development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the
minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of
dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and
reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.
And in this spirit the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began
his career by resolving the stable solar system of Newton and its
eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had once been
given, into the result of a historic process, the formation of the sun
and all the planets out of a rotating nebulous mass. From this he at
the same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the solar
system, its future death followed of necessity. His theory half a
century later was established mathematically by Laplace, and half a
century after that the spectroscope proved the existence in space of
such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this
system--and herein is its great merit--for the first time the whole
world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process,
_i.e._, as in constant motion, change, transformation, development;
and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that
makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From
this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild
whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the
judgment seat of mature philosophic reason, and which are best
forgotten as quickly as possible; but as the process of evolution of
man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the
gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to
trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental
phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is
here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the
problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be
able to solve. Although Hegel was--with Saint Simon--the most
encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the
necessarily limited extent of his own knowledge, and, second, by the
limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age.
To these limits a third must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To him
the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract
pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and
their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea,"
existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of
thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the
actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as
many individual groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the
reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial,
labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in
itself, was a colossal miscarriage--but it was also the last of its
kind. It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable
contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the
conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its
very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery
of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim
to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural
and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all
time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic
reasoning. This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the
contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the
external universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led
necessarily back to materialism, but _nota bene_, not to the simply
metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth
century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude
heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the
process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws
thereof. With the French of the eighteenth century, and even with
Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole, moving in narrow
circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as
Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern
materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science,
according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial
bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions,
people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole,
must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume
infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is
essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that
sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining
mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make
clear its position in the great totality of things and of our
knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is
superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier
philosophy is the science of thought and its laws--formal logic and
dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of
Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only
be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials
furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts
had occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of
history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons;
between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that
of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle
between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history
of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the
development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of
the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Facts more
and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois
economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as
to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the
consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer
be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was
their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old
idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew
nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing
of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared
in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of
civilization."
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history.
Then it was seen that _all_ past history, with the exception of its
primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these
warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of
production and of exchange--in a word, of the _economic_ conditions of
their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes
the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the
ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and
political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and
other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel had freed history from
metaphysics--he had made it dialectic; but his conception of history
was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last
refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of
history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's
"knowing" by his "being," instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by
his "knowing."
From that time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery
of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the
struggle between two historically developed classes--the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of
society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic
succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had
of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus
created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier
days was as incompatible with this materialistic conception as the
conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics
and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly
criticised the existing capitalistic mode of production and its
consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not
get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The
more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of the
working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it
clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose.
But for this it was necessary--(1) to present the capitalistic method
of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness
during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present
its inevitable downfall; and (2) to lay bare its essential character,
which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of
_surplus-value_. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor
is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the
exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the
capitalist buys the labor-power of his laborer at its full value as a
commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he
paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus-value forms
those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing
masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis
of capitalist production and the production of capital were both
explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history
and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through
surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries Socialism became
a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and
relations.
III
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that
the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all
social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history,
the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into
classes or orders, is dependent upon what is produced, how it is
produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view
the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are
to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into
eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production
and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the _philosophy_, but in
the _economics_ of each particular epoch. The growing perception that
existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason
has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes
of production and exchange changes have silently taken place, with
which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no
longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting
rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light, must also be
present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed
modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by
deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the
stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?
The present structure of society--this is now pretty generally
conceded--is the creation of the ruling class of to-day, of the
bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie,
known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was
incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred
upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well
as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the
framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie broke up the
feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of
society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the
equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of
the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of
production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the
making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into
modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of
the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of
before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and
handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into
collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern
industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with
the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it
confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the
capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive
forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the
mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It
exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will
and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism
is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its
ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering
under it, the working-class.
Now, in what does this conflict consist?
Before capitalistic production, _i.e._, in the Middle Ages, the system
of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property
of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the
agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the
handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor--land,
agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool--were the instruments
of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker,
and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But,
for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer
himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production,
to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production
of the present day--this was precisely the historic role of capitalist
production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section
of "Capital" Marx has explained in detail, how since the fifteenth
century this has been historically worked out through the three phases
of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the
bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not transform these puny
means of production into mighty productive forces, without
transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the
individual into _social_ means of production only workable by a
collectivity of men. The spinning-wheel, the handloom, the
blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the
power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory
implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In
like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual
into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to
social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came
out of the factory were the joint product of many workers through
whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No
one person could say of them: "I made that; this is _my_ product."
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is
that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not
upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of
_commodities_, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the
individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the
case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, _e.g._, sold to the artisan
agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft.
Into this society of individual producers, of commodity-producers, the
new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division
of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon _no definite plan_, which
had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon _a
definite plan_, as organized in the factory; side by side with
_individual_ production appeared _social_ production. The products of
both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least
approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was
stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working
with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals
produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small
producers. Individual production succumbed in one department after
another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of
production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so
little recognized, that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means
of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it
arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery
for the production and exchange of commodities; merchants' capital,
handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself
as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of
course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full
swing, and were applied to its products as well.
In the mediaeval stage of evolution of the production of commodities,
the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise.
The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging
to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own
tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no
need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to
him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was,
therefore, based _upon his own labor_. Even where external help was
used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally
was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and
journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for
education, in order that they might become master craftsmen
themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the
producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation
into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers.
But the socialized producers and means of production and their
products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been
before, _i.e._, as the means of production and the products of
individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had
himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own
product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner
of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the
product, although it was no longer _his_ product but exclusively the
product of the _labor of others_. Thus, the products now produced
socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion
the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by
the _capitalists_. The means of production, and production itself, had
become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of
appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals,
under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it
to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of
appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the
latter rests.[4]
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its
capitalistic character, _contains the germ of the whole of the social
antagonisms of to-day_. The greater the mastery obtained by the new
mode of production over all important fields of production and in all
manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to
an insignificant residuum, _the more clearly was brought out the
incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic
appropriation_.
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms
of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was
exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The
agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by
the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all
events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the
journeyman of to-day became the master of to-morrow. But all this
changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and
concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as
well as the product of the individual producer became more and more
worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker
under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and
accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime
complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the
worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The
number of these permanent wage-workers was further enormously
increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the
same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the
eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation
was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the
hands of the capitalists on the one side, and the producers,
possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. _The
contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic
appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and
bourgeoisie._
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way
into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose
social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society,
based upon the production of commodities, has this peculiarity: that
the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations.
Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may
happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy
his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article
is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one
knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand,
whether he will be able to make good his cost of production or even to
sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of
production, has its peculiar inherent laws inseparable from it; and
these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal
themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations,
_i.e._, in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as
compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these
producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and
as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore,
independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as
inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The
product governs the producers.