FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[1]I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically under the name of “German or ‘True’ Socialism.” This paragraph, which is unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the German philosophy of that epoch, notably in certain of its tendencies marked by acute degeneracy, has, with good reason, been suppressed in the Spanish translation.[2]It is better to use the expression “democratic socialization of the means of production” than that of “collective property” because the latter implies a certain theoretical error in that, to begin with, it substitutes for the real economic fact a juridical expression and moreover in the mind of more than one it is confused with the increase of monopolies, with the increasingstatizationof public utilities and with all the other fantasmagoria of the ever recurring State socialism, the whole effect of which is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands of the oppressing class.[3]Twenty-five octavo pages in the original edition (London, February, 1848) for a copy of which I am indebted to the special kindness of Engels. I should say here in passing that I have resisted the temptation to affix any bibliographical notes, references and citations, for I should then have been making a work of scholarship, or a book, rather than a simple essay. I hope the reader will take my word for it that there are in this essay no allusions, or statements of fact or opinion, which I could not substantiate with authorities.[4]The “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-oekonomie” appeared in the German-French Year Book, Paris, 1844, pp. 85-114; and his book on “The Condition of the Working Class in England” at Leipzig in 1845.[5]In these last years many jurists have thought they found in the re-adjustment of the civil Code a practical means for ameliorating the condition of the proletariat. But why have they not asked the pope to become the head of the free thought league? The most delightful of these is that Italian author who occupying himself with the class struggle asks that by the side of the code which establishes the rights of capital another be elaborated which should guarantee the rights of labor.[6]This development has been given in Marx’s Capital which can be considered as a philosophy of history.[7]It was not until after the publication of the Italian edition of this essay that I had at my disposal for some months a complete collection of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for which I owe hearty thanks to the Partei-Archiv of Berlin. The impression derived from this reading surpasses expectation. It is desirable either that this journal which now has become very rare, be reprinted entire or that the most important articles and letters in it be reproduced.[8]Misere de la Philosophie, by Karl Marx, Paris and Brussels, 1847; new edition, Paris, Giard and Briere, 1896.[9]This is made up of articles which appeared in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and which reproduced the lectures given by Marx to the German Workingmen’s Circle of Brussels in 1847. It has since been published as a propaganda leaflet.[10]See Chapter II. of the Manifesto.[11]Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, pp. IV.-VI. of the preface. (Instead of retranslating this extract from the French I have availed myself of the assistance of Comrade Hitch, who has translated direct from the German of Marx. C. H. K.)[12]These articles which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Politischokonomische Review, Hamburg, 1850, have recently been brought together into a pamphlet by Engels (Berlin, 1895) under the title of “Die Klassenkampfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850.” The little work has a preface by Engels.[13]Appeared for the first time in New York in 1852 in a review. Several editions have since been made in Germany. A French translation appeared in 1891 published by Delory, Lille.[14]In the preface to the “Class Struggle in France in 1848-50” and elsewhere Engels treated fundamentally the objective development of the new revolutionary tactic. (It is well to remember that the first Italian edition of this essay appeared June 18th, and the second, October 15, 1895.)[15]In my opinion this is the case in France. The recent discussions of the agrarian programme submitted to the deliberations of the social democracy in Germany confirm the reasons which I have indicated.[16]It was otherwise in Germany. After 1830 socialism was imported there and became a current literature; it underwent philosophical alterations of which Gruen was the typical representative. But already before thenew doctrinesocialism had received a characteristic imprint which was proletarian, thanks to the propaganda and the writings of Weitling. As Marx said in 1844 in the Paris Vorwaerts, “it was the giant in the cradle.”[17]It is what many people call Marxism. Marxism is and remains a doctrine. Parties can draw neither their name nor their justification from a doctrine. “I am no Marxist” said—guess who? Marx himself.[18]It is he who established the first relations between Marx and the League and who served as intermediary in the publication of the Manifesto. He fell in the insurrection of 1849 at Murg.[19]Marx’s Capital, Vol. III., Hamburg, 1894, pp. xix-xx. The date of 1845 refers principally to the book “Die heilige Familie, Frankfort, 1845,” which was produced in collaboration by Marx and Engels. This book is indispensable to an understanding of the theoretical origin of historical materialism.[20]I stop with Cabet who lived at the epoch of the Manifesto. I do not think I ought to go as far as the sporadic forms of Bellamy and Hertzka.[21]The Balzac of the 17th century.[22]It is these writers whom Menger thought he had discovered as the authors of scientific socialism.[23]It is for this reason that certain critics, Wieser for example, propose to abandon Ricardo’s theory of value because it leads to socialism.[24]Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots.[25]For example in the essays of Th. Rogers.[26]Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law?[27]Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition.

[1]I refer to that form which the Manifesto designates ironically under the name of “German or ‘True’ Socialism.” This paragraph, which is unintelligible for those who are not well versed in the German philosophy of that epoch, notably in certain of its tendencies marked by acute degeneracy, has, with good reason, been suppressed in the Spanish translation.

[2]It is better to use the expression “democratic socialization of the means of production” than that of “collective property” because the latter implies a certain theoretical error in that, to begin with, it substitutes for the real economic fact a juridical expression and moreover in the mind of more than one it is confused with the increase of monopolies, with the increasingstatizationof public utilities and with all the other fantasmagoria of the ever recurring State socialism, the whole effect of which is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands of the oppressing class.

[3]Twenty-five octavo pages in the original edition (London, February, 1848) for a copy of which I am indebted to the special kindness of Engels. I should say here in passing that I have resisted the temptation to affix any bibliographical notes, references and citations, for I should then have been making a work of scholarship, or a book, rather than a simple essay. I hope the reader will take my word for it that there are in this essay no allusions, or statements of fact or opinion, which I could not substantiate with authorities.

[4]The “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National-oekonomie” appeared in the German-French Year Book, Paris, 1844, pp. 85-114; and his book on “The Condition of the Working Class in England” at Leipzig in 1845.

[5]In these last years many jurists have thought they found in the re-adjustment of the civil Code a practical means for ameliorating the condition of the proletariat. But why have they not asked the pope to become the head of the free thought league? The most delightful of these is that Italian author who occupying himself with the class struggle asks that by the side of the code which establishes the rights of capital another be elaborated which should guarantee the rights of labor.

[6]This development has been given in Marx’s Capital which can be considered as a philosophy of history.

[7]It was not until after the publication of the Italian edition of this essay that I had at my disposal for some months a complete collection of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for which I owe hearty thanks to the Partei-Archiv of Berlin. The impression derived from this reading surpasses expectation. It is desirable either that this journal which now has become very rare, be reprinted entire or that the most important articles and letters in it be reproduced.

[8]Misere de la Philosophie, by Karl Marx, Paris and Brussels, 1847; new edition, Paris, Giard and Briere, 1896.

[9]This is made up of articles which appeared in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and which reproduced the lectures given by Marx to the German Workingmen’s Circle of Brussels in 1847. It has since been published as a propaganda leaflet.

[10]See Chapter II. of the Manifesto.

[11]Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, pp. IV.-VI. of the preface. (Instead of retranslating this extract from the French I have availed myself of the assistance of Comrade Hitch, who has translated direct from the German of Marx. C. H. K.)

[12]These articles which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Politischokonomische Review, Hamburg, 1850, have recently been brought together into a pamphlet by Engels (Berlin, 1895) under the title of “Die Klassenkampfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850.” The little work has a preface by Engels.

[13]Appeared for the first time in New York in 1852 in a review. Several editions have since been made in Germany. A French translation appeared in 1891 published by Delory, Lille.

[14]In the preface to the “Class Struggle in France in 1848-50” and elsewhere Engels treated fundamentally the objective development of the new revolutionary tactic. (It is well to remember that the first Italian edition of this essay appeared June 18th, and the second, October 15, 1895.)

[15]In my opinion this is the case in France. The recent discussions of the agrarian programme submitted to the deliberations of the social democracy in Germany confirm the reasons which I have indicated.

[16]It was otherwise in Germany. After 1830 socialism was imported there and became a current literature; it underwent philosophical alterations of which Gruen was the typical representative. But already before thenew doctrinesocialism had received a characteristic imprint which was proletarian, thanks to the propaganda and the writings of Weitling. As Marx said in 1844 in the Paris Vorwaerts, “it was the giant in the cradle.”

[17]It is what many people call Marxism. Marxism is and remains a doctrine. Parties can draw neither their name nor their justification from a doctrine. “I am no Marxist” said—guess who? Marx himself.

[18]It is he who established the first relations between Marx and the League and who served as intermediary in the publication of the Manifesto. He fell in the insurrection of 1849 at Murg.

[19]Marx’s Capital, Vol. III., Hamburg, 1894, pp. xix-xx. The date of 1845 refers principally to the book “Die heilige Familie, Frankfort, 1845,” which was produced in collaboration by Marx and Engels. This book is indispensable to an understanding of the theoretical origin of historical materialism.

[20]I stop with Cabet who lived at the epoch of the Manifesto. I do not think I ought to go as far as the sporadic forms of Bellamy and Hertzka.

[21]The Balzac of the 17th century.

[22]It is these writers whom Menger thought he had discovered as the authors of scientific socialism.

[23]It is for this reason that certain critics, Wieser for example, propose to abandon Ricardo’s theory of value because it leads to socialism.

[24]Thus there arises notably in France the illusion of a social monarchy which, succeeding the liberal epoch, should solve harmoniously what is called the social question. This absurdity reproduces itself in infinite varieties of socialism of the pulpit and State socialism. To the different forms of ideological and religious utopianism is joined a new form of bureaucratic and fiscal utopianism, the Utopia of the idiots.

[25]For example in the essays of Th. Rogers.

[26]Who would have thought a few years ago of the discovery and the authentic interpretation of an ancient Babylonian law?

[27]Note 189, p. 740, of the 3rd German edition.

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 calledverbalism. 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-socialcomplexus, 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 andreligion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into abstract and conventional fashions of speech.

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,[28]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 immensecomplexusof 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 findsa support in certain theoretical hypotheses, for example, thatmatterindicates something which is below or opposed to another higher or nobler thing which is called spirit; or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit which opposes the word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense, to all that, in a word, is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum total of the anti-egoistic inclinations and acts; then our embarrassment is extreme! Then we are told that in this doctrine it is attempted to explain the whole of man by the mere calculation of his material interests and that no value whatever is allowed to any ideal interest. The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste of certain partisans and propagandists of this doctrine have also been a cause of these confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they themselves only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.

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 allelse, to be drawn from the position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to the ideologies of every sort;—that the proof of its value consists exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the succession of human events which is derived from it;—that this doctrine does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other interests, but that it merely affirms the objective co-ordination and subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and this it affirms, thanks to that geneticprocessuswhich consists in going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of formation to the things formed.

Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the wordmatterin 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 tofind the relations of co-ordination and subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action. It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a criticism; it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must be put in evidence.

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 itphraseology,although this word is not an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.

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 æsthetic, 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. Tame, 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 oftheir immediate thought. Class tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g.,chance) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., theinevitable course of eventswhich sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of itssuperficial character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears.

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” thenon plus ultraof intelligence,—in all these a great part of the humanprocessusis 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 therevolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes the explanation of the historicalprocessus.

A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of individuals, but aplexusof 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 birthto legal-political relations which result in the formation of the state;—this nation, which by the organization of the state, which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself, renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for progress and retrogression:—there is the sum of what is at the bottom of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the fantastic and ideological combinations.

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, andexplanations which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the historic events—great masses of people, directing and ordering classes, masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word, if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval—never had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work, unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which developed property and the state, or at least the city,—even then, at the epoch of all the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of gods and heroes. So much so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belongto them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and toThe City of Godof St. Augustine—from the superstitious credulity in miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is to say, down to theIdeawhich for thedecadentsof Hegelianism engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most incongruous variations of social life in the course of history.

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 isdelivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars, and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate source which is behind the so called documents properly and which, before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit, that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions. To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very facts while they are developing—this is to make a new criticism of the sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal documentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and thereby to reconstruct them anew.

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,a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court. He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation, particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the circumstantial integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now, the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in theLow Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light the passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the forerunners of capitalism.Post factum, and after the tardy realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments, that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,—in these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can make otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record merely theeconomic moment(often still unknown and often unknowable), and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent.

From the fact that history must be taken in itsentirety and that in it the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three consequences follow:—

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, æsthetic, 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 theconsciousness as motives whose origin is often obliterated.

And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in thelast analysis(Engels) all the historic factsby 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 Schäffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment,conscience, will, etc. But I wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine’s expression, the “spontaneous anarchy” of 1789, those peasants who finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology, which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions, the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain social conditions actually determined;—this class, in this situation, determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;—and finally, these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economicstructure. This social psychology, by its nature always circumstantial, is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).

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 theaction, to the causes and the motives of the will and the action, in order to find thereupon the co-ordination of these causes and of these motives in the pre-elementaryprocessusof the production of the immediate means of existence.

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 inthe past, were the objects of any trustworthy observation, are found, and were found, already sufficiently removed from the moment when purely animal life had ceased. A certain social life with customs and institutions, even if it be of the most elementary form that we know, that is to say, of the Australian tribes, divided into classes and practising the marriage of all the men of one class with all the women of another class, separates human life by a great interval from animal life. If we consider thematernal gens, of which the classic type, the Iroquois type, has, thanks to Morgan’s work, revolutionized prehistoric science, while giving us at the same time the key to the origins of history properly so called, we have a form of society already much advanced by the complexity of its relations. At that stage of social life which, according to our knowledge, seems very elementary, that is to say, in the Australian society, not only does a very complicated language differentiate men from all other animals (and language is a condition and an instrument, a cause and an effect of sociability), but the specialization of human life, apart from the discovery of fire, is manifested by the use of many other artificial means by which the needs of life are satisfied. A certain territory acquired for the common use of a tribe, a certain art of hunting—the use of certain instruments of defense and attack and the possession of certain utensils for preserving the things acquired—and then the ornamentation of the body, etc., all this means that at bottom this liferests upon an artificial, although very elementary, basis, upon which men endeavor to fix themselves and adapt themselves,—upon a basis which is after all the condition of all further progress. According as this artificial basis is more or less formed, the men who have produced it and who live in it are considered more or less savage or barbarous. This first formation constitutes what we may call pre-history.

History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part of the humanprocessuswhose 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,the introduction of slavery, etc., instruments and methods of economy which have first differentiated communities from each other and have subsequently differentiated the component parts of these communities themselves. In other words, the works of men in so far as they live together react upon the men themselves. Their discoveries, and their inventions, by creating artificial ways of living, have produced not only habits and customs (clothing, cooking of food, etc.), but relations and bonds of coexistence proportioned and adapted to the mode of production and reproduction of the means of immediate life.

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 andprincipal object the determination and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its origin, its composition, its changes and its transformations. To say that all this is only a part and a prolongation of nature, is to say a thing which by its too abstract and too generic character has no longer any meaning.

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. Thisprogress does not consist merely in the sort of progress with which subjective psychology is concerned that is to say, the inner modifications which would be the proper and direct development of the intellect, the reasoning and the thought. Moreover, this inner progress is but a secondary and derived product, in proportion as there is already a progress realized in the artificial foundation which is the sum of the social relations resulting from the forms and the distributions of labor. It is, then, a meaningless affirmation to say that all this is but a simple prolongation of nature, unless one wishes to employ this word in so generic a sense that it no longer indicates anything precise and distinct; that which is not realized by the work of man.

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 humanprocessus. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism, and it need not invoke anew the conception of amythical, mystical or metaphorical form of fatalism. If it is true in effect that history rests, before all else, upon the development of technique, that is to say, if it is true that the successive discovery of tools gives rise to the successive distributions of labor, and therewith to the inequalities whose sum total, more or less stable, forms the social organism, it is equally true that the discovery of these instruments is at once the cause and the effect of these conditions and of those forms of the inner life to which, isolating them by psychological abstraction, we give the name of imagination, intellect, reason, thought, etc. By producing successively the different social environment, that is to say, the successive artificial foundations, man has produced himself, and in this consists the serious kernel, the concrete reason, the positive foundation of that which by various fantastic combinations and by a varied logical architecture has suggested to the ideologists the notion of the progress of the human mind.

Nevertheless, this expression ofnaturalizinghistory, 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 quality, 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 a 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,but it was not, and is not, with rare exceptions, the result of a critical choice or of a reasoning desire. Moreover, it was and is through necessity that, determined by external needs and occasions, this activity engenders an experience and a development of internal and external organs. Among these organs we must include intelligence and reason which also are the result and consequence of repeated and accumulated experience. The integral formation of man in his historical development is henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple conjecture. It is an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of theprocessuswhich engenders a step of progress are henceforth reducible into a series of explanations; and up to a certain point we have under our eyes the schedule of all historical developments, morphologically conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite negation of all ideology, because it is the explicit negation of every form of rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in their existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a measure, an end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of human events is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men have made and laid down for themselves through the experience accumulated in their changing social life, but it represents neither the tendency to realize a predetermined end nor the deviation of a first principle from perfection and felicity. Progress itself implies merely that empirical and circumstantial notion of a thing which is atpresent defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development thus far realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee, at least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future.

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 havedeveloped, 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 andsituations. 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, whatunites 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, thatall 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 theprocessusby 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 arelost 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, acertain 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 anextraordinary 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 itsprocessus, 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 economicexchange; 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 beenserved 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 FrenchChauvinism, 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 intensityof theprocessus. 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.

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