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Understanding of Karl Marx

Sidney Hook

Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx

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Chapter XI: The Materialistic Conception of History

Of all Marx’s theories, the materialistic conception of history has been most widely misunderstood. This is attributable not only to the ambiguity of some of its central terms, but to the fact that whereas Marx projected it as a method of understanding and making history, his disciples have tried to convert it into a system of sociology. Because of this the flexibility it possesses in the writings of Marx and Engels is sacrificed for unverifiable dogma in the works of the epigoni. Depending upon the class loyalty of the critics, the theory of historical materialism has been regarded as a commonplace, or an absurdity, or as the most powerful instrument available for investigating the origins of social thought. Marx himself sketched the theory only in general outline, but regarded the whole of his writings – in history, economics and philosophy – as an exhibition of its meaning and a test of its truth.

The theory can best be expounded in terms of Marx’s own intellectual development and in relation to the evolution of social and economic forces of the nineteenth century. Considerations of space, however, forbid this. For the purpose of the present analysis, it will be sufficient to state its central propositions in schematic form, discuss the criticisms and misunderstandings to which it has been subjected, point out where it has been fruitful and what problems remain to be solved. We may profitably begin by blocking the theory off from other theories with which it has been associated or identified.

I: Marx’s Conception of History: What does Marx mean by history? For Marx, history is not everything which has happened. Many happenings, like the birth of a planet or the disappearance of an animal species, are not historical in any sense which concerns him. Nor is history the records or chronicles of social life. For these are the result of history – the materials which must first be explained and interpreted to become significant. History is a process – and it is distinguished from all other natural processes in that ‘it is the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.’ [1] The fact that human behaviour is undertaken on behalf of ends or ideals distinguishes the subject-matter of history from that of physical nature. But the difference between the two is not so great that a realistic method cannot be applied to historical activity.

Although no historical activity is possible without ideals, historical effects cannot be explained in terms of ideals alone. For the interests and drives which move men in daily life are very diverse and conflicting. Each man reaches out to serve himself and yet each one finds himself caught up on the actions of others. The upshot of the complex interaction of individual wills is different from what each one has willed. Engels puts this very effectively in his Feuerbach:

The history of social development is essentially different in one respect from that of nature. In nature – in so far as we disregard the reaction of man upon it – there exist only unconscious, blind agents which influence one another and through whose reciprocal interplay general laws assert themselves. Whatever occurs... does not occur as a consciously willed end. On the other hand, in social history the active agents are always endowed with consciousness, are always men working towards definite ends with thought and passion. Nothing occurs without conscious intent, without willed end. But this difference, important as it may be for historical investigation... does not alter the fact that the course of history obeys general laws. For here, too, on the surface, despite the consciously willed ends of individuals, chance seems to rule. Only seldom does that occur which is willed. In most cases the numerous ends which are willed conflict with or cut across one another, or they are doomed from the very outset to be unattainable, or the means to carry them out are insufficient. And so, out of the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and acts there arises in the social world a situation which is quite analogous to that in the unconscious, natural one. The ends of actions are willed; but the results, which really flow from those actions, are not willed, or, in so far as the results seem to agree with the willed ends, ultimately they turn out to be quite other than the desired consequence. [2]

The crucial question, which every philosophy of history must face, is whether or not there are any factors which determine the historical resultant of the interaction of individual wills. Is it possible even without having knowledge of the content of innumerable wills to predict what will take place when, say, the density of population increases or the level of real wages falls? Or is the unexpected historical resultant – the whole record of what has happened – itself a matter of chance? There are some philosophers who have made the problem easy for themselves by denying that there is any determinate causation in history, that everything which has happened could have happened differently, that no rhyme or reason can be discovered in the direction of history save what the poets, prophets or fanatics read into it. They have pointed to the rack and ruin of past cultures, to needless blood and misery which have accompanied change from one social order to another, to the unrelieved tragedy and injustice of visiting the historical sins of one generation upon the heads of its descendants, as supplementary evidence that the surface appearance of chance is not, as Marx and Engels believe, a reflection of an inner law but is rather an expression of the stark irrationality of the historic process. The historical resultant, they say, has been determined by the interaction of many wills, and nothing else. And since these work at cross-purposes with one another, the arbitrary character of the historical pattern is explained.

There are at least three good reasons why this hypothesis of wholesale chance in history must be rejected. First, there are some events that have taken place which seem to us to have been necessitated by a whole chain of antecedent circumstances, although all the links in that chain may not be clear. No one can seriously maintain today that either the World War or the recent invasion of Manchuria was a chance phenomenon. To be sure, chance elements entered into them, but they were not decisive. The exact date of the World War, the type of men at the head of their respective governments, the thousand and one details with which the war burst upon the world, could never have been deduced in advance. None the less the event itself, the period within which it occurred, its most important consequences, were not only determined by the conflict between the imperialist powers for world hegemony – they were actually foreseen. They were not, however, predetermined, in the sense that they could not have been different even if antecedent conditions had been different. Had the international proletariat been both sufficiently organised and genuinely Marxist, it might have transformed the World War into an international civil war and fought its way to socialism. But the fact that the international proletariat was not prepared to do this was itself not a chance event, but followed, as we have already seen, from a whole constellation of other social forces.

Secondly, to take seriously the hypothesis that chance alone rules in history would involve the belief that anything could have happened at any time. This is the favourite assumption of all rationalist constructions which try to show that if only reason and intelligence had guided human behaviour, mankind would have been spared most of its evils. If only free-trade had been introduced at the time of the crusades, they say, hundreds of years of oppression would have been avoided; if slavery had only been abolished by the Church in the early centuries of Christendom, there would have been no civil war in America in 1861; if the crowned heads of Europe had only listened to Owen, we would all be living today in a communist commonwealth. Now just as it is true that there are chance elements in history, so is it true that many things in the past could have turned out differently from what they did; but only within a narrow range of possibilities conditioned by an antecedent state of affairs. Booth might very well have missed when he fired at Lincoln, but it is extremely improbable that Lincoln would have been able to carry out his reconstruction policy. The Church might have remained faithful to its primitive communism even after it had entered into concubinage with the Roman Empire, but it would have been no more able to arrest the course of economic development in Europe than its condemnation of all interest as usury was able a thousand years later to prevent the rise of capitalism.

Not only are the possibilities of development of material culture limited by determinate social forces, whose character we shall examine in detail below; even the autonomous creation of the mind, the flights of fancy by which men often think they transcend the limits of space and time – art, religion and philosophy – obey an order, in addition to their own, which is imposed upon them from without. Once they come into the world, they often exhibit relatively independent careers, but they cannot come into the world at any time and at any place:

Is the view of nature and of social relations which constitutes the basis of Greek phantasy and therefore of Greek art, possible in an age of automatic machinery, railroads, locomotives and electrical telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts & Co; Jupiter as against the lightning rod; and Hermes as against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains real control over the forces of nature. What becomes of the Goddess Fame side by side with Printing House Square? ... Or from another angle, is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press and printing machines? Do not singing and reciting and the muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer’s bar; and do not, in consequence, the necessary prerequisites of epic poetry disappear? [3]

The third reason for not surrendering the field of history to the realm of the unknown and unknowable is that despite the enormous variation in the motives of human conduct, there are certain statistical constants which are observable in all mass behaviour. Not only are life insurance companies able to reap a harvest by safe betting on the death rates of different groups of people, but all other social institutions can function only by presupposing certain large regularities of human behaviour. We build schools for children who are not yet born and jails for people who have not yet committed crimes. What act is more supremely personal than suicide? Yet it is possible to tell within narrow limits how many people will take their lives next year, and what percentage will be men or women, Jew or Gentile, married, single or divorced. And where the rates of death, suicide, marriage and divorce change – and they do, of course – it is often possible to find variations in other social phenomena with which to correlate them. These correlations often suggest, although they do not necessarily involve, causal connections. What accounts for the recurrence of these regularities? It is not even necessary to assume as did Karl Liebknecht in his revision of Marxism, [4] that there are ‘average material motives’ behind human behaviour which express nothing but economic interests. For the greater the diversity of motives of human behaviour, the more impressive is the statistical regularity which results, and the more probable it is that if an explanation of this regularity is to be found, it will not lie in any of the schedules of invariant psychological forces, dispositions or desires so popular among latter-day sociologists.

II: Alternative Conceptions of History: So far we have shown only that there are definite patterns in history which all philosophies of history must recognise. In terms of what principle can the succession of these patterns be explained? We must now distinguish between two generic theories of history and civilisation – the idealistic and materialistic – before the differentiating character of Marx’s theory can be grasped.

Idealistic theories of history explain the ordered sequence of events in terms of purpose – divine or natural – and refuse to go beyond the will or intelligence of the men who make history or of the God who controls it. Whatever order is discovered to exist, must be for them a teleological order attributable to good or bad purposes, to intelligence or stupidity. The future of civilisation depends upon man’s willingness and ability to purify his heart or improve his mind – as the case may be.

Supernatural idealism may be dismissed with a word. It can never explain why anything happens. It can only bestow its blessings upon an event after it has happened. Whether the appeal is to God’s will, Plato’s Form of the Good, Plotinus’ One, Hegel’s Absolute, Schopenhauer’s Will, E von Hartmann’s Unconscious or Bergson’s élan, it cannot predict or make intelligible a single historical occurrence. Hypostasis, rationalisation and fetishism are its intellectual techniques; quietism and the narcosis of resignation its political consequences. Every practical step it takes is at the cost of a logical contradiction. The pious man who prays, ‘O Lord, Thy Will be done’, in a church whose steeple flaunts a lightning rod to correct that will if it absentmindedly strikes in the wrong place, expresses only more dramatically the confusion of the idealistic philosopher who proclaims that the immediate pain of the part is the ultimate good of the whole and then practically translates this sentiment into the proposition that the slavery of one class is necessary for the leisure of another.

Psychological idealisms which look to the ideas and emotions of human beings for the final causes of social and historical change are legion. An adequate discussion of them would require a separate volume. Their common defect may be briefly indicated. First, in appealing to psychological entities like ambition, sympathy, love of domination, fear or whatever it is that is taken as central in the historical process, something is being invoked which, although existent, is not easily observable. The specific mechanism by which it presumably transmits its efficacy is rarely given, so that its influence appears to be highly mysterious. When mechanisms are constructed or discovered on the basis of the biological analogy of the nervous system, a greater difficulty presents itself. These psychological attitudes which the hypothetical mechanisms make possible are either constant or variable. If they are constant, how explain the enormous variety in the social patterns out of which those attitudes – since they are never found in a pure form – are analysed? Man may be a loving animal, a playful animal, a fighting animal. But how explain in these terms the differences in the way man loves (that is, the forms of the family), the character of his play (contrast the primitive dance and the modern cinema), and the manner of his contests (socialist competition and nationalist war). Assuming, now, that these psychological attitudes are variable and that they are correlated with varying social relations, the more urgent question asserts itself as to what determines this change in their character. When, where and to what extent do they flourish and become dominant? These questions cannot be explained without introducing some material conditioning factors, since, as we have seen, the variations in the motives of individual behaviour are too extreme, the motives themselves – fear, love, ambition, hate – too ambiguous in meaning, to warrant using any specific psychological element rather than another as the key term in explaining the character of historical effects.

If human motives are subjected to material control from without, that is, by changes in nature or economic organisation, are these latter, too, of a purposive character? Do they fall into the teleological order so essential to all idealism? He would be a hardy man to assert it, for he would have to read will, feeling and reason, which are specifically characteristic of individual men, back into the social and physical conditions out of which the life of man arises. No, we must conclude that ideas do not make history, for whether they are accepted or are not accepted depends upon something which is not an idea; that, although there can be no history without psychologically-motivated behaviour, the particular emotional set which asserts itself from out of the whole gamut of emotional life is selected by factors which are not psychological but social.

Materialistic philosophies of history turn away from the quest for objective meanings, spirit and purpose in the historical process and seek for its controlling conditions in some observable aspect of the physical and social environment. Before Marx, most materialist philosophies took a physical, chemical or biological approach to cultural life. Hobbes, for example, laid down a theoretical programme according to which it should be possible to deduce from the mathematical laws of motion and the positions of material particles in space and time, all political and social life. Feuerbach, that suggestive but too impressionable thinker, was so carried away by the primitive food chemistry of his day that he tried to summarise the political difference between England and Ireland as a difference between roast beef and potatoes. This might have been a starting point for a social analysis, but Feuerbach remained stuck in his chemistry. The result was that the same man who produced the most fruitful hypothesis of the nineteenth century in the psychology of religion, offered the most ludicrous revolutionary theory ever devised by attempting to base his politics upon food chemistry. Feuerbach actually believed that the revolution of 1848 had ended with the triumph of reaction because the poorer elements of the population had been made sluggish by their potato diet. ‘Potato blood [träges Kartoffelblut] can make no revolution!’, he cried.

Shall we then despair? [He inquires] Is there no other foodstuff which can replace potatoes among the poorer classes and at the same time nurture them to manly vigour and disposition? Yes, there is such a food-stuff, a food-stuff which is the pledge of a better future, which contains the seed of a more thorough, even if more gradual, revolution. It is beans. [5]

To be sure, not all chemical determinists were guilty of such excesses. But the same methodological absurdities were committed by the racialists and later by the social-Darwinists, who regarded all social life as a resultant of a biological struggle for existence.

The attempt has recently been made, especially by Ellsworth Huntington, to revive the geographical interpretation of history, already suggested by Herder and Montesquieu in the eighteenth century and more explicitly stated by Buckle in the nineteenth. It is asserted that there are certain climatic pulsations and shiftings of the climatic zone which can be correlated with the rise and fall of cultures. The nature of the evidence for these climatic changes is highly questionable. Uncontrolled extrapolations have been made from one region of the world to another – and from the present to the past. There is not the slightest ground for believing that the climate of Greece has varied in any appreciable way from the sixth century BC to the first AD – a period of tremendous social change. And even where periods of extreme climatic stress have been observed, as in the great floods and cold of the fourteenth century, no plausible connection has been established between these facts of climate and the profound subsequent changes in European material and ideal culture. Sometimes the effects attributed to natural forces are really the effects of social factors. For example, the devastation produced by periodic floods in China is not always the result of uncontrollable natural disasters but is due to the fact that the Chinese war lords divert to military purposes the tax money raised to keep the elaborate system of dykes and canals in repair.

There is no climate that cannot support different cultures; while similar cultures often flourish in different climates. The same arguments apply to the racial interpretation of history, especially where differences between the races are explained by differences in the climate and the selective effect it has had upon man. Were the wildest claims concerning the correlation of climate and cultural change to be accepted, still, in the absence of any knowledge of the specific ways in which climate affects creative impulses, we should have to look for more relevant social causes to explain the rise and fall of ideas.

The chief defect of all these materialistic philosophies is the attempt to reduce the social to merely a complicated effect of the non-social, and the consequent failure to observe that new types of relations arise in the associated behaviour of men which are irreducibly distinctive. In addition to the fundamental objection that the reduction of the specific qualities and laws of social behaviour to categories of physics and biology is not intelligible, the evidence points to the fact that in any given area these physical and biological factors are relatively constant while social life shows conspicuous variations. So much even Hegel, the idealist, had pointed out. Marxists admit that climate, topography, soil and race are genuine conditioning factors of social and historical activity; they deny that they determine the general character of a culture or its historical development. They claim that a truly historical philosophy must do greater justice to the activity of man upon all phases of cultural life than is provided for in the theories of the physical and biological determinists. Engels writes in his Dialektik und Natur:

Natural science as well as philosophy has completely neglected the influence of the activity of man upon his thinking. They know only nature on one side, thought on the other. But it is precisely the changes in nature brought about through men, and not nature as such alone, which is the most essential and primary foundation of human thought. In proportion to the extent to which man learned to change nature, his intelligence developed. The naturalistic conception of history, found, for example, more or less in Draper and other natural scientists according to which it is nature which exclusively acts upon man, and natural conditions which exclusively determine his historical development, is therefore one-sided. It forgets that man can react upon nature, change it, and create new conditions of existence. Of the ‘natural conditions’ of Germany as they existed when the German tribes came in, mighty little has remained. The surface of the soil, climate, vegetation, fauna, man himself have gone through infinite changes, and all by virtue of human activity. On the other hand, the changes that have taken place in the natural aspects of Germany in which human beings had no hand, is incalculably small. [6]

III: The Theory of Historical Materialism: In the remainder of this chapter we shall state briefly the central propositions of the theory of historical materialism, following Marx as closely as possible and leaving difficulties and problems for the succeeding chapters. We shall begin the exposition by stating Marx’s theory of social organisation and then go on to his theory of social development. They constitute respectively the (a) static and (b) dynamic phases of historical materialism.

A-I: Every society for Marx is a structurally interrelated cultural whole. Consequently no material or ideal aspect of that whole, whether it be its legal code, methods of manufacture, educational practices, religion or art, can be understood as an isolated phenomenon. It must be taken in relation to the way in which the system functions as a whole. Traditional elements may exist within it but they have been readapted to harmonise with the dominant patterns of thought and action. For example, Christianity in America is a traditional religion, but the specific character it exhibits today as distinct from the past, and in America as distinct from, say, Bavaria, is a reflection of the American frontier life with its alternations between drab experience and emotional release, American exhibitionism, philosophical optimism, go-getting tactics in business, etc. These in turn reflect the influence of American religion. But although cultural elements exist in some functional connection, they are not so organically related with one another that a change in one produces a change in all at the same time or to the same degree. Even in such a highly organised system as the human organism – though the whole organism is involved in the functioning of any of its parts – a change in some of the organs will not produce an immediate effect upon others and may leave still others comparatively unaffected. Similarly, no one can seriously contend that the latest refinements in philosophical logic must necessarily affect fashions in women’s dresses. Nonetheless important changes in fashions of dress and fashions of ideas reveal not only a development peculiar to their own fields, but changes outside of them. When women took to wearing breeches and abandoning corsets in the twentieth century and philosophers stressed race or national ideas in rewriting their histories, it was not because of any immanent logic within the fields of fashion or philosophy, but rather because of the impact of certain social and political forces from without. Or even more obviously, looking at the legal systems of Rome, the medieval church and twentieth-century Europe, we can see that, despite the similarity of some of the concepts, these systems did not grow out of one another, but out of deep social changes. A significant history of law – or even an analysis of law – then, would have to include an account of the social and cultural changes which found expression in formal and legal concepts. A knowledge of only the logical interpretation of these concepts would tell us more about logic than about law. Interestingly enough, the starting point of the development of Marx’s theory was the philosophy of law. In sketching his own intellectual history, he tells us that even earlier than 1844, in the course of a criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of law, he had become convinced ‘that legal relations as well as the forms of the state could neither be understood by themselves nor explained by the so-called progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material relations of life’. [7]

What is true for one phase of ideal culture is true for all. And if true for all, we can understand Marx’s paradoxical remark that, from his point of view, there is no history of ideas as such, but only a history of societies. That is to say, just as it is possible to regard the thoughts of an individual as events in his life – the proper history of their succession involving, therefore, his biography – so the rise and fall of leading ideas (their truth is another question) may be regarded as social events to be properly grasped only as part of world history. This was Hegel’s great empirical insight, overstated and obscured by a too inclusive organic determinism, but corrected and developed by Marx. To what extent this is compatible with pluralism will be considered in the succeeding chapter.

A-II: Within any civilisation law exercises an influence upon education, education upon religion, religion upon economic organisation, economic organisation upon politics, and vice versa. This is apparent to all but those who would build life out of one block. But to recognise that the cultural process is one of multiple reaction and interaction does not help us understand why the general character of one civilisation is distinct from another, or in what direction a particular civilisation has developed and will develop. To stop at the recognition of the complexity of the factors involved is eclecticism. Neither Hegel nor Marx was an eclectic. Both sought for a key which, allowing for the reciprocal influences of the parts of a culture upon each other, would provide a general explanation of the whole process. Hegel maintained that ‘political history, forms of government, art, religion and philosophy – one and all have the same common root – the spirit of the time’. [8] We have already seen that this is theology. Whether it has any meaning or not, its truth cannot be tested.

According to Marx’s hypothesis it is the material ‘relations of production’ (Produktionsverhältnisse) which condition the general character of cultural life:

The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundations, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. [9]

The economic structure of society, the Produktionsverhältnisse, includes, but cannot be identified with, the forces of production (Produktivkräfte) such as technology, existing skills, both physical and mental, inherited traditions and ideologies; nor is it the same as the conditions of production (Produktionsbedingungen) such as the natural supply of raw material, climate, race, population. The ‘relations of production’ express the way in which productive forces and productive conditions are organised by the social activity of man. They constitute the mode of economic production. Property relations are their legal expression. For Marx it is the relations of production, not the forces of production and not the conditions of production, which are the basis of the cultural superstructure. Later we shall see how important these distinctions are. At any rate it should be clear that it is only the relations of production that can properly be described as feudal or bourgeois. We cannot speak of feudal or bourgeois forces and conditions of production except in a metonymous sense.

A-III: Relations of production are indispensable if processes of production are to continue. The only question which can be intelligently asked about them is whether any given set of relations is still compatible with the continuance of production. Whatever set of relations exists is independent of the will of those who participate in production. A man finds himself an employer or employee, a feudal lord or serf, a slave or a slave holder. Some few individuals may succeed in changing their status, but no class as a whole can do so without revolutionising the existing system of social relations. Such a revolution cannot be undertaken at any time, nor if undertaken, succeed, save under certain determinate conditions, all of which are necessary for victory but no one of which is sufficient. Since a class is defined by the objective role it plays in the organisation of production, the sources of the antagonism between classes flows not from the consciousness (or lack of it) of individual members of the class but from the division of the fruits of production. To insure the system of division against discontent, to facilitate a greater appropriation of the product, the property relations which are the formal expression of the relations of production must be backed up by extra-economic power. The state is the institution and instrument through which the legal relations receive their moral and physical sanctions. No class can dominate production unless it controls the state. All political life and history, then, since it revolves around struggle for the mastery of the state power, is to be explained in terms of the class conflicts generated in the process of production.

A-IV: The division of society into classes gives rise to different ways of looking at the world. This is in part determined by the character of the actual work done, but even more so by the desire to preserve the existing order or to transform it. The political, ethical, religious and philosophical systems – no matter how high their summits tower – are reared on values that may be universal in form but never in fact. Analysis reveals that they all turn out to be relevant to the struggle for social power, even when they profess not to be concerned with it. A struggle for survival and domination goes on between ideas no less than between classes. Since those who control the means of production also control, directly or indirectly, the means of publication – the church, press, school, cinema, radio – the prevailing ideology always tends to consolidate the power and strengthen the authority of the dominant class. ‘In every epoch’, wrote Marx, ‘the ruling ideas have been the ideas of the ruling class.’ [10] It does not follow that ideological indoctrination is always deliberate or that those who embrace a doctrine can themselves distinguish between what is true in their belief and what is merely helpful in achieving their political purposes. In every system the deepest and most pervasive kinds of cultural conditioning are never the results of a mechanical inculcation. In the course of his life-career the individual imbibes the values and attitudes which are accepted as natural by those who surround him. A system of checks and approvals controls conduct at every step – not only on those rare occasions when an individual rises from one social level to another but even within his own class. The tone and model of behaviour, the very objects of ambition, are set by those who wield power or who serve those that wield it. In every age the prevalent conception of the ‘ideal man’ summarises the virtues and celebrates the status of the ruling group. Aristotle’s ‘magnanimous man’, Castiglione’s ‘courtier’, the medieval ‘fighting monk’, the English ‘gentleman’, the early American ‘log-cabin president’, and the late American ‘captain of industry’, inspired a pattern of feeling and action among the ruled as well as the rulers.

B-I: We now turn to the dynamic phase of the social process. If this is the way a culture is organised, how does it come about that it changes? In every social system a continuous change goes on in the material forces of production. In early societies, where production is primitive, these changes are often produced by natural phenomena such as the desiccation of rivers or the exhaustion of soil. Usually, however, and more particularly under capitalism, this change takes place in the development of the instruments of production. At a certain point in the course of their development the changed relations in the forces of production come into conflict with existing property relations. At what point? At a point when it no longer becomes possible on the basis of the existing distribution of income to permit the available productive processes to function to full capacity; when the great masses of human beings, out of whose labour all social value and capital have come, cannot be sustained by their own institutional handiwork. It then becomes recognised that ‘from forms of development of the forces of production the relations of production turn into their fetters’. [11]

B-II: The class that stands to gain by modifying the relations of production becomes revolutionary in order to permit the forces of production to expand. It asserts itself as a political force and develops a revolutionary ideology to aid in its struggles for state power. Sometimes it masks its class interests in the guise of slogans of universal appeal as did the French bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century when it declared for freedom from all oppression but fought only for the freedom to buy cheap and sell dear; sometimes it dresses itself up in the borrowed robes of antiquity or echoes the prophets, or, like Cromwell’s men, marches into battle to the song of hymns; but at all times, its doctrines are patterns of social action which function instrumentally to rally a frontal attack against the enemy, or by insidious criticism operate to undermine his morale. A class is not always critically conscious of what it really is fighting for. It is the shock and consequence of the struggle which brings it to self-consciousness. Strictly speaking it is only in the absence of self-consciousness that a set of ideas becomes an ideology:

... the distinction should always be made [writes Marx] between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness. [12]

The most important task of historical materialism is to criticise cultural and social doctrines in order to lay bare their social roots and presuppositions, to expose the contradiction between their avowed programme and their class allegiance, and to discover the social incidence which practical activity on their behalf will probably take.

B-III: Viewed in the light of contemporary experience, all history since the disappearance of primitive communism may be regarded as a history of class struggle. A class, it will be remembered, is any group of people which plays a definite role in production. This is not to say that all history is nothing but class struggles. As we shall see later, it only asserts that no other form of human association, whether it be of struggle or of cooperation, can be intelligibly regarded as the moving agent of social change. Every class struggle is at the same time a political struggle, for the state is never really neutral in class conflict, and a class struggle carried to successful completion is directed towards the overthrow of the existing state. Every ideal struggle, in so far as it bears in any way upon the class struggle, has political repercussions, and may be evaluated from a political point of view without prejudice to its own specific categories.

B-IV: The struggle between the capitalist and proletarian classes represents the last historic form of social opposition, for in that struggle it is no longer a question of which class should enjoy ownership of the social functions of production but of the existence of private ownership as such. The abolition of private ownership in the means of production spells the abolition of all classes. This can be accomplished only by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Political power is to be consolidated by the proletarian state during a transitional period in which the last vestiges of anti-social activity will be rooted out. When this is accomplished the proletarian state, to use Engels’ phrase, ‘withers away’, that is, its repressive functions disappear and its administrative functions become part and parcel of the productive process of a society in which ‘the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each’. [13]

This in bare outline is what historical materialism means. In the next chapter we shall dissociate it from what it is often interpreted to mean, and then proceed to a discussion of its validity.

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Notes

1. Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band III, p 265 [Karl Marx, The Holy Family – MIA

2. Engels, Feuerbach (Duncker edition), p 56 [Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Philosophie (Vienna & Berlin 1927); English translation Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. – MIA

3. Karl Marx, Introduction to Critique of Political Economy (English translation), pp. 310–11 [Karl Marx, Grundrisse – MIA