structure in an objective manner, must finally direct with precision the researches of history, and must end in a narrative complete, transparent and integral.

   Helps are not lacking.

   Economics, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and development as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed up with the illusion

   These studies, certainly, are not made in the interest of our doctrine, and oftener than not they are made in a spirit hostile to socialism; something not observed, we may say in passing, by those foolish readers of printed papers who so often confuse economic history, historical economics, and historical materialism. But these studies, apart from the materials which they gather, are remarkable in that they witness the progress which is in course of making the internal history which, little by little, is

   A good part of these materials that have been gathered must always be submitted to new corrections, as for that matter happens in every domain of empirical knowledge, which oscillates continually between what is held for certain and what is simply probable, and what must, later, be integrated or eliminated.

   The deductions and the combinations of the historians of economics, or of those who relate history in general, availing themselves of the guiding thread of economic phenomena, are not always so plausible or so conclusive, that one does not feel the need of saying to them: All this must be taken back and worked over. But that which is undoubted is the fact that in this present time all writing of history tends to become a science, or, better, a social discipline; and when that movement, now uncertain and multiform, shall be accomplished, the efforts of the scholars and inquirers will lead inevitably to the acceptance of economic materialism. By this incidence of efforts and of scientific labors, which start from points so opposite, the materialistic conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds as a definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from partisans and adversaries the attempt to speak pro and con as for partisan theses.

   Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our

   The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very far from that evidence and that clearness of processus of analysis and of reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at this moment, to write a summary of universal history, which should propose to develop all the varied forms of production in order to deduce from them afterwards all the rest of human activity, in a particular and circumstantial fashion. In the present state of knowledge, he who should try to give this compendium of a new Kulturgeschichte would do nothing but translate into economic phraseology the points of general orientation which, in other books, for example, in Hellwald, give it in Darwinian phraseology.

   It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or to a great succession of phenomena.

   So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the exposition and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms are clear to all. The economic developments of the

   The true problem consists, indeed, not in substituting sociology for history, as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind it a secret reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its intuitive manifestations, and in understanding it through the aid of economic sociology. It is not a question of separating the accident from the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel, or applying any other formula used by the partisans of any species of scholasticism, but of explaining the connection and the complexus precisely in so far as it is a connection and a complexus. It is not merely a question of discovering and determining the social groundwork, and then of making men appear upon it like so many marionettes, whose threads are held and moved, no longer by Providence but by economic categories. These categories have themselves developed and are developing, like all the rest -- because men change as to the capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and utilizing natural conditions; because men change in spirit and attitude through the reaction of their

   It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for example, of what the classes were at the moment when the French Revolution broke out, and to pass then to the classes that result from the Revolution and survive it. In that case the titles, the indications and the classifications of the materials to analyze are definite; they are, for example, the city and the country, the artisan and the laborer, the nobles and the serfs, the land which is freed from feudal charges, and the small proprietors who came into being, commerce which frees itself from so many restrictions, money which accumulates, industry which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to in the choice of this method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic origins, was indispensable to the preparation of historical research according to the direction of the new doctrine.*

   But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to make us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed of living beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces, instincts and passions. And it is the same, mutatis mutandis, with men also, in so far as they live historically. These particular men, moved by certain passions, urged by certain circumstances, with such and such designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who, martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and reciprocal suppressions of each other -- there is the real history of the French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all history is but the unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true that it develops only in definite forms of human activity -- whether the latter be passionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly instinctive or deliberately heroic.

   To understand the interlacings and the complexus in its inner connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface; to analyze the passions and the intentions, in their motives, from the closest to the most remote, and then to bring back the data of the passions and of the intentions and of their causes to the most remote elements of a definite economic situation; there is the difficult art which the materialistic conception must realize.

   And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his pupils to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await the examples which I shall give in other essays in a real historical narration, working over into a book which for some time I have already been doing in my teaching.

   In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all cleared up.

   What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men?

   In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the extreme sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after the fashion of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their history. According to some it is sufficient to show what were the reasons, for example, of Caesarism, and Caesar matters little. According to others, there are no objective reasons of classes and social interests which suffice to explain anything; it is the great minds which give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and history has, so to speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of narration extract themselves from embarrassment in a very simple fashion, putting together at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact and subjective influences.

   Historical materialism goes beyond the antithetical views of the sociologists and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates the eclecticism of the empirical narrators.

   First of all the factum.

   Let this particular Caesar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth Brumaire. All this is completely accidental with relation to the general course of things which was pushing the new class, mistress of the field, to save from the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save, and that necessitated the creation of a bureaucratico-military government. It was, however, necessary to find the man, or the men. But what actually happened came about in the fashion that we know. It depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who directed the enterprise and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger. And from that moment the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because it is this definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events, determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded.

   The very fact that all history rests upon antitheses, contrasts, struggles and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in definite occasions. These men are neither a negligible accident of the social mechanism, nor miraculous creators of what society, without them, could have made in no other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the antithetic conditions, which causes the fact that definite individuals, generous, heroic, fortunate, mischievous, are called at critical moments to say the decisive word. As long as the particular interests of the different social groups are in such a

   The social antitheses, which make of every human community an unstable organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined rapidly and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama in all its relations is repeated from community to community, from nation to nation, from state to state, because the inner inequalities concurring with the external differentiations, have produced and produce the whole movement of wars, conquests, treaties, colonizations, etc. In this drama have always appeared, in the role of leaders of society, the men who are characterized as eminent, as great, and empiricism has concluded from their presence that they were the principal authors of history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance to the general causes and the common conditions of the social structure, is a thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of our doctrine; but to try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology would willingly do, is pure capriciousness.

   And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes.

   History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of accidents and variations. It

   It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of factors, because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence of things which seem incongruous, independent, and sell-directing. To present the whole as a whole, and to discover in it the continuous relations of the events which border on each other, there is the difficulty.

   The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural beings.

   In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all historical events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any significance? This question, whether it comes from the camp of the idealists, or whether it comes to us from the mouth of the most circumspect critics, certainly, and in all cases, demands our attention, and requires an adequate answer.

   In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from which is derived the conception of progress as an idea which incloses and embraces the total of the human processus, it is seen that these presumptions all rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of attributing to one or more series of events a certain sense and a certain signification. The

   I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative over the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men. That is as intuitive as is the actual coexistence of peoples, of nations and of states, which find themselves, at the same time, in a different stage of development; so undeniable is the actual condition of relative superiority and inferiority of nation as compared with nation; and again so certain is the partial and relative retrogression which has been produced several times in history, as Italy has exemplified for centuries. Still more, if there is a convincing proof of how progress must be understood in the sense of immediate law, and, to use a strong expression, of a physical and inevitable law, it is precisely this fact -- that social development by the very reasons of the processus which are inherent in it, often leads to retrogression. It is evident, on the other hand, that the faculty of progressing, like the possibility of retrogressing, does not constitute, to begin with, an immediate privilege, or an innate defect of a race, nor is either

   Now then, the faith in the universality of progress, which appeared with so much violence in the eighteenth century, rests upon this first positive fact, that men, when they do not find obstacles in external conditions, or do not find them in those which result. from their own work in their social environment, are all capable of progress.

   Moreover, at the bottom of this supposed or imagined unity of history, in consequence of which the processus of the different societies would form one single series of progress, there is another fact, which has offered motive and occasion for so many fantastic ideologies. If all nations have not progressed equally, still more, if some have stopped and have followed a backward route, if the processus of social development has not always, in every place and in all times, the same rhythm and the same intensity, it is nevertheless certain that, with the passage of the decisive activity from one people to another people in the course of history, the useful products, already acquired by those who were in

   Need we remind the reader that writing was never lost, although the peoples who invented it have disappeared from historic continuity? Need we recall again that we all have in our pockets, engraved on our watches, the Babylonian dial, and that we make use of algebra, which was introduced by those Arabs, whose historical activity has since been dispersed like the sands of the desert? It is useless to multiply these examples, because it is sufficient to think of technology and the history of discoveries in the broad sense of the word, for which the almost continuous transmission of the instruments of labor and production is evident.

   And after all, the provisional summaries which are called universal histories, although they always reveal, in their aim and in their execution, something forced and artificial, would never have been attempted if human events had not offered to the empiricism of the narrators a certain thread, even though subtle, of continuity.

   Take for example the Italy of the sixteenth century, which is evidently in decadence; but while it is declining, it transmits to the rest of Europe its

   A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial sense of the transmission and the

   As I have said several times, ideas do not fall from heaven, and even those which, at a given moment arise from definite situations with the impetuosity of faith and with a metaphysical garb, carry always within themselves the index of their correspondence with the order of the facts, of which the explanation is sought or attempted. The idea of progress, as the unifier of history, appears with violence and becomes a giant in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the heroic period of the intellectual and political life of the revolutionary

   The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social processus, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World, Australia, Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us! And the rebound in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in Africa through conquest! In the presence of this universality and this cosmopolitanism, the acquisition of the Celts

   The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the tendency to a unification of history under a general view: and in this fashion we find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which fills so many books of the philosophy of history and of Kulturgeschichte. The unity of social form, that is to say,

   But this unification of the social life, by the working of the capitalist form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and continues to develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans and designs, but, on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles, which in their sum form a colossal complication of antitheses. War without and war within. Struggle incessant among the nations, and struggles incessant between the members of each nation. And the interlacings of the deeds and the action of so many emulators, competitors and adversaries is so complicated, that the co-ordination of events very often escapes the attention, and it is a very difficult thing to discover their intimate connection. The struggle which actually exists among men, the struggles which now, with various methods, are unfolding among nations and within nations, have come to make us understand better in the midst of what difficulties the history of the past has unfolded. If the bourgeois ideology, reflecting the tendency to capitalist unification, has proclaimed the progress of the human race, historical materialism, on the contrary, and without proclamation, has

   Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were oscillating -- or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself far from the point of departure -- in an actual zigzag.

   Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the meeting of several societies on the field of competition (from the ingenuous forms of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of the elegant sport of the stock exchange) it is natural that every historical result, when it is measured in the one measure of individual expectation, appears very often like chance, and afterwards, considered theoretically, becomes for the mind more inextricable than the track of meteors.

   Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus laughing above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of themselves playing a divine comedy.

   Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of association ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete development of all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior processus of history may become a real and true evolution? And, to speak like the amateurs of high-sounding

   It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what critical communism says, that is to say, foresees, of the future. But it does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing an abstract possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give life to a state of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it says and predicts because what it announces must inevitably happen by the immanent necessity of history, seen and studied henceforth in the foundation of its economic substructure.

   "It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political revolutions."*

   "To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all."

   "The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of the social processus of

   "With the taking possession of the means of production on the part of society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the dominance of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates in social production will be succeeded by conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence will cease. Only in this way man will detach himself, in a certain sense, from the animal world in a definite fashion, and will pass from a condition of animal existence to conditions of human existence. The entire sum of the conditions of life which has thus far dominated men will pass under the rule and the examination of men themselves, who will thus for the first time become the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters of their own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had been outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied and mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause. Their very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature and history, will become their own and their free work.

   The foreign and objective forces, which till then dominated history, will pass under the care of men. Only from that moment will men make their own history with full understanding; only from that moment will the social causes which they put in motion, be able to arrive, in great part and in a proportion ever increasing, at the desired effects. It is the leap of the human race from the reign of necessity into that of liberty. To accomplish this action emancipating the world, such is the historic mission of the modern proletariat."

   If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and application of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many conspirators and visionaries had not given them a horror of every Utopia, opposing it indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas might pass for good-natured paradoxes, which criticism need not examine. But these formulas are, as it were, the close, the effective conclusion of the doctrine of historic materialism. They are the direct result of the criticism of economies and of historical dialectics.

   In these formulas, which may be developed, as I have had occasion to show elsewhere, is summed up every forecast of the future, which is not and is not intended for a romance or a Utopia. And in these very formulas there is an adequate and conclusive response to the question with which this chapter began: Is there in the series of historic events a meaning and a significance?