On all sides and from 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, socialists 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 in classic
phrases that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer
of the capitalist epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism,
but who was its secretary and faithful and diligent editor. And as for
the logical tourney between egoism and altruism, has it not been in full
view from the time of the Reverend Malthus up to that empty, prolix and
tiresome reasoner, the indispensable Spencer? Struggle for existence!
But could you wish to observe, study and understand a struggle more
important for us than the one which has its birth and is taking on
gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps you would
reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and working
in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created in
the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and
through social institutions, and which man himself can change through
other forms of labor, processes and institutions,--you would perhaps
reduce it to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in
which plant and animals, and men themselves in so far as they are
animals, are contending in the bosom of nature.
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 Phales of Chalcedon down to Cabet.[20] More
than this, it is by the study and the knowledge of these forms that the
consciousness of the separateness of scientific socialism from all the
rest becomes developed and fixed. And in making this study who is there
who will refuse to recognize that Thomas More was a heroic soul and a
great writer on socialism? Who will not find in his heart a large
tribute of admiration for Robert Owen who first gave to the ethics of
communism this indisputable principle, that the character and the morals
of men are the necessary result of the conditions in which they live and
of the circumstances which surround them? And the partisans of critical
communism believe it is their duty, traversing history in thought, to
claim fellowship with all the oppressed, whatever may have been their
destiny, which was that of remaining oppressed and of opening the way
after an ephemeral success for the rule of new oppressors.
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.
They cannot admit that the 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 of a caprice
of circumstances. All these ideologies although they reflected in fact
the sentiment directly due to social antitheses, that is to say, the
real class struggles, with a lofty sense of justice and a profound
devotion to an ideal, nevertheless all reveal ignorance of the true
causes and of the effective nature of the antitheses against which they
hurled themselves by an act of revolt spontaneous and often heroic.
Thence their utopian character. We can moreover explain why the
oppressive conditions of other epochs although they were more barbarous
and cruel did not bring that accumulation of energy, that concentration
of force, or that continuity of resistance which is seen to be realizing
itself and developing in the proletariat of our time. It is the change
of society in its economic structure; it is the formation of the
proletariat in the bosom of the great industry and of the modern state.
It is the appearance of the proletariat upon the political scene,--it is
the new things, in fine, which have engendered the need of new ideas.
Thus critical communism is neither moralizer, nor preacher, nor herald,
nor utopian--it already holds the thing itself in its hands and into the
thing itself it has put its ethics and its idealism.
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 of Equals and we explore still further back
to attempts at relief, to acts of resistance, and to wars,--to the
famous peasants' war in Germany, to the Jacquerie and to Father Dolcino.
In all these facts and in all these events we discover forms and
phenomena relating to the future of the bourgeoisie in proportion as it
tears to pieces, overthrows, triumphs over and issues from the feudal
system. We can do the same with the class struggles of the ancient world
but with less clearness. This history of the proletariat and of the
other oppressed classes, of the vicissitudes of their struggles and
their revolts, is already a sufficient guide to assist us in
understanding why the ideologies of the communism of other epochs were
premature.
If the bourgeoisie has not yet 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 communism of the Manifesto simplifies into rigid and
general theoretical formulas the ideologic, ethic, psychologic and
pedagogic suggestion of the other forms of communism not by denying but
by exalting them. All is prosaic and communism itself partakes of this
character, it is now a science.
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 consist 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 factor 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 religion and not religion man) the
old Balzac[21] had made a satire of it by making men the puppets of God.
And had not Vico already recognized that Providence does not act in
history from without? And this same Vico, a century before Morgan, had
he not reduced history to a process which man himself makes through
successive experimentation consisting in the invention of language,
religion, customs and laws? Had not Lessing affirmed that history is an
education of the human race? Had not Rousseau seen that ideas are born
from needs? Had not Saint Simon guessed when he did not lose himself in
the distinction between organic and inorganic epochs the real genesis of
the Third Estate, and did not his ideas translated into prose make of
Augustin Thierry a reconstructor of historical research? In the first
fifty years of this century and notably in the period from 1830 to 1850
the class struggles which the ancient historians and those of Italy
during the Renaissance had described so clearly, instructed by the
experience of these struggles in the narrow domain of their own urban
republic had grown and had reached on both sides of the Channel greater
proportions and an evidence always more palpable. Born in the midst of
the great industry, illuminated by the recollection and by the study of
the French Revolution they have become intuitively instructive because
they found with more or less clearness and consciousness their actual
and suggested expression in the programmes of the political parties:
free exchange or tariffs on grain in England, and so on. The conception
of history changed to the observer in France, on the right wing as on
the left wing of the literary parties, from Guizot to Louis Blanc and to
the modest Cabet. Sociology was the need of the time and if it sought in
vain its theoretic expression in Auguste Comte, a belated scholastic, it
found its artist in Balzac who was the actual inventor of class
psychology. To put into the classes and into their frictions the real
subject of history and the movement of this in their movement,--this is
what was then on the point of being studied and discovered, and it was
necessary to fix a theory of this in precise terms.
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 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 reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears
within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its _processus_,
and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process
of birth before our eyes, as for example, in Japan. In so far as it is
society which transforms all the products of human labor into
commodities by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat
or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and
the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined
times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they
may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of
development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and
then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic
expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old
proprietorship, to speak the language of the jurists. In one country it
elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing
forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences
through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and
crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great
revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of
historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of
sociology.
As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois
history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the
Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its
successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great
industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a
derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements
of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the class
struggle were already implicitly contained in it.
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 guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is
to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of "natural right" which
developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the
Constitution of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the
ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing
and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the
postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the
Physiocrats.
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 unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical
precision even into his thoughts of its details.
The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered,
there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a
socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified
as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society
by as many appropriate remedies.[22]
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 reasonings, 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
gearings.
The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all
these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of
classical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of
present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in
politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its
elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the
doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these
relations arise in certain historic conditions but they constitute a
system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by
an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate
pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the
worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the
profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the
purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which
it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular
one which returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this
commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic
system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of
facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish
thing to assume that this system of facts which the ruling class has
established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by
sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will
destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the
reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty
without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this
society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is to
demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to
be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is
plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without
being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of
certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental
change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere
piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the
process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who,
reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the
one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed
with a definition and a syllogism.
The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has the
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 to the arbitrary suggestion which demands a change,
proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism makes common
cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary
force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social
form and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more
exact, the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new
conditions are already born.
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,[25] which, taking 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
social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics
itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as
many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure
for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called
economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as
our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an
historic conception of economics and to explain the other changes by
means of its changes. Therein lies our answer to all the criticisms
which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not
excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are
sentimental or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has
done in his Capital, not the first book of critical communism, but the
last great book of bourgeois economics.
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 how from it came all the later forms marked by monogamy,
the development of the paternal family, the appearance of property,
first of the _gens_, then of the family, lastly individual, and by the
successive establishment of the alliances between _gentes_ which are the
origin of the State. All this is illustrated by the knowledge of the
process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and
instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this
process upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and
making it traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be
corrected at certain points, notably by the study of the different
specific fashions according to which in different parts of the world the
passage from barbarism to civilization has been effected. But,
henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that we have before our
eyes the general embryogenic record of human development from primitive
communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome with their
constitutions of citizens arranged in classes according to census which
not long ago constituted the columns of Hercules for research into
written tradition. The classes which the Manifesto assumed have been
later resolved into their process of formation and in this can already
be recognized the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for
the categories of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream
of Fourier to find a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of
a long and vast process has been realized. A scientific solution has
been found for the problem of the origin of inequality among men which
Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments of an original dialectic,
relying however upon too few real data.
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
the 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. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with the new
historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in
tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics
relative to each epoch,[26] 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 origin is peculiar to Germany and to the
other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either
in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields
upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say,
of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises
of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the
first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect
form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for
that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many
characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop
there.
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 an
army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the
continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the
proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear
to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be
so in reality. _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 of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world
for its theatre. To-day the world is invaded by civilization and
everywhere is developing that society which lives upon class antagonisms
and class domination, the form of bourgeois production. (Japan may serve
us for an example.) The coexistence of the two nations in one and the
same state, which the divine Plato had already described, is
perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism to-morrow. But
as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous are those
who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms of
production,--and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and
precision; especially because in the domain and struggle of competition,
the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminishing. The
proletarian International, while embryonic in the Communist League of
fifty years ago, henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the
first of every May that the proletarians of the whole world are really
and actively united. The future grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and
their descendants to many generations will ever remember the date of the
Communist Manifesto.