V.

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, to a certain point,

wherever the artificial foundation has acquired a certain consistency,

and wherever the social differentiations and their resulting antitheses

have created the need, the possibility and the conditions of an

organization more or less stable or unstable, there, always and

necessarily, appear premeditated designs, political views, plans of

conduct, systems of law and finally maxims and general and abstract

principles. In the circle of these products, and of these derived and

complex developments of the second degree, spring up also the sciences

and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary fashion of

production. This circle is what the rationalists and the ideologists,

ignorant of its real foundations, have called, and call, in an exclusive

fashion, civilization. And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens,

that some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical,

have found, and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed

circle of the reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that

they have been able and are able consequently to submit all the rest to

the subjective view which they have elaborated under these conditions;

that is, the origin and explanation of all the ideologies. Our doctrine

has definitely outgrown the visual angle of ideology. The premeditated

designs, the political views, sciences, systems of law, etc., instead of

being the means and the instrument of the explanation of history, are

precisely what require to be explained, because they are derived from

determined conditions and situations. But that does not mean that they

are pure appearances, soap bubbles. If they are things which have been

developed and derived, that does not imply that they are not real

things; and that is so true that they have been, for centuries, to the

unscientific consciousness, and to the scientific consciousness still on

the way towards its formation, the only ones which really existed.

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 unites these different moments to the learned ministrations

of the professional narrators. As a revolutionary doctrine it is, before

all else, the intellectual consciousness of the actual proletarian

movement in which, according to our assertion, the future of communism

is preparing long beforehand; so much so that the open adversaries of

socialism reject it as an opinion, which, under a scientific mask, is

only working out another utopia.

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 all known

historic conditions are circumstanced, and, second, that progress has

thus far been circumscribed by various obstacles and that for this

reason it has always been partial and limited.

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 lost in the mass

through the intermingling of races or perish and disappear completely.

Western Asia and Egypt, which already in very ancient times, as the

first cradle of all our civilization, gave birth to the great

semi-political formations which marked the first phases of certain and

positive history, have appeared to us for centuries as crystallizations

of social forms incapable of moving on of themselves to new phases of

development. Upon them is the age-long weight of the barbaric camp--the

dominion of the Turk. Into this stiffened mass is introduced by secret

ways a modern administration, and in the name of business interests the

railroads and the telegraphs push in,--bold outposts of the conquering

European bank. All this stiffened mass has no hope of resuming life,

heat and motion except by the ruin of the Turkish dominion, for which

are being substituted in the different methods of direct and indirect

conquest the dominion and the protectorate of the European bourgeoisie.

That a process of transformation of backward nations or of nations

arrested in their march, can be realized and hastened under external

influences, India stands as a proof. This country, with its own life

still surviving, re-enters vigorously under the action of England into

the circulation of international activity even with its intellectual

products. These are not the only contrasts in the historic physiognomy

of our contemporaries. And while in Japan, by an acute and spontaneous

phenomenon of imitation, there has developed, in less than thirty years,

a certain assimilation of western civilization which is already moving

normally the country's own energies, the forcible law of Russian

conquest is dragging into the circle of modern industry, and even into

great industry, certain notable portions of the country beyond the

Caspian, as an outpost of the approaching acquisition to the sphere of

capitalism of Central Asia and Upper Asia. The gigantic mass of China

appeared to us but a few years ago as motionless in the hereditary

organization of its institutions, so slow is every movement there, while

for ethnic and geographical reasons almost all Africa remained

impenetrable, and, it seemed, even up to the last attempts at conquest

and colonization, that it was destined to offer only its borders to the

process of civilization, as if we were still in the times not even of

the Portuguese, but of the Greeks and Carthaginians.

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 swiftness of movement has

already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery and the most

democratic wage system. But where there is a real halt and even an

attested retrogression, as in Western Asia, in Egypt, in the Balkan

Peninsula and in Northern Africa,--and this arrest cannot be attributed

to the change of natural conditions,--we find the problem before us

which is awaiting its solution from the direct and explicit study of the

social structure studied in the internal modes of its development, as in

the interlacings and complications of the different nations upon that

field which is ordinarily called the scene of historic struggles.

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;

and thereon have depended, and still depend, not only the frictions and

the struggles, the treaties and the wars, but also everything that with

more or less precision the political writers have been able to relate to

us since the Renaissance, and certainly with increasing evidence, from

Louis XIV. and Colbert to our own time.

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 up by the

heavy and pedantic German professors!) Here and there modern capitalist

production is edging its way into countries which from other points of

view do not enter into our movement and especially into its political

side, as is the case with unhappy Poland; or again this form only

penetrates indirectly, as in the Slavonic countries. But now comes the

sharpest contrast, which seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an

epitome, all the phrases, even the most extreme, of our history.

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 _Chauvinism_, 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 excommunists 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 of the _processus_. Time

as an abstract measure of chronology and the generations which succeed

one another in approximate periods give no criterion and furnish no

indication of law or of process. The developments thus far have been

varied because the things accomplished in one and the same unit of time

were varied. Between these varied forms of development there is an

affinity or rather a similarity of movements, that is, an analogy of

type, or again an identity of form; thus the advance forms may by simple

contact or by violence accelerate the development of backward forms. But

the important thing is to comprehend that progress, our notion of which

is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced and thus limited, is

not suspended over the course of human events like a destiny or a fate,

nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine cannot serve to

represent the whole history of the human race in a unified perspective

which repeats, _mutatis mutandis_, the historic philosophy from thesis

to conclusion, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or, better, from the prophet

Daniel to M. De Rougemont.

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 of the constructed or constructive natural philosophy as

used by Shelling and his school.

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 of

an artificial field upon which it has been given to men to develop

themselves further, it is evident that the successive obstacles to the

uniformity of progress must be sought in the proper and intrinsic

conditions of the social structure itself.

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, or whether, under the disguised

forms of supposed equal rights for all, it be produced by the automatic

action of economic competition, as in our time.

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 and to keep ever

further from culture the masses who, attached to their ceaseless daily

toil, are thus feeding the whole of society.

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.