Herman Gorter

Historical Materialism

Source: the Collective Action Network.

Marked up: by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

Preface

by Karl Kautsky

This booklet by my friend Herman Gorter is being read by Dutch workers and will also be read by German-speaking workers as well, without the need for any other recommendation.

If I have inserted a few introductory remarks this is because, in a certain sense, I am responsible for the fact that one of his critics could express doubt concerning Gorter’s understanding of historical materialism.

In 1903, in an article in Die Neue Zeit, I expressed the view that, throughout the entire course of social evolution, the precepts of social morality have had absolutely no application outside of the social organization, the nation or the class to which one belongs, and that they are by no means extended to the enemy of the class or the nation. My verification of this reality has been zealously exploited ever since, especially by Catholic priests, against both me and my party. With their well-known love of truth, they distort the confirmation of a reality which has been observed for many thousands of years, since the beginning of human evolution, with respect to all classes and all nations, into an invitation to my party comrades to ignore the prevailing moral points of view and to lie shamefacedly to the masses of the people when the interests of the party require it. The irony of this affair resides in the fact that my argument was part of an article which was a polemic against the old revisionist, now former social democrat, G. Bernhardt, who claimed for the party comrades, “who are situated on a higher plane”, the right to deceive the masses.

Gorter, as it turns out, has subsequently re-confirmed this same point, but he has put it to a more serious use than I did. For this he has been attacked not by his political adversaries, but by his party comrades. He was accused of not understanding Marxism, and it was said that Marx himself held very different positions than Gorter.

As proof, they have referred to the statutes of the International, which contain this statement:

“The International Workingmen’s Association, as well as the individuals and groups of which it is composed, acknowledge truth, justice and morality as the rules governing their mutual affairs as well as their dealings with others, without consideration of color, creed or nationality.”

This sentence would appear to be in total disagreement with Gorter’s position. And these are Marx’s own words, since Marx was the author of the International’s statutes.

First of all, it must be pointed out that this sentence has nothing to do with Gorter’s position. The latter reiterates a fact which has prevailed everywhere from time immemorial. It is not historical fact which the statutes set forth, but requirements for membership in the International.

It cannot be maintained that these requirements were formulated in an especially clear and felicitous manner. What, after all, are truth, justice and morality? Is it not true that each class has its own point of view on justice and morality? Is it not true that solidarity, for example, belongs to proletarian morality? And do we want to comprehensively apply proletarian solidarity to the capitalists? There are undoubtedly many situations where capitalists and proletarians have the same interests. In such cases, the proletariat will much more rapidly practice the solidarity required by their morality than the capitalists. After the Messina earthquake, the proletarians who rushed to the aid of buried victims did not ask if they were rich or poor; they did what they could to save human beings. It was not proletarian considerations which obstructed the rescue efforts, but capitalist concerns, because they placed the highest priority on salvaging property.

Wherever it is not human beings who are confronting nature, but capitalists who are confronting proletarians, within the framework of society, it is impossible to speak of solidarity between them; one group tries to reduce wages, the other tries to increase them. Each can only gain at the expense of the other.

And wherever proletarians enter into conflict with capitalists, they are not obliged to assume an attitude of absolute sincerity towards them. Who would want to require striking workers to communicate to the capitalists the whole truth concerning the size of their strike fund? To deceive the capitalist enemy concerning this figure could in some circumstances literally become a moral duty for a proletarian endowed with class consciousness.

That sentence in the statutes of the International does, of course, contain a kernel of truth. We must acknowledge truth, justice and morality as rules for our behavior in relations among ourselves. Truth must rule among all the combatants of an army; therefore, we do not have the right to tell a lie to the comrades when we believe it is in the interest of the party. This is why, in the article I wrote in 1903 for Die Neue Zeit, I said:

“Just as there are economic laws which are valid for every form of society, there are also moral principles from which no one can be exempt. One of the most important of these principles is the duty of sincerity towards comrades. This duty has never been recognized towards the enemy; on the other hand, without it there can be no lasting cooperation between comrades who are on the same side. It is valid for all societies without class contradictions; and it is valid within a society full of class contradictions for every party specifically composed of class comrades. Lying to party comrades has always been permitted in those parties in which two parties acted in concert, each associating with the other for the purpose of exploiting their joint power in the interest of each. This is the morality of the jesuitical party and of clericalism generally.” [1]

It is perfectly legitimate for the statutes of the International to expressly reject this jesuit morality.

To the best of my knowledge, the only time Marx invoked this statutory principle, he did so in connection with his revulsion at the idea of lying to comrades. He attacked the Bakuninists for forming a secret organization within the International; this organization had “prescribed as the highest duty of its adepts the task of deceiving the profane internationals concerning the existence of the secret organization, concerning its motives and even concerning the purposes of its words and deeds.” [2]

Without mutual sincerity, without reciprocal trust among its members, it is impossible for a democratic party to conduct an energetic struggle.

It is, however, inconceivable that a duty of sincerity should be established towards all men, in every circumstance; towards the police who are persecuting our friends, for example.

Therefore, if the passage from the statutes of the International was indeed written by Marx, it cannot be maintained that he was particularly successful in his choice of words or that an idea worthy of consideration was provided with an opportune form. This is certainly surprising, coming from Marx. But Marx did not write this passage. This was first proven, to the best of my knowledge, by Jäckh in his history of the International. I came to the same conclusion and this has received further confirmation from Marx’s daughter, comrade Laura Lafargue.

One must not forget that Marx was not an autocrat in the International. He was obliged, in the interests of the unity of the proletarian class struggle, to accept many decisions with which he was not at all pleased.

He did not write the statutes of the International all by himself. The supporters of Proudhon and Mazzini also participated in the drafting of the statutes. If one wants to make Marx responsible for the passage in question because it is in the statutes of the International, then he would also share responsibility for the following passage, which, from the points of view of both style and logic, is of a piece with the former, which immediately precedes it:

“The International Workingmen’s Association, as well as the individuals and groups of which it is composed, acknowledge truth, justice and morality as the rules governing their mutual affairs as well as their dealing with all others, without consideration of color, creed or nationality.”

“It is considered to be each man’s duty to demand civil rights and human rights not just for himself but also for all those who do their duty. No rights without duties, no duties without rights.”

Any remaining doubts about whether or not Marx was responsible for the passage about truth and morality will be dispelled as soon as the close relation between that passage and this other one which demands civil rights for those who “do their duty” is recognized. Here we find a provision which is simply ridiculous, since its interpretation is elastic. What authority will decide upon the question of who is doing their duty and, consequently, who is worthy of enjoying civil rights? It was not just the bourgeoisie and the workers who had very different opinions about the rights of the citizen, as there have been even greater differences among the workers during the era of the International. For they still followed in the footsteps of the bourgeoisie in many ways. Among Proudhon’s supporters the strike was considered to be an act of dereliction of duty. Thus, away with the strikers’ right to vote! It never would have occurred to Marx, for example, to demand universal suffrage only for those “who do their duty”.

Naturally, Marx was incapable of opposing the two sentences of the statutes which he helped to draft and which he accepted in their entirety. I have been informed however, by a trustworthy source, that he privately expressed his discontent with these two paragraphs. But evidence of his discontent is also publicly available.

The provisional statutes were first published in 1864 in London as an appendix to the English edition of Marx’s Inaugural Address. They were published in German in April 1866 in the Geneva Vorbote by Johann Phillip Becker. The two paragraphs in question were completely omitted from that edition. It would be idle to speculate that Johann Phillip Becker was opposed to them. He hardly ever concerned himself with theoretical questions.

Could it have been Marx who was behind the excision of these paragraphs from the provisional statutes? It was the absence of these two paragraphs in the German edition of the statutes which, even before I read Jäckh, first called my attention to the fact that there were differences of opinion among those who drafted them and that these two paragraphs brought the contradiction to a head.

The idea that various sentences which horrified Marx were inserted into the statutes by the Proudhonians can be deduced from the following facts. The draft provisional statutes contained this resolution in Section 9:

“Every member of the International Workingmen’s Association will receive, in case of emigration to another country, the fraternal assistance of the associated workers.”

This was not good enough for the Program Committee and for the plenary session of the Geneva Congress which approved the final draft of the statutes, which added the following:

“This assistance consists of:

a) the right to be informed of everything concerning his trade in his new home;

b) the right to credit under circumstances determined by the regulations of his section and to the full amount guaranteed by the same.”

Here the undeniable source of these insertions is clear; it is petit-bourgeois Proudhonism, which sought to emancipate the proletariat with its exchange banks and with free mutual credit, just as it dreamed of an eternal justice which would transform private property from a motive for egoism into an ideal institution.

Proudhonism dominated the entire 1866 Congress. The resolution on the trade unions which had been proposed by the general council and which remains exemplary to this day, hardly interested the delegates at all. The debate on this topic was perfunctory. The following resolution, which was proposed by the Parisian delegation, was most passionately debated and unanimously adopted:

“1) The Congress recommends to all sections that they undertake studies of international credit and send the results thereof to the general council, and that they publicize these studies for the benefit of all comrades in their ‘bulletins’, so that, at the next congress, the comrades will be able to pass resolutions in connection therewith.”

“2) The Congress recommends the immediate study of the idea of the cooperative fusion of all the present and future workers credit institutions into a future central bank of the International Workingmen’s Association.”

Just one more resolution to give an idea of the character of the Geneva Congress; it concerns female labor.

Varlin and Bourdon proposed the following resolution:

“The lack of training, the degree of overwork, an exceedingly low rate of pay and unhygienic conditions in the factories are the causes, for the women who work in them today, of physical and moral decline. These causes can be eliminated by a better organization of labor, that is, by cooperation. The task is not to remove woman from labor that she needs in order to live, but to adapt it to her capacities.”

This excellent resolution was defeated; the following resolution, proposed by the Proudhonians Chemale, Tolain and Fribourg, was adopted instead:

“From the physical, moral and social perspectives, female labor must be rejected, as it is a cause of degeneration and is one of the sources of the moral decline of the working class.”

“Woman has received certain tasks from nature, and her place is in the family; her duty consists in raising children, bringing order to man’s life, accustoming him to family life and improving his habits. These are the services which woman must provide, the jobs she must do; to impose other tasks upon her is a bad thing.”

This limited concept of female labor is also truly Proudhonian.

One therefore arrives at the most false conclusions by simply attributing all the declarations of the International to Marx. Many of them were inspired precisely by anti-Marxist elements. Whoever seeks to invoke the declarations of the International in order to characterize Marxist thought, must first have a clear grasp of that theory and its differences with respect to the spirit of the other socialist schools of thought which flourished during the era of the International.

One can be a very good Marxist and have a very good understanding of historical materialism yet nonetheless disagree with numerous resolutions of the International and with many passages in its statutes.

This applies, first of all, to the passages Marx did not compose. But it would not be very Marxist to want to stop at Marx’s words and bow down before them without demonstrating a critical mind. From the first moment of coming into contact with his method, it is natural that no one would want to unnecessarily disagree with a giant of thought like Marx. Nor, in the present case, is this necessary.

So, as far as I know, his divergence from the statutes of the International is the sole objection which has been offered against Gorter’s understanding of historical materialism. Now, readers of the German language will be able to judge his pamphlet for themselves.

K. Kautsky

I

The Theme of this Pamphlet

Social democracy embraces not merely the aspiration to transform private property in the means of production, that is, natural forces and instruments of labor, as well as the soil, into common property, and to achieve this thanks to the political struggle, to the conquest of State power; social democracy embraces not just a political and economic struggle; it is more: it also embraces a struggle of ideas over a conception of the world, a struggle fought against the possessing classes.

The worker who wants to help defeat the bourgeoisie and bring his class to power must eliminate from his mind the bourgeois ideas which have been inculcated in him since his childhood by the State and the Church. It is not enough to join the trade union and the political party. He will never be able to be victorious with them if he does not transform himself internally into a different human being than the one molded by his rulers. There is a certain conception, a conviction, a philosophy, one might say, which the bourgeoisie rejects but which the worker must embrace if he wants to defeat the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie want to convince the workers that mind is above material social existence, that mind alone rules and forms matter. They have been using mind as a means of domination: they have science, law, politics, art and the Church behind them and their rule incorporates all of these things. Now they want to make the workers believe that this is an expression of the natural order; that mind by its nature rules over material social existence, that it rules over the workers in the factory, the mine, the farm, the railroad and the ship. The worker who believes this, who believes that mind creates production, labor and social classes by itself, this worker submits to the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the priests, the experts, etc., because the bourgeoisie controls the majority of the sciences, it controls the Church, and thus mind, and, if this is true, it must rule.

To preserve its power, the possessing class is trying to convince the workers to accept this as true.

But the worker who wants to become a free being, who wants to place the State under the power of his class and seize the means of production from the possessing classes, this worker must understand that the bourgeoisie, with its way of depicting things, turns them on their head and that it is not mind which determines existence, but social existence which determines mind.

If the worker understands this, then he will free himself from the mental rule of the possessing classes and will oppose their way of thinking with his own more just and more resilient way of thinking.

Furthermore, because social evolution and social existence itself are moving in the direction of socialism, because they are paving the way for socialism, the worker who understands this and who understands that his socialist thinking comes from social existence, will recognize that what is happening all around him in human society is the cause of what is produced in his head, that socialism is born in his head because it is growing outside, in society. He will recognize and will feel that he possesses the truth about reality; this will give him the courage and the confidence that are necessary for the social revolution.

This understanding is therefore just as indispensable for proletarian combat as the trade union and the political struggle; one could say that without this knowledge the economic and political struggles could not be carried through to the end. Mental slavery prevents the worker from correctly prosecuting the material struggle; a poor proletarian, his consciousness of being mentally stronger than his masters raises him above them and also confers upon him the power to defeat them in reality.

Historical materialism is the doctrine which explains that it is social existence which determines mind, and which obliges thought to take particular paths and which thus determines the will and the acts of individuals and classes.

In this pamphlet we shall attempt to prove to the workers, as simply and as clearly as possible, the truth of this doctrine.



II

What Historical Materialism Is Not

However, before we proceed to a clear statement of what historical materialism is, in anticipation of encountering certain prejudices and foreseeable misunderstandings, we would like to first of all say what historical materialism is not. For besides the historical materialism that is the doctrine of social democracy, a particular doctrine established by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, there is also philosophical materialism, and various systems of that kind. And these systems, unlike historical materialism, do not address the question of how the mind is compelled by social existence, by the mode of production, technology, and labor, to proceed by way of determined paths, but rather the question of the relation between body and mind, matter and soul, God and the world, etc. These other systems, which are not historical but merely philosophical, attempt to find an answer to the question: what is the nature of the relationship between thinking in general and matter, or, how did thinking arise? Historical materialism, on the other hand, asks: why is it that, in any particular era, thought takes on one form or another? General philosophical materialism will say, for example: matter is eternal, and mind is born from it under certain conditions; it then disappears when its conditions no longer exist; while historical materialism will say: the fact that proletarians think in a different way than the possessing classes is a consequence of such-and-such causes.

General philosophical materialism asks about the nature of thought. Historical materialism asks about the causes of changes in thought. The former tries to explain the origin of thought, the latter its evolution. The former is philosophical, the latter historical. The former assumes a context in which there is no thought, no mind; the latter assumes the existence of mind. The big difference is apparent.

Those who want to examine and learn to understand the doctrine of social democracy must begin by paying particular attention to this difference. For their opponents, and especially all the religious believers, want at all costs to confound the two systems and, as a result of the revulsion expressed by the religious workers for the former doctrine, to banish the other system as well. The pastors of the church-goers say: materialism proclaims that the entire world is nothing but matter in mechanical motion, that matter and force are the only things that absolutely and eternally exist, that thought is simply a secretion of the brain, just as bile is a secretion of the liver; they say that the materialists are worshippers of matter and that historical materialism is the same thing as philosophical materialism. Many workers, especially in the Catholic regions, which still cling to the servile adoration of the spirit and where those who are acquainted with the true ideas of social democracy concerning the nature of mind, as they have been presented by Joseph Dietzgen, are few and far between, heed these warnings and are afraid to listen to social democratic speakers who want to lead them to the worship of matter and thus to eternal damnation.

These claims are false. We shall show, by means of a series of examples, that historical materialism does not address the general relationship between mind and matter, soul and body, God and the world, thought and existence, but only explains the changes which thought undergoes and which are produced by social transformations.

But if we prove that historical materialism is not the same thing as philosophical materialism, we do not thereby intend to imply that historical materialism cannot lead to a general conception of the world. To the contrary, historical materialism is, like every empirical science, a means to reach a general philosophical conception of the world. This is an especially important aspect of its meaning for the proletariat. It brings us closer to a general representation of the world. This representation is not, however, that of the mechanical-material view, any more than it is that of the catholic-christian, evangelical or liberal view; it is another conception altogether, a new conception, a new vision of the world which is particular to social democracy. Historical materialism is not a conception of the world strictly speaking; it is a path, a means, one of many means to reach such a conception, like Darwinism, all the sciences, Marx’s doctrine of capital and Dietzgen’s doctrine of mind, or the knowledge of such means. Any one of these means alone is not enough to attain this conception of the world but all of them together lead to it.

Since we shall only be discussing historical materialism in this pamphlet, we shall obviously not speak in any detail about the general philosophical conception of social democracy. In relation to some of the examples which shall help shed light on our topic, we shall nevertheless encounter opportunities to display a glimpse of this general conception of the world, so that the reader may acquire some understanding of this totality of which historical materialism constitutes one part alongside so many other sciences.



III

The Content of the Doctrine

What, then, is the general content of our doctrine? Before we start to demonstrate its accuracy and its truth, we shall first provide the reader with a clear general outline of what we intend to prove.

For anyone who observes the social life which surrounds him it is obvious that society’s members live in certain mutual relations. They are not social equals but occupy higher or lower ranks and are opposed to one another in groups or classes. The superficial observer might think that these relations are nothing but property relations: some possess the land, others the factories, the means of transport or commodities destined for sale, while others possess nothing. Or he might think that the difference is principally a political difference; certain groups have the power of the State at their disposal, others have little or no influence over the State. But the more penetrating observer sees that, behind property and political relations, there are production relations, that is, relations in which men confront one another in the production of society’s needs.

Workers, businessmen, ship-owners, rentiers, big landowners, farmers, wholesalers and shopkeepers are what they are due to the place they occupy in the production process, in the transformation and circulation of products. This difference is even more profound than the distinction between someone with money and someone without money. The transformation of the wealth of nature is the basis of society. We are reciprocally involved in relations of labor and production.

On what, then, are these labor relations based? Are all men, as capitalists and workers, big landowners, farmers and day laborers, somehow simply floating in the air, so they can all call each other members of society?

No, labor relations are based on technology, on the instruments with which the land and nature are transformed. Industrialists and proletarians rely upon machinery, they are dependent on machinery. If there were no machines, there would be no industrialists or proletarians, or at least not the kind we know today.

The occupation of the artisan weaver gave birth to work at home for the whole family; the occupation of weaver in a small workshop engendered a society of small masters and clerks; large-scale steel weaving machinery powered by steam or electricity led to a society of great industrialists, stock brokers, directors, bankers and wage workers.

Production relations are not suspended in the air like clouds of smoke or steam; they form solid boundaries within which men are enclosed. The production process is a material process; its instruments are the walls and foundations of the space we occupy.

Technology, the instruments of production and the productive forces comprise society’s infrastructure, the real basis upon which the whole gigantic highly-developed organism of society is raised. But the same men who establish their social relations on the basis of their mode of production also form their ideas, representations, concepts and principles on the basis of these relations. The capitalists, the workers and the other classes who, as a result of the technology of the society in which they live, are obliged to confront one another in specific relations – as master and servant, property owner and the propertyless, landowner, farmer, and day laborer – these same capitalists, workers, etc., also think as capitalists, workers, etc. They form their ideas and representations not as abstract beings, but as real, living, quite concrete men; they are social men who live in a specific society.

Therefore, it is not just our material relations which depend on technology, and are based on labor and the productive forces, but also, since we think within these material relations and under these relations, our thoughts depend directly on these relations and thus indirectly on the productive forces.

The modern social existence of the proletariat was created by the machine. The proletariat’s social thoughts, which result from the relation in which the proletariat as such finds itself, are then indirectly based on the modern replacement of labor by machinery, they indirectly depend on it. And the same is true of all the classes of capitalist society. For the relations within which individual men confront one another are not just applicable to each man individually. Socially, each man is not situated in a unique relation which applies to him as a personal fact as opposed to other men; he has many fellow men who are in exactly the same relation with each other. A worker – to continue with this example – is not alone as a wage worker in relation to other men, he is one of numerous wage workers, he is a member of a class of millions of wage workers who, as wage workers, find themselves in the same situation. And the same is true of all men in the civilized world; everyone belongs to a group, a class whose members are involved in the same way in the production process. Therefore, not only is it true that a worker, a capitalist, a peasant, etc., will think socially as the work relations make them think, but their ideas and representations will coincide in their principle characteristics with those of hundreds of thousands of other people who find themselves in the same situation as them. There is a class thought, just as there is a class position in the labor process.

The form – here we continue to occupy ourselves with the general outline of our doctrine – in which the work relations of the different classes (capitalists, businessmen, workers, etc.) are revealed is at the same time a property relation in capitalist society and, in general, in any society divided into classes. The capitalists, the wage workers, the shopkeepers and the peasants not only occupy their own positions within production, but also in terms of possession, of property. The shareholder who pockets the dividends plays in the production process not just the role of supplier of money and parasite, but also the role of co-owner of the business, the means of production, the land, the tools, the raw materials and the products. The shopkeeper is not only someone who participates in exchange, an intermediary, but is also an owner of commodities and of commercial profit. The worker is not merely the person who makes the goods, but is also the owner of his labor power, which he sells in each instance, and of the price which his labor power fetches. In these terms, work relations, in a society which is divided into classes, are at the same time property relations.

It has not always been so. In primitive communist society, the land, the communally-built dwelling, the herds, in a word, the principal means of production, were common property. Essential social labor was carried out jointly; setting aside gender and age distinctions, there was equality in the production process and there was little or no difference in the control of property.

But after the division of labor advanced so far that all kinds of special jobs were created, and, thanks to an improved technology and a more developed division of labor, after a surplus above and beyond what was immediately needed for survival was produced, certain eminent professions – distinguished by knowledge or valor – such as those of priest and warrior, succeeded in appropriating this surplus and, ultimately, the means of production as well. This is how classes were born and this is how private property became the form in which labor relations have been manifested.

“Thanks to the development of technology and the division of labor, classes were created. Class relations and property relations rest upon labor. Thanks to the development of technology, which has placed certain professions in a position to take possession of the means of production, the propertied and propertyless were born and the vast majority of the people were transformed into slaves, serfs and wage workers.”

And the surplus which technology and labor produce beyond what is immediately needed has become increasingly important, and so has the wealth of the owners, and all the more stark is the class contrast for those who have no property. And, therefore, the class struggle has grown proportionately, the struggle waged by the classes for the possession of the products and means of production, and has thus become the general form of the struggle for existence of men in society. Labor relations are property relations, and property relations are relations between classes which are engaged in struggle with one another; and all these relations, taken as a whole, rest upon the development of labor, they result from the labor process and technology.

But technology does not stand still. It is part of a faster or slower development and movement, the forces of production grow, the mode of production changes. And when the mode of production changes, the relations in which men face one another must necessarily change as well. The relations of the old small-scale master craftsmen among themselves and with their apprentices are completely different from the present-day relations of the big business owners among themselves and with the wage-earning proletariat. Mechanized production has resulted in a modification of the old relations. And since, in a class society, production relations are at the same time property relations, the latter are revolutionized along with the former. And since conceptions, representations, ideas, etc. are formed within the framework and as functions of the relations in which men live, consciousness is also modified when labor, production and property undergo changes.

Labor and thought are parts of a continuous process of change and development. “By transforming nature by means of his labor, man simultaneously transforms his own nature.” The mode of production of material life conditions all of social life. “It is not man’s consciousness which determines his existence, but his social existence which determines his consciousness.”

At a certain stage of development, however, the material productive forces of society enter into conflict with the existing relations of production and property. The new productive forces cannot develop within the old relations; they cannot fully unfold within them. A struggle then begins between those who have an interest in preserving the old relations of production and property and those who have an interest in the development of the new productive forces. An era of social revolution ensues and lasts until the new productive forces are victorious and new relations of production and property arise in which the new productive forces can flourish.

And, by way of this revolution, man’s thought changes as well; it is modified with and within this revolution.

I have briefly summarized the content of our doctrine. It can be recapitulated in an outline form as follows:

I. Technology, the productive forces, forms the basis of society.

The productive forces determine the relations of production, the relations in which men confront one another in the production process.

The relations of production are at the same time property relations.

The relations of production and property are not only relations between persons, but between classes.

These relations of class, property and production (in other words, social existence) determine man’s consciousness, that is, his conceptions of rights, politics, morality, religion, philosophy, art, etc.

II. Technology is undergoing continuous development.

Consequently, the productive forces, the mode of production, property and class relations, are also undergoing constant modification.

Therefore, man’s consciousness, his conceptions and representations of rights, politics, morality, religion, philosophy, art, etc., are also modified along with the relations of production and the productive forces.

III. The new technology, at a certain stage of development, enters into conflict with the old relations of production and property.

Finally, the new technology prevails.

The economic struggle between the conservative sectors which have an interest in the preservation of the old forms and the progressive sectors which have an interest in the rise of the new forces enters into consciousness under juridical, political, religious, philosophical and artistic forms.

Now we shall attempt to prove that our theory is correct. By means of a series of examples we shall demonstrate the causal relation between changes in human technology and changes in human thought. If we succeed in doing so, then we shall have toppled an important pillar upon which the power of the capitalists over the workers rests. We shall thus have proven that no divine providence or human mental superiority can prevent the workers form ruling the world when technology transforms them into intellectual and material masters.



IV

Our Examples

The examples we shall provide below, first of all, must be very simple. They must be understood by workers who have little historical knowledge. They must thus possess a persuasive force as a result of their clarity. We shall therefore choose large-scale, wide-ranging phenomena, whose effects are visible everywhere.

If our doctrine is correct, it must obviously be valid for all of history.

It must be able to explain all class struggles, all radical changes in the thought of classes and society.

A great deal of historical knowledge, however, is required to explain, on the basis of our doctrine, examples drawn from previous centuries. We shall show how dangerous it is to want to apply our doctrine to eras or situations concerning which we have little or no knowledge. Neither the reader nor the author of this pamphlet possesses such extensive historical knowledge. We shall therefore only provide very simple examples, but we shall seek them primarily in our own era; large-scale phenomena which every worker knows or could know from his environment, changes in social relations and social thought which must be noticed by every living man. Questions, in short, which are of the greatest interest for the existence of the working class and which can only be satisfactorily resolved for that class by social democracy.

Furthermore, we shall have in this manner simultaneously conducted good propaganda work.

But very important and seemingly powerful arguments will be presented against our doctrine.

This is why, when we are discussing all kinds of mental phenomena, such as changes in political ideas, religious representations and other similar facts, we shall pause to consider and to combat on each occasion one of the most significant arguments of our opponents, so that our doctrine can be progressively approached from every angle and a good view of the whole can be obtained.

The material modifications brought about by technological change can quite easily be distinguished. In every industrial sector, in the means of transportation and in agriculture, too, everywhere technology is changing, the productive forces are changing. We see this taking place every day before our eyes.

Typesetting and the manufacture of printed materials were until recently still generally done by hand. But technological progress has brought the linotype machine, which selects the letters in obedience to the hand of the typographer and puts them in their place.

Glass-blowing was done by mouth. Technology has invented tools which manufacture glass vases, bottles, etc.

Butter was made by hand. A machine has been invented which churns vast quantities of milk in a much shorter period of time; this machine is now universally employed.

Dough is kneaded by hand in the little baker’s shop; the machine does it in a bread factory.

Light was produced by the mother of the family in the old-fashioned household. She cleaned and filled the lamp, taking care to trim the wick. In the modern home, gas or electricity is supplied from afar by machinery.

Everywhere you look, you see changes in the productive forces in every sector of industry, as well as increasingly more rapid transformation and faster-paced evolution. The machine executes operations that were once thought to be impossible for machines.

Along with the productive forces, the relations of production and the mode of production also change. We have already mentioned weaving machinery and how it introduced new relations among the business owners, and between the business owners and the workers. Previously, there were numerous artisans with adjoining little workshops, and proportionally few wage workers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of wage workers and proportionally few factory owners, few entrepreneurs in this industry. The manufacturers conduct themselves in their relations with one another like great lords while they act like Asiatic despots towards the workers. How these relations have changed! All of this, furthermore, was determined by the machine alone.

For it is the machine that has enriched those who could afford to buy one, the machine put them into a position to overcome their competitors, to obtain an enormous amount of capital on credit and, perhaps, to form a trust. And it is the machine, the force of production, which has caused the small business owners to lose their property and has compelled thousands of them to enter the ranks of wage labor.

And what consequences have resulted from the new productive forces employed in the production of butter? The machine, which transforms thousands of liters of milk into butter, was too expensive for the average peasant, who furthermore did not produce enough milk to use it. That is why a hundred peasants join together to buy one, and now they process their milk collectively. The productive force has been modified, but so too have the relations of production, as well as the whole way the product is produced; where formerly one hundred people worked separately, where the wives and children of the peasants made butter under conditions of agricultural exploitation, now one hundred people cooperate to make wage workers labor on behalf of their collective. The peasants, their wives, their children and a certain number of proletarians have entered into new relations of production with each other and with society as a whole.

It used to be the woman of the house who took care of the gas or oil lamp; hundreds of thousands of women were kept busy providing lighting for the home. But if the municipality builds a manufactured gas plant or an electric power station, then the relations of production are modified. It is not a particular human being who produces, but a vast social organism: the municipality. A new type of worker, previously rare, makes its appearance by the thousands: municipal employees, who have a totally different relation to society than the old producers of illumination.

Long ago, wagons were used to transport commodities and mail from one place to another. Technology has invented the locomotive and the telegraph and has thus made it possible for the capitalist State to attract the transport of goods, men and information. Hundreds of thousands of workers and employees have entered into new relations of production. The human masses in the municipality, the State or the Empire, are in a direct relation of production with the collectivity, and are much more numerous than the armed hordes of the past.

There is no activity which has not seen technology introduce a new way of production. From top to bottom, from scientific research in chemistry, from the inventor’s laboratory to the most humble labor and sewage disposal in a modern big city, technology and work routines are constantly changing. Every activity has been revolutionized, so that inventions are no longer the work of chance or of genius but are the work of people who are trained for the purpose of discovering inventions, and who consciously pursue certain paths towards that end.

One after another, production sectors are transformed or even totally eliminated. The economic life of a modern capitalist country is like a modern city where new construction replaces whole neighborhoods.

The new technology engenders big capital, and thus also gives rise to the modern banking and credit system which multiplies yet further the powers of big capital.

It gives rise to modern trade, it gives rise to the export of goods and capital, and that is why the seas are covered with fleets and whole regions of the world are subjected to capitalism for the production of minerals and agricultural products.

It gives rise to such huge capitalist interests that only the State is powerful enough to defend them. It therefore gives rise to the modern capitalist State itself, with its militarism, its taste for naval flotillas, its colonialism and imperialism, with its army of functionaries and its bureaucracy.

Is it necessary for us to use such examples to draw the attention of the workers to the fact that the new production relations are also property relations? The number of owners of means of production in the German Empire decreased by 84,000 in industry and 68,000 in agriculture between 1895 and 1907, at the same time that the population dramatically increased; on the other hand, the number of men who live from the sale of their labor power increased by three million in industry and 1,660,000 in agriculture. This change, which affected not just production relations but also property relations, was provoked by the new technology, which has smothered small business and has transformed hundreds of thousands of the children of the petit-bourgeoisie and peasantry into wage workers. And what else is the so-called new middle class but a class with new property relations? Functionaries, whose numbers are rapidly increasing, officials, scientists, the intelligentsia, the higher-paid professors, the engineers, chemists, lawyers, doctors, artists, managers, traveling salesmen, the small shopkeepers dependent on big capital, everyone who receives remuneration for services to the bourgeoisie directly or indirectly by way of the State, this new middle class exists in a property relation distinct from that of the old autonomous middle class. And the modern big capitalists who rule the world and world politics with their banks, their syndicates, their trusts and their cartels, exist in property relations vis-à-vis society which are totally different from those of the Florentines, the Venetians, or the Hanseatic, Flemish, Dutch or English traders and industrialists of centuries past.

Production and property relations are therefore not personal, but class relations.

The new technology creates, on the one hand, propertyless people whose numbers are increasing at a faster rate than the general population, who are slowly becoming the majority of the population, and who receive almost none of the social wealth, as well as a very large number of petit-bourgeois and peasants, employees and practitioners of the most diverse trades, who get very little of the social wealth. On the other hand, however, technology creates a proportionally small number of capitalists who, by way of their political and economic domination, get the greater part by far of the social wealth.

And the surplus they amass each year is once again used to exploit those who have little or nothing, the workers, peasants and petit-bourgeois, and foreign peoples in countries which have not yet undergone capitalist development, so that accumulation takes place, at compound interest, progressively growing, and deprivation is aggravated on the one hand, and a surplus of social wealth comes into being on the other hand.

The constant progress of technology therefore creates not only new relations of production and property, but also new class relations and, in our case, a sharper class divide and more widespread class struggle.

Is it not true that the whole world sees this? It is really not hard to see. The classes have turned on each other; the contemporary class struggle is sharper, more extensive and more profound than it has been for fifty years. With each passing year the abyss has grown wider and deeper and is getting bigger every day. It is absolutely clear that the cause of this is technology.

It is easy to understand the material side of this issue. Does it take many words to explain to the son of a Saxon or Westphalian peasant, who has become a factory worker, that it was technology which made this happen, that it was a result of the new methods of production? That there was no future for him in a small business, that today’s competition is too fierce, that too much capital is required, that only a few people can succeed in small business, but that the great majority must labor fruitlessly? Big capital is big technology; who can amass such capital with big technology? The modern worker knows full well that the material situation, bad food, bad housing, and bad clothing for him and his class, are the consequences of the new production relations which have arisen from the old production relations thanks to technology. It is not hard to discern the material existence of all the classes in clearly-defined relation to the relations of production and of property and, therefore, to the productive forces. Now no one can point to the expensive clothes, the excellent food, and the luxurious home of the manufacturer as a gift from God, because it is clear that he obtained his well-being and his fortune thanks to exploitation. No one can see “predestination” at work in the downfall of the wholesaler or the speculator, because the cause of their downfall must be sought in value or commodity exchange. No one can speak of heaven’s wrath when a worker is struck down by unemployment for months, by illness and enduring poverty, because the natural causes, or, more properly speaking, the social causes of all these things, all of which have their roots in the new technologies, are sufficiently well-known, at least by the worker. Nor can one any longer stand for making personal intellectual faculties or individual character responsible for one’s prosperity or misfortune, because in the big business which is replacing everything, millions of people with excellent talents cannot advance.

Society has reached such a level of development that the material causes of our material existence openly reside, for all to see, in society as well as in nature.

Just as we know that the sun is the source of all material life on earth, so too do we know that the labor process and the relations of production are the causes of the way things are in social material life.

If the worker would look calmly and steadily at his material existence, that of his comrades and of the classes above him, he would discover that what has been said above is correct. This would free him from many prejudices and superstitions.

At first sight, the question becomes more difficult when it is a matter of recognizing the relation between material labor, the relations of production and property, and mental existence. The soul, the spirit, the heart, reason; these have been presented to us for a long time, to us and our predecessors, as what is our own, as what is best, as the all-powerful (and even, from time to time, as all that exists)!

Nonetheless ... when we say: “Social existence determines consciousness,” this thesis is, undoubtedly, in its universal significance, a great new truth but, even before Marx and Engels, that which pointed in this direction and paved the way for the higher truth which they discovered, had already been explained, proven and acknowledged.

Does not every educated man believe, does he not know, for example, that before Marx and Engels had clearly proven so much, men’s customs, experience, education and environment also shaped them mentally? And our customs – are they not products of society? The men who educate us – have they not been educated themselves by society, and do they not give us a social education? Our experience – is it not social experience? We do not live alone like Robinson Crusoe! Our environment is, then, society first of all; we can only live in nature with our society. All of this is true, and it has also been acknowledged by people who are neither Marxists nor social democrats.

But materialism does not stop there; it summarizes all previous science, but goes deeper by saying: social experience, social customs, education and environment are themselves determined in turn by social labor and social relations of production. The latter determine all mental existence. Labor is the root of the human mind. The mind is born from that root.



V

Social Existence Determines Mental Existence

A. Science, Knowledge and Learning

Science is an important domain of the mind, although it does not constitute all of it. How can its contents be determined?

The worker must first of all, while reading this, observe himself. Where does the extent and type of knowledge which fills his mind come from?

He has some knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic – we are speaking generally, since here we are discussing an ordinary member of the working class who is not in an exceptional situation. In his youth, he may have learned some other things: a little geography, a little history, but remembers nothing of these subjects. Why did he have precisely this miserable education and nothing more?

This is determined by the process of production, with its relations of production. The class of capitalists, which rules in the so-called civilized countries, needs, for its workshops, workers who are not totally ignorant. This is why it introduced elementary schools for the children of proletarians and set the maximum age for receiving this education at 12 to 14 years. The bourgeoisie needed, in the process of production, workers who were neither more ignorant, nor more educated. If they were more ignorant, they would not have been profitable enough, while if they were more educated, they would have been too expensive and too demanding. In the same way that the process of production needs certain machines which run faster and supply more products, it also needs a certain kind of worker, the modern proletarian, unlike the workers of the past. The process of production imposes this need on society; it creates this need as a result of its own nature. In the eighteenth century, for example, there was no need for workers of this kind.

The same thing also took place with the knowledge of the other classes.

Big capitalist industry, communications and agriculture increasingly rely upon the physical and natural sciences. The process of production is a conscious scientific process. The new technology has itself laid the foundations of the modern natural sciences by inventing tools for them and by providing them with the means of communication which bring them material from every country. Production consciously utilizes the forces of nature. As a result, the process of production needs men who understand the natural sciences, mechanics and chemistry, since only such men can take responsibility for the direction of production and discover new methods and new tools. This is why, because they are social requirements of the process of production, the secondary school and the institution of higher learning are often organized principally with a view towards the study of nature and they teach those sciences which are necessary for the direction and extension of the process of production.

Knowledge, the sum of all the particular knowledge of all these mechanics, shipbuilders, engineers, agronomists, chemists, mathematicians, and science teachers, is therefore determined by the process of production.

We shall draw a second example from these same social classes. The activity of lawyers, professors of law and economics, judges, notaries, etc., does it not presuppose a certain property law, that is, as we have seen above, certain relations of production? The notaries, lawyers, etc., are these not people who are needed by capitalist society for the preservation and protection of the rights of property? Therefore, is it not true that their particular way of thinking is inspired by the bourgeois class, and their thought has its source in the process of production which has engendered these classes?

The nobility, the bureaucracy, the parliament – do they not presuppose property or class interests based on relations of production, interests which must by protected at home against the other classes and overseas against other peoples? Is the government not the central committee of the bourgeoisie which defends their property and interests? The government itself, as well as the knowledge and special techniques which it possesses for that purpose, are born from social needs, from the needs of the process of production and property. The knowledge of its members is used for the preservation of the existing relations of production and property.

And what is the role of the clergy, of the minister and the priest? If they are reactionaries, they officially serve – with their demand that one must unconditionally submit to the dogmas of the Church and to certain moral precepts – to uphold the old society. This is what their knowledge is used for, this is why they were educated in institutions of higher learning; there is a social need, a class need, for people who preach such things. If they are progressives, they proclaim the rule of God over the world, the rule of the spirit over matter, and thus help the bourgeoisie – who have educated them for this purpose – to preserve their rule over labor.

The system of production and property required the cultivation of a certain kind of priest, judge, physicist, and technician. It produced them and, through social necessity, the protagonists and representative of these social roles have continuously been making their appearance en masse in society. The individual imagines that he freely chooses one of the professions and that the conceptions nourished in them “are the determinant characteristic causes and the point of departure for his activity”. In reality these conceptions and his choice, first of all, are determined by the process of production.

“In the social production of their lives,” Marx says, “men enter into necessary and determined relations, independent of their wills, relations of production.” This is certainly true. These relations are necessary and independent of our will. They were already present before we were born. We must necessarily enter into these relations; society, with its process of production, with its classes and needs, has us in its power.

And all these kinds of professions require a certain amount and a certain type of knowledge in order to fulfill their functions in society. It is therefore clear that, like their functions themselves, the various kinds of knowledge required by society are determined by the social process of production.



Our Opponents’ First Objection

In this first discussion we have addressed the issue of knowledge, which plays an important role in society and thus, in our doctrine, which is the true image of society, a role which we must therefore mention again and again. It is a question of necessity.

Necessity, however, is something mental, it is felt, perceived and thought, in the soul, in the heart, in the spirit and in the brain of man.

With this argument, the opponents of social democracy forge a weapon against us.

They say that if the institutions of the process of production are engendered by man’s need, then the cause of this need is, first of all, spiritual and not material-social.

This objection is easy to refute. Where, after all, do needs come from? Are they born from free will, are they based on opinion? Are they the independent results of the spirit? No, needs originate in man’s corporeal nature. Above all, if the needs of food, clothing and shelter are not met, men would perish miserably. The activity of procuring food, clothing and shelter, for the production and reproduction of life, is the purpose of the process of production; when we speak of production, we must always include the production of those articles which men need in order to live.

But if man in general has need of food, clothing and shelter, each particular mode of production implies its own particular needs. Such needs are always rooted in the process of production. Today, the production of our vital necessities is only possible by way of big industry, under the protection of State power; it therefore requires a highly-developed science; it requires people who understand science. The student, for example, needs knowledge of mechanics, law, theology, and political science; but who provided him with these needs? Society, his society, with its particular process of production, which, without such knowledge, could neither exist nor produce his means of subsistence. In a different form of society, he might not have desired these fields of knowledge and might have aspired to study completely different subjects.

The worker also feels the need for knowledge, that is, for knowledge of society, for the kind of knowledge we are attempting to give him at this very moment – a knowledge of a completely different kind than that which is given him in the school of the ruling class – but where does this need come from? From the process of production. For the latter transforms the worker into a member of a class which numbers in the millions, which must fight and is capable of attaining victory. If this were not so, the worker would not seek such knowledge. In the eighteenth century, he did not yet seek it because the relations of production were of another kind during that era and did not provoke this need in him.

It is therefore only an illusion to think that it is the need for knowledge, the spiritual sensation of the soul, which leads us. If we reflect deeply, we see that this need is inspired within us by the social-material relations.

This is true not only in the case of the “higher” spiritual need for knowledge but is also true of much “lower” things; material needs are also often determined by technology, by the relations of production and of property.

The worker needs, for example, food like any other man, but does he need margarine, does he need ersatz food, or substitutes for his clothing, his comfort and his adornment? Honestly, no. It must instead be said that man, by his nature, desires food which invigorates him and good clothing to adorn him. But if the system of production and of property needed cheap food for the workers, it experienced the need to give rise to mass-produced articles; it produced them, and only in this way and only for this reason has the need for these cheap, mass-produced, low-quality products arisen.

Thus, no one needs, in and of itself, a production process capable of producing 100,000 pieces per hour or one that runs at the speed of one hundred kilometers per hour; only the producer who is under the pressure of competition needs it as a consequence of the system of production; the latter produces the machines which attain such speeds and such levels of productivity, and only in this way and for this reason is this need felt by all of society’s individuals.

We could thus provide hundreds of examples. The reader will easily find them by just looking around.

“Is the system of needs as a whole based on opinion, or on the complete organization of production? In most cases, needs are born from production or from a general situation based on production. World trade almost exclusively revolves around the needs of production rather than individual consumption.” And in this manner knowledge, too, is born from the needs of production.



The Second Objection

But – say our opponents – there is a general desire for knowledge common to all men! The desire for any particular kind of knowledge might be temporary, but the general desire for knowledge is eternal.

Not at all. There are peoples who have absolutely no desire for knowledge, who are perfectly satisfied with the little passed on to them by their ancestors in the way of science.

In a lush tropical region where nature provides the inhabitants with all they need, the latter are content when they can plant their palm trees and when they know how to build a hut with branches and leaves, and when they know how to do a few other things, of great antiquity, which have been transmitted to them from the past. In countries with fertile soil and small-scale agriculture, the inhabitants can remain in the same situation for centuries. They do not seek new knowledge because the relations of production do not require this of them.

A convincing example – which we have not yet mentioned – is provided by those peoples who practice agriculture in the valleys of large rivers which flood periodically: they needed an astronomical calendar and were therefore obliged to study the celestial bodies.

Such were the inhabitants of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, who arrived at astronomy on account of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Yellow River. Other peoples, who did not experience the need for this knowledge, did not become acquainted with it.

It is, then, the relations of production which drive knowledge and which determine the quantity and the quality of this knowledge.

To verify this truth, the worker only needs to take a look around him once again. Who are the active workers, the ones with a thirst for learning, the ones who are full of the desire for social development? The ones who can understand the role of the proletariat in the context of the process of production, that is, the workers in cities and big industry. Technology, the machine itself, tells them that a socialist society is possible; the vast process of production which they have before their eyes teaches them that the old relations of productions are too narrow for the forces of the machine. New relations must come; as you are equal in terms of rights, you must yourselves take possession of the means of production: these are the words that are shouted in their ears by the modern city. And thanks to these words of the process of production, a desire for knowledge is born in the workers of the cities which is much stronger than that of the rural worker, who does not yet see so much of the new forces of production.



Observation

On the basis of the example of the tropical regions, where the process of production does not spur the search for knowledge, and of the example of the great river valleys, where the desire for knowledge was aroused, the attentive reader sees that historical materialism does not recognize the process of production as the sole cause of this development. Geographical factors have great importance in historical materialism. Thus, and to take one last important example, the process of production would never have developed so vigorously and rapidly in Europe if the latter had a tropical climate and if the soil had provided abundant harvests almost without labor. It is precisely Europe’s temperate climate and its relatively poor soils which obliged its people to work harder and, for that very reason, to acquire an understanding of nature.

Thus, the reproach that the process of production is for the social democrats the only independent motor force is unfounded. Besides climate and the natural qualities of a country, besides the influences of atmosphere and the soil, we shall learn to recognize still other motor forces in the course of our argument.



B. Inventions

There is a domain of science which must be discussed in more detail. That is the domain of technological inventions.

We said: the relations of production rest upon technology. Do we not also thereby admit that the relations of production rest upon the mind?

Of course we do. Technology is the invention and the conscious utilization of tools by thinking man, and when the defenders of historical materialism say that all of society rests upon technology, they are also simultaneously saying that all of society rests upon material and mental labor.

But does this not contradict what we said? Does this not thus convert the mind once again into the leading motor force of social evolution?

If the mind produces technology and technology produces society, then the mind is undoubtedly the first creator.

Let us take an even closer look at this question.

Historical materialism by no means denies that the mind is part of technology. Men are thinking beings. The relations of production, the relations of property, are relations between men; it is within these relations that they act and think. Technology and the relations of property and production are just as mental as they are material. This is not the object of our dispute.

We only deny the autonomous, arbitrary, spontaneous, supernatural and incomprehensible nature of the mind and its activity. We say: if the mind discovers a new science, or a new technology, it does not do so of its own volition but as the result of an impulse or a need of society.

In other times, most technological inventions were made by men who were themselves involved in the process of production. It was their desire to improve the labor process and to make it more efficient in order to make more wealth for themselves or to enrich the whole world!

Whatever the nature of society, whether large or small, nomadic horde or tribe, feudal or capitalist, this desire was social; it was engendered by an economic need. In societies where property was held in common, it was the social desire to do something for the community; in class societies with private property, it was the social desire to do something for the social individual, for the private owner or for the class of private masters.

There is nothing surprising about this. Since man is a social being and man’s labor is social, the desire to improve labor is not something which results from the mind of the individual, but something which derives from his social relations. The desire for an improved technology, for inventions, is a social desire; it is born from social needs.

This is what the defenders of historical materialism say: they deny the independence, the arbitrariness, the preeminence of the mind; they say that existing social need obliges the mind to follow a particular road and that this need is also engendered by specific material relations of production. Therefore, they also deny the absolute mastery of the mind.

This relation between technology and science is so important that we are well advised to pause and give it more thorough consideration.

We shall provide a few detailed examples.

Let us consider a weaver of the Middle Ages. The job done by the weaver is generally sufficient for social needs. Trade, circulation and the foreign market have not yet developed to the point where large-scale productive forces are necessary. The need for them is not yet felt. However, the especially wise weaver cannot neglect his tools, since he knows that a more convenient and efficient manner of production would benefit him personally. He invents a small improvement and implements it. Within his circle, this improvement is noted and imitated. And that is as far as it goes. It is a small change in the process of production which barely signifies a step forward and which might be the only such change for decades or centuries. It was the result of an individual’s need.

Let us suppose, however, that circulation and trade have made great progress (as in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example), that the foreign market has seen extraordinary growth, and that colonies have been founded which generate a demand for manufactured goods from their home countries; then, the social need and desire for improved technology, and for greater labor productivity, become generalized; then, it is not one man who ponders the subject of technological improvements, but one hundred men who do so; then a new instrument is born as the result of numerous, rapidly-accumulating changes.

Let us consider one of the inventors of the steam engine, Papin, for example.

In many men there is a special talent and love for technology; this is a legacy of millions of years of human evolution; in some men, when the relations of production contribute their stimulus, this love and this talent are most conspicuous. The society in which they live now has a developed technology; they study an improvement which could enhance social productivity. Their social reflection, oriented by this purpose, is devoted to the power of pressurized steam. They imagine a new apparatus based on the old instruments powered by men, animals, water or wind. Their social feeling is so overwhelming, their happiness and their desire to produce something of this sort are so strong, that they sacrifice their time, their health and their wealth to perfect it and to make it accepted.

The generalized need, however, still does not exist; this particular step forward for technology is so big that the price to develop it is too high. The invention is not introduced, the experiments must be stopped and fall into oblivion. The inventor often goes to his grave a ruined man. He certainly did discern a social need, but society had not yet experienced this need or, in any case, it did not feel it sufficiently; the inventor arrived too soon.

Now let us consider an inventor of our time, an Edison. He is a technician; his life consists solely of thinking about technology. But he is not a man born before his time who thinks of what is not yet possible. Society, or in any case the owning classes, wants the same thing he does. For the capitalists, improved technology means a colossal increase in profit. Every invention which makes cheaper and faster production possible is immediately adopted. This increases the power of labor and also allows the latter to pose its own problems, which no longer depend on chance but on its own will.

An Edison’s desire for invention is a social desire, his love of technology is a love engendered in and by society, a social love; the basis upon which he labors is also social; that he is successful and can consciously posit his object in advance, is due to society.

In our days it often happens that new machines are invented but cannot be introduced because they are too expensive. In agriculture, for example, there are excellent machines which, for the most part, remain utterly unutilized or are only used sparingly. The relations of production are still too limited for these new forces. Thus, if an invention arises as the consequence of a social need felt by an individual on the basis of an already-existing technology, nonetheless only those inventions which society needs in practice and which can be introduced in its specific relations will be adopted. Consequently both the birth and the development of the tool are of a social nature. Their roots are not to be found in the mind of the individual but in society.

In conclusion, here is an example drawn from the era when man was only just beginning to fabricate his first tools. It is from Kautsky’s book, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History. There we read (p.83):

“Ever since primitive man possessed the spear, he could herd much larger animals. If his food had hitherto consisted for the most part of fruits and insects, as well as birds’ eggs and chicks, now he could also kill much larger animals, and henceforth meat became a more important part of his diet. But most animals live on the ground rather than in the trees; therefore, the hunt descended from its airy regions to an earth-bound domain. Even more: the animals which could be hunted, the ruminants, are only rarely found in the virgin forest; they prefer the vast plains of the savannahs. The more of a hunter man became, the more he could leave the virgin tropical forest where prehistoric man was hidden away.”

“This description is, as has been pointed out, based purely on suppositions. The course of evolution could just as well have been otherwise. Just as the inventions of the tool and the weapon could have been capable of impelling man to leave the virgin forest in order to migrate to the open savannah with its scattered woodlands, it could also have been the case that some other cause led man to leave his original abode and thereby presented him with the occasion to invent weapons and tools. Let us assume, for example, that man’s population had increased beyond his ability to feed himself ... or that a drought had thinned out the virgin forests, and that this led to the appearance of more prairies among the forestlands. In any event prehistoric man was compelled to renounce his sylvan ways and move closer to the ground; then he had to seek more animal food and could no longer feed himself on a predominantly fruit-based diet. The new way of life gave him the chance to make more frequent use of rocks and sticks and thus brought him closer to the invention of the first tools and the first weapons.”

“Whatever course of evolution one presupposes, the first or the second – and both could have taken place independently in different locations – one may clearly deduce from each the strict interaction which exists between new means of production and new ways of life, new needs. Each of these factors engenders the other by objective necessity; each is transformed by necessity into the cause of changes which in turn contain new changes within them. Thus, every invention produces inevitable effects which give rise to other inventions and therefore to new needs and new ways of life as well, which in turn stimulate new inventions, etc., a chain of infinite development which becomes always more varied and rapid as it advances and with which the possibility and the likelihood of new inventions increases.”

Kautsky goes on to tell how man, once he arrived on the grassy plains, devoted himself to agriculture, to the construction of dwellings, to the use of fire and to the breeding of cattle, and how, later, “man’s whole life, his needs, his dwelling-places, his means of subsistence, were changed and how an invention had in the end led to many more after it, once it had been discovered, once the fabrication of the spear or some other device was achieved”.



Observation

The invention of new technology, upon which, as we have seen, science rests, takes place through social desire and social need which find their expression in the individual, and can only totally succeed when this need is felt by all of society. Until that moment, however, the mind of the inventor cannot foresee in most cases the invention’s possible consequences.

Did the inventors of the steam engine or even the inventors of the powerful technologies of our time, foresee that the class struggle between labor and capital would become more rigorous and aggravated as a result of their inventions? Do our inventors see that the socialist society must be born from their inventions? All men, even the most brilliant, have to this day been blind to society’s future. They were obliged to act within the framework of social needs. Under capitalism, men became aware of these needs, although only vaguely, but they did not know where the satisfaction of these needs would lead society. They lived in the realm of necessity.

Only in socialist society, when the means of production are collective property, when they are consciously utilized and controlled, only then will man be aware of not only the social forces and needs which oblige him to act, but also the goal towards which his activity leads and the consequences which flow from his activity. Each technological improvement will have as a consequence greater happiness, and more freedom for mental and physical development. No invention will give birth to unforeseen horrible setbacks; all of them will grant individuals the freedom for development towards improvement and will thus continuously improve the conditions for all men’s happiness.

In all actuality, the productive forces, the material relations of production, are pushing us towards socialism and, within the socialist society as well, we will depend upon the productive forces, on the socialist mode of production. Since social existence will always have precedence over the mind, we shall never be free. But if we no longer blindly and passively endure this condition, if we are no longer dragged along by the explosive movement of technology like poor isolated “atoms”, if we consciously produce as a single whole, if we foresee the consequences of our social actions, then we will be free, in comparison with today’s conditions, then we will have passed from the dark realm of blind fate to the magnificent light of freedom. Nor shall we then enjoy absolute freedom, which exists only in the brains of the anarchists and the priests or mystical liberals; we shall be connected to the productive forces at our disposal. But we will be capable of using them in accordance with our common will, in accordance with our collective benefit. And that is all we are demanding.



Second Observation

Naturally, once a science has been called into existence by a social need, it can continue to develop, regardless of its stage of development, without any direct connection to social need. Although the beginnings of astronomy resulted from a social need, it later continued to develop outside of any direct connection to the needs of the life of society. Nonetheless, the relation between a science which has become autonomous, technology and need, must constantly be uncovered if we are not to be limited to just the branches or the blossoms but see the roots of science.



C. Law

Law is about what is mine and what is yours. Law is the general concept of a society to which you, I and the other person belong. As long as the productive forces and the relations of production are stable, these ideas of property will not change. But if the former begin to waiver, the latter will become unstable as well. This is not surprising. For the relations of production are at the same time property relations, as we clearly demonstrated above.

We shall proffer a few important examples, with which everyone is familiar, drawn from our own times, to illustrate these changes.

Not so long ago, in a big city like Amsterdam, it was generally accepted that the provision of lighting and water, as well as transportation, was an occasion for private individuals to make money; gas works, the water supply and streetcars had to be the property of private individuals. Things are different now. Today it is generally acknowledged that these activities, and many other sectors of industry, should be municipally owned. This is a great transformation in the conception of law, in the domain of the mind, which expresses an opinion, a conviction or a prejudice concerning what is mine and what is yours.

Where did this change come from?

It is not hard to show that it came directly from a change in the productive forces. When Holland began to suffer from the influence of big industry and world trade, the situation of the middle class and the working class deteriorated. Their situation became even worse after 1870. These classes of the population reflected upon the question of how to remedy their misery. This led to the birth of a middle class party which was joined by the workers. When this party took power, it introduced municipal ownership so that its members would no longer be bled by the private companies which exploited the gas works, the water system and streetcars.

The new economic relation between big capital, on the one side, and the small businessmen and craftsmen, on the other, which is, basically, the relation between the big machine and the small tool-bench, created for one part of society, for certain classes, a new condition of need. The need for new relations of production was born, thanks to which the new productive forces were to inflict less devastating results. The classes which suffered the effects of these new productive forces managed to take power and introduced new property relations.

This is a relatively minor example. Even though the municipal enterprise (and even the national enterprise) is a completely different form of property compared to the private business owned by one or more capitalists, everyone knows that today’s municipality or State is capitalist and that the benefits of the municipal enterprise or State property cannot be very significant for the ordinary man. But however much the humble folk are conned, fleeced or shaken down by the State as well as by the municipality, they will not be bled quite as shamelessly as they were by the owners of private utilities.

The example of our own movement is of much greater significance and of much greater scope.

Socialism wants to transform the means of production into collective property. There are now millions of socialists where there were practically none a few decades ago. How has such a vast revolution in thought, in the consciousness of so many men, taken place? How has their conception of law been transformed?

Here, the answer is much clearer than in the case of the first example.

Big industry has made it plain to millions of proletarians that, as long as private property in the means of production lasts, they will never have property or well-being. But if private property is transformed into common property, then the road to well-being is open to them. This is why they became socialists.

In addition, crises and overproduction, as well as, more recently, the trusts, with their competition which devours everything and their restriction of production – all these factors which derive directly from the contemporary private ownership of the means of production – have had such an awful effect on the middle classes that even among the latter many consider collective property as the only way to save themselves from poverty, and they became socialists.

With socialism, the direct relation between the change in the productive forces and relations of production, and the change in thought, is evident.

Is it a god which has put socialism into our heads? Is it a mystical spark, a holy spirit? A light which god has shown us, as many Christian socialists would have us believe?

Is it our own free mind which has produced for us this magnificent thought due to the excellence of the mind? Is it our own especially elevated virtue, a secret force within us, the categorical imperative of Kant?

Or is the devil that has instilled in us the desire for collective property? This is what other Christians declare.

None of the above. It is poverty, social misery.

This poverty comes from the fact that the new productive forces, within the straitjacket of the old property relations of the small business of past times, wreak devastation among the workers and the petit-bourgeois. The solution of socialism arises on its own because all the workers and many petit-bourgeois can sense and understand that this devastation would come to an end if they were to collectively own the means of production. Labor is already certainly collective. The fact that their difficulties could be resolved thanks to common ownership is therefore obvious.

Nor can it be said that socialism was contemplated over the course of centuries past and that therefore socialism cannot be an emanation of today’s dominant productive forces, but that the principle of the equality of all men is an eternal ideal which men have dreamed about in every era.

Socialism as conceived by the first Christians was as unlike the socialism sought by today’s working class as the productive forces and class relations of that epoch are unlike today’s productive forces and class relations. The first Christians wanted a common consumption, the rich were supposed to share their surplus of means of consumption with the poor. It was not the soil, the land and the means of labor which were to be held in common, but the products. It was, then, basically a socialism of beggars; the poor, thanks to the goodness of the rich, were supposed to share the products with the latter.

Likewise, Jesus himself never preached anything else, that is, that the rich should give up their wealth. The rich were supposed to love the poor as brothers and the poor were to love the rich in the same way.

Social democracy, on the other hand, teaches that those who possess nothing must fight the owners and seize from them the means of production through political power; it does not want to possess the products in a collective manner – to the contrary, what each receives in the way of products, of objects of consumption, will be for him alone, he need not share it – but it most certainly does want to collectively possess the means of production.

The relations of production of the first centuries of Christianity could not have given rise to our social democratic conceptions, any more than our productive forces are capable of leading us to the Christian ideal. When the productive forces were still so minimal, so fragmented and dispersed in such a way that a greater community could not control them, the only solution to poverty was philanthropy, as miserable and insufficient as it was, since it only alleviated an insignificant part of that poverty. In an era where labor is becoming increasingly social, social ownership is the only means to confront poverty, but now it is also a sufficient means.

Another significant example is provided by criminal law. Here, too, a revolution has taken place in the minds of many men: socialist workers no longer believe in the personal fault of the criminal. They believe that the causes of crime are social rather than personal.

How did they arrive at this new opinion, which neither liberal nor clerical Christianity was capable of discovering?

It was possible thanks to the struggle against capitalism which, as we saw above, rests upon the process of production. Socialist authors were led by the struggle, by their critique of the existing social order, to look for the causes of crime, and they discovered that the causes of crime are rooted in society. It was the process of production and the class struggle which necessarily led them to this understanding.

This awareness is slowly penetrating the minds of socialistically-educated workers.

We cannot provide further examples for reasons of space, but this example once again reveals the revolution which has taken place in the world of thought as a consequence of the change in the relations of production. And how different things are today! It was not so long ago that the world believed in sin, in personal culpability, in free will, in the vengeance of God and men, in punishment; now, socialists – but only socialists – see that, when “the anti-social roots of crime are annihilated, along with capitalist society, and when every person is provided with the social space for his essential life expression”, then social crime will disappear.



Observation

At this point, after examining these examples of changes in thinking about law and property, we now very clearly discern for the first time a law of the evolution of human thought that has not yet been subjected to our closest scrutiny.

We have already seen enough concerning the question of why evolution in thought is engendered by the productive forces, which are its wellsprings and causes. Now, we see how this takes place. Evolution in thought takes place in struggle, in the class struggle. This can be illustrated quite clearly with the same examples of municipal utilities and the socialist conception of property and law which we discussed above.

Big industry made the situation of the petit-bourgeois and the workers extremely difficult. Monopolies controlling the supply of gas and water, taken for granted for years, became increasingly unendurable as big industry continued to expand. The workers and the petit-bourgeois viewed the monopolies as their enemies, and to free themselves from the control of the latter became a vital necessity. The following thought took shape in their minds: what would be just, just to the highest degree, would be for the municipality to control this kind of activity. We, the laboring classes, must fight these parasites. The parasites, on the other hand, thought: it is our right to own these utilities; as a class we will lose all our profits if we allow one profitable business after another to be taken from us. We must fight the laboring classes. It is, then, in the struggle where a new conception of law has evolved. The development of the new productive forces has produced the new class struggle, and this struggle has expanded the new legal consciousness.

And the proletariat, which had the feeling that it was intellectually, morally and physically dying at the hands of big industry, recognized the capitalists as its enemies. First, it thought: we, the workers in this factory, are deprived, we are dying, and our capitalist is our enemy; it is unjust that he receives all the profits and we get nothing. We must fight him. Later, the proletariat of a whole city, or of a particular trade, thought the same thing. And then the proletariat of an entire country and of the whole world. All of them thought: we, as a class, must fight the class of capitalists. It would be right for all the means of production to be in our hands. We shall struggle for our rights.

The capitalists, however, thought precisely the contrary, first individually, then all of them together, in an organized way and as a State. It is right for us to keep what belongs to us. We shall crush these revolutionary ideas. We shall struggle together as a class for our rights.

And the more that technology developed, the more that the productive forces and wealth in the hands of the capitalists constantly grew, the deeper, the more widespread and the less endurable became the poverty among a continuously growing proletariat; and the more that the owners recognized the necessity of preserving their greater wealth, the greater was the necessity asserted by those who owned nothing of seizing the means of production. So also to the same degree the struggle between the two classes has grown sharper and for that same reason so has the power of their ideas concerning what is right and what is wrong become more well-defined.

With this example we see quite clearly that the conceptions of what is right and what is wrong evolve in the class struggle and as a result of the class struggle, and that a class could slowly come to consider something to be wrong which previously seemed right, and that it could also, with the growth of class interests, feel this new sense of what is right and wrong with an increasing passion.

The material struggle for the means of production is simultaneously a spiritual struggle concerning what is right and wrong. The wrong is the mental mirror-image of the right.



Second Observation

It will not of course be necessary to show here that, in this spiritual and material struggle, the victorious class will be the one which, in the end, due to the development of the process of production, will be transformed into the most powerful class, the class with the greatest spiritual power and the greater truth, the class which, as a result of the needs brought about by its situation, will be called upon to resolve the contradictions between the new productive forces and the old relations of production. We shall return to this topic at the end of our treatise. At this time, however, we must set forth another observation which will invalidate an objection of our adversaries.

There are members of the owning classes who pass over to the side of those who have nothing. Does this not prove that it is not social existence which determines thought, but that maybe something eminently spiritual, something mysteriously ethical, is what determines our social behavior?

An individual who passes from the capitalist camp to the proletarian camp could do so for two kinds of reasons, reasons which could also be at work simultaneously. Perhaps he has come to understand that the future belongs to the proletariat. But no one can deny that it is the process of production, i.e., the economic relations, which provided him with this understanding and therefore that it is not in the “freedom” of the mind that one must seek the motive for his action, but in social existence. Or this act could be rooted in sentimental reasons, since, for example, this individual prefers to stand alongside the weak rather than the oppressors. In the course of our discussion of social morality we shall prove that, in this case as well, the determinant sentiments are based on the socio-economic life of men rather than something mysterious, supernatural or absolutely spiritual.



D. Politics

If the socialist conceptions of property and crime provide clear examples of how the productive forces influence thought, how the class struggle arises and how it must be resolved, in politics we encounter examples which are yet more clear.

And in this connection we must also refer to the example of what the socialists think, since it is in their heads that the new productive forces are most vigorously at work.

The new productive forces also powerfully influence the minds of the industrialist, the financier, the wholesaler, the shipbuilder, etc. They think of enormous enterprises, huge profits, the formation of cartels, foreign and colonial markets, the creation of a national navy and a powerful army, in order to increase their influence, their wealth and their power. But regardless of the scale of their thought compared to that of the capitalists and ruling classes of past centuries, the type of thinking they engage in is the same.

The middle classes also think differently than the middle classes of the past. The growth of the productive forces has pushed them in a dangerous direction, into a position where they could fall into the ranks of the proletariat. How to escape this fate – by means of credit, by State aid, through trade unions – this is what they reflect upon, totally unlike their parents. In their minds, things now seem very different from the way they were in the eighteenth century, for example. Their thought, however, moves in the same old direction: profit, profit, private profit!

The mind of the non-socialist worker is also full of feelings quite distinct from those experienced by his counterparts of the first half of the nineteenth century, for example. Higher wages, shorter working hours, State aid, a higher standard of living – this is what he thinks about; it is like a beehive, like a mill-wheel in these non-socialist Christian organizations. This humming and