The laws of materialist dialectic are all-embracing, general laws of becoming. As we have seen, a deep and all-embracing historicism is at their basis, that is to say, a historicism which can embrace all forms of movement. This Marxist dialectical method is much wider and more universal than the idealist dialectic of Hegel, the limitation of which does not merely lie in exalting a limited sphere of consciousness. into the substance of the universal. The limitation of the Hegelian dialectic also lies in its two most important qualities. Firstly, with Hegel nature has no history.1) Secondly, history itself settles down with the bourgeois landlord state (here Hegel's system in fact conflicts with his method). Both these limitations, which are of quite exceptional importance, are undoubtedly connected with the idealist character of Hegelian dialectic. Hence, by the way, the unsurpassably wretched poverty of those "thinkers" ("manufacturers of ideology", as Marx called them), who suggest that the difference between the Marxian and Hegelian dialectic is simply a matter of a change of label and that in fact Marx remained a Hegelian to the end of his life.2) Whereas Marxian dialectic as a doctrine of historical development was the first to conquer the whole sphere of nature comprehended from the point of view of an historical process, and broke those fetters which Hegel put upon the understanding of social development. This remarkable expansion of outlook proceeds entirely from Marx, a thing which bourgeois investigators cannot understand. Even very recently this sort of gap between nature and society played, and still plays to this day, a very important part. The whole conception of the Rickert school proceeds from the historical character of society and the unhistorical character of nature. The whole laborious differentiation between the generalising method of the natural sciences and the individualising method of the social sciences, between nomothetics (or nomology), on the one hand, and ideography on the other, between "natural laws" and "reference to worth" is founded in the last resort on the absolute rupture between society and nature. This is, in essence, a softened and refined theology, converting human society into a super-natural quantity. Whereas society and nature are a unity, but a contradictory unity. Society itself is a product of the,historical development of nature, but a product which relatively is in opposition to nature, reacts upon it and even in the process of historical development transforms external nature itself into its product (the so-called cultivated landscape). Therefore Marx said that in fact there is one science, the science of history, which embraces both the history of the inorganic world, and the history of the organic world and the history of society.3) In the sphere of the natural sciences this meant a decisive break with mechanistic-mathematical rationalism which in Marx is bound up with the criticism of mechanistic materialism.
Natural matter was conceived as being all of the same kind, as only a quantitatively defined quantity, as a combination of qualitatively similar parts. Diversity of quality was from this point of view merely an illusion of a subjective character.
Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. In bringing under the conception of matter the things examined by us as bodily existing we are distracted from the qualitative differences in them. Therefore matter as such, in distinction from definitely existing matters (our emphasis, N.B.), is not something existing sensually... It (this point of view, the "onesided mathematical point of view", N.B.) is even a return to Pythagoras who already regarded number, quantitative definition as the essence of things.4)
In other words qualityless matter would bring us back to the position of so-called logical realism, in opposition to nominalism. It does not, hôwever, in any way follow from this that "matter has disappeared". It only follows that, objectively and independently of our consciousness, it exists in all the wealth of its qualitatively different and varied forms, with an historical process of transition from one form to another, with specific forms of movement and, consequently, with specific laws for this movement. Even in the limits of inorganic nature mechanical movement and chemical movement are distinct, although they pass into one another. The organic world grows out of the inorganic in the process of historical development, but, once it has arisen, it develops its specific forms of movement. Society arises historically from the biological species, through the herd, but once it has arisen, it develops in turn through its conditioned laws. It passes through different stages of development. It is always historical, that is it exists really only in its historical form, with its own historically defined laws, etc. In this way we here have all the wealth and all the variety of the world which in the historical process of thought, on the basis of the historical process of the development of social practice, is ever more adequately "grasped" by this thought. Every new form of moving matter thus has its own special laws. But this enriched form and these new laws are not cut off by a Chinese wall from those historically preceding them. The latter exist in these in "sublated form". Herein lies the historical succession of processes. On the other hand, variety does not exclude unity. So it is no question of a flat monism of knowledge for which variety has no meaning and to which all cats are grey, nor is it a matter of pluralism for which unity does not exist, but of dialectical and materialist monism, which is adequate to the real unity in variety and variety in unity, with all its forms of contradiction, with its ruptures and catastrophes, with its transition of one form into another, which is adequate to the mighty and general historical process of development.
The historical view of society therefore presupposed the breaking down of the mathematical-atomistic-individualist conception of rationalism. However, here the essence of the matter did not lie at all in the fact (as the Kantians argue)5) that society must be torn out of (absolutely) its natural historical environment and converted into a substance creating the world out of its spiritual depths and dictating its laws to the cosmos, but in the ascertaining of specific social laws on the basis of an historical view of nature itself. The great limitation of the natural scientific theories before Marx lies in the "eternity" of the laws of nature, i.e. in the supposition that the connections between things and processes are constant. This presupposed the constancy and unchangingness of things. Whereas "the eternal laws of nature are more and more becoming transformed into historical laws. That water is liquid from o° to 100° is an eternal law of nature, but in order that it may have any force there must be: (1) Water, (2) a given temperature and (3) a normal pressure... All our official physics, chemistry, and biology are exclusively geocentric, and calculated for the earth..."6) So here there is no difference in principle between society and nature. The Kantians and idealists generally have to make use of a sophism. They wish, starting from a correct notion of the originality of social development, to draw the conclusion that this originality is principally in the sense of the supernatural character of society. Just as "spirit" is in no way an efflorescence of matter but the real substance of matter, so human society is a special quantity insofar as it is not relatively but absolutely opposed to nature. So the laws of social development, if they exist at all, are supernatural laws having nothing in common with the laws of nature. Their specific character here in fact becomes a supernatural character which serves in its turn as a bridge to God.
So it is obvious how Marx's peculiar terminology is explained. Marx frequently, beginning with the first volume of Capital, speaks of the social process as a "natural historical" process, of the laws of social movement as " natural laws like the law of gravity ", etc. On the other hand, Marx energetically emphasises the specific nature of social relationships and the corresponding laws ("Nature does not create the owners of money on the one hand and the owners of nothing but their own labour power on the other. This relation is anything but natural-historical" (ibid.)). But only stupid minds can deduce from this an "inconsistency" in Marx. For it is clear where his main approach lies. Society is the link in the chain of the general historical development of the world, a link which develops according to law like the development of nature (in this sense the laws of society are natural-historical laws however "critically thinking persons" might wish to jump out into a world of supernatural being). But this law is a special law. It is not a law of either physical, chemical or biological type. It is a specifically social law which must be "theoretically grasped" in precisely this specific character. In the one case (against the idealists) Marx emphasises the connection with nature. In the other (against mechanistic materialism, the "organology" of the biological school of sociologists and positivists of Comte and Spencer and their epigones) he. emphasises the specifically social character, the new quality. Even a very slightly thoughtful attitude towards the subject makes the full wealth of the Marxian method absolutely clear in comparison with all other schools and tendencies. The overcoming of the "naturalist" point of view (which does not start from the unity of society and nature, together with their opposition, but from their identity) is far from implying an obligatory (which the bourgeois ideologists reach) transition to the standpoint of idealist metaphysics. The idea of historicism is far from being the private property of the idealist tendencies in thought. Historical "laws of movement" of society can in fact be discovered only by means of materialist dialectic.
So the laws of social development are specific laws. It is therefore, for example, fundamentally incorrect and methodologically impermissible to transfer mechanically laws of a biological order into processes of social development. Society has developed historically out of the animal herd but it is itself no longer a herd. The "way of life" of an animal species, that is the uniformity of vital behaviour of animals of one species, is still not a "mode of production". The natural organs of an animal differ fundamentally from artificial technique which is itself the product of active labour, that is of active adaptation to environment. And so on and so on.7) The transition from the herd to productive society is, from the point of view of world history, a leap, although this in its turn was a whole immense and lengthy historical period. But, insofar as society has already formed as a new link in the general and universal historical process, it develops its special contradictions and discloses a special form of movement. "It was necessary in this case, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, to set aside these artificial inter-relations by the discovery of the real, a task which finally culminated in the discovery of the universal laws of movement which established themselves as the dominating ones in the history of human society."8) These "universal laws of movement which established themselves as the dominating ones in the history of human society" were formulated by Marx in his theory of historical materialism, a doctrine of genius the creation of which certainly marks a new epoch in the development of the social sciences. So the general laws of dialectic here found a special, concrete, social form of manifestation. Society was included as a link in the universal chain of history, in full correspondence with objective historical reality. But it is just in this that the superiority of the bold, fearless, revolutionary and materialist dialectic of Marx showed itself with striking power. We must once again emphasise with all force the originality of Marxist historicism in comparison with the historicism of the "historical school" in all its various manifestations. It is well known how viciously Marx flayed it."9) In practice taking its direction from the eternalising of the datum, in theory it simply included any "interruption in gradualness," whereas Marx's revolutionary dialectic starts from the inevitable change of social forms, including an historically conditioned contradictoriness of development, the sharpening of inner contradictions, the class struggle, the catastrophic transition of one social form into another by means of revolution, etc.
The strict knowledge of the objective laws of social development is a long way from presupposing in Marx, despite the numerous critics who wage a permanent guerilla warfare of dwarfs against the giant of thought and action, any kind of "destiny" or " fate". With Marx history itself is a long way from hypostasising and is not transformed into a peculiar subject standing above human beings. On the contrary, as long ago as the time of his controversy with Bruno Bauer Marx demolished such a treatment of the problem. "History", he wrote in the Holy Family, "is not some kind of special personality which man makes use of to attain his ends. History is simply the activity of man pursuing his ends."10) Another circumstance should be remarked here. Marx is often transformed into a vulgar apostle of "progress". This also does not correspond to fact. "In spite of the pretensions of 'progress' cases are always to be observed of retrogression and round-about movement." 11) So in Marx there is not on the one hand a trace of fatalism, nor of Panglossian teleology on the other.12)
But it does not follow from the fact that "men make history" that human activity is outside the control of any laws. Society is not a sum of isolated and mechanically united individuals. It is a definite whole, divided and contradictory, with a variety in its elements. So objective social laws do not correspond with subjective aim-purposes and they cannot be deduced from individual "motivisations". On the contrary, every individual is already born "socialised" and his activities are determined by the aggregate of his conditions of life. He already finds this environment of his life ready for him, although he also reacts upon it. Sofor Marx it was important to discover the "laws of movement" of the special form of combination human society, and moreover, of historical society. It is interesting to note that a number of Marx's critics who attack him for his so-called mechanistic approach to society, also reproach him with starting from society and not from the human unit. Whereas it is just from the surpassing of the mechanistic, qualityless, quantitatively mathematical conception of society that there arises the originality of the laws of the specific whole ("Totalität"); of a whole (and not its "parts") specifically social (and not generic, special, biological, physico-chemical).
But Marx does not take this whole, society, as an empty abstraction.
If, for example, we begin our analysis with population, then this will be an abstraction if we leave out classes; classes are an abstraction ("leeres Wort") unless we know their elements, and so on.
If [says Marx] we start out therefore with population, we do so with a chaotic idea of the whole, and by close' analysis we shall gradually arrive at simpler ideas; thus we shall proceed from the represented concrete to less and less complex abstractions, until we get at the simplest conception. This once attained, we might start on our return journey until we would finally come back to population, but this time not as a chaotic notion of an integral whole, but as a rich aggregate of many conceptions and relations.13)
The method of this transition, from the chaotic conception of the concrete to the simplest abstract and then back to the enriched concrete aggregate, is Marx's method, a method which cannot be contained within the formal-logical and usual oppositions of induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, concrete and abstract. So the concept of society with Marx is no longer an empty abstract and extra-historical concept, but a concept which includes the whole divided variety of its concrete historical definitions, which are given in their development, in correspondence with the real course of the real historical process. Here Marx really solves that problem of knowledge which Rickert considered specific for human history, the problem of the "individual" and the "typical". Marx, on the basis of a painstaking study of history, reached a conception of the economic structure of society which is the morphological principle of all the social whole, of "the mode of production", both historically of the "individual" (and at the same time the "typical"), and of the specific stage of historical development. Max Weber had already remarked that the "individual" cannot be understood without "nomological knowledge".14) But it is impossible to imagine the individual, even of a "minor order", as a Kantian thing in itself, without relation to an "other"; as outside of all connection with others, outside of the social aggregate. Weber is therefore forced to restore the "generalising method" buried by Rickert on the basis of Rickertian premises which have an absolutely definite social sense, as do all the tendencies of the Kantian "practical reason",15) and to have recourse to the construction of so-called "ideal types", of a bad, idealistically deformed copy of the Marxian "economic formations" ("economic structures", i.e. "means of production"), whilst, as Tröltsch justly points out, an "intellectual contemplation (Anschauung) of the great sociological complexes and evolutionary relations" 16) predominates in him.
So.
1. With Marx society is a part of nature, but a part in opposition to it, a special and specific part which arises historically (thus here is a unity, but not an identity; the division of the one).
2. It actively influences nature and changes it (mutual interpenetration of opposites).
3. It has its specific laws (social laws) which differ qualitatively from the laws of the inorganic world and the laws of biology (a new quality arising historically) but which are anything but "laws" of a supernatural kind (materialism).
4. Society is taken in the variety of its historic definitions and in the process of its historical development (the dialectic of the abstract and concrete).
5. There is no teleological "world conception" in Marx ("aims of history", "progress", "united humanity"; "in fact what is meant by the words 'purpose', 'aim', 'germ', 'idea' in previous history is nothing but the abstraction of later history, the abstraction of the active influence exercised by past history on later history").17)
The most remarkable explanation of the theory of historical materialism, with the exception of the brilliant and monumental introduction to The Critique of Political Economy, is undoubtedly the German Ideology, particularly that part of it which is devoted to the criticism of Feuerbach.
From the very beginning the authors place the whole problem within the widest limits. "We know one science alone, the science of history. History can be examined from two aspects and divided into the history of nature and the history of man. But it is impossible to separate these two aspects from one another. So long as men exist the history of nature and human history will condition one another."18) In the last instance the whole further movement also conditions this division of a simple nature into opposing principles. The movement of this opposition, the struggle of society with nature, the growing process of " humanising " nature, the constant penetration of the one opposite into the other, lies at the bottom of the whole movement. This is the law of development of the productive forces of society and the basis of its self-movement. The relation to nature is an active, practical relation, it is labour, the process of production. Social man is above all, not an animal rationale, but homo faber, a tool-making animal. Thus the first premise is the "bodily organisation of individuals and the connection with nature given thereby". The production of the means of life and means of production is the production of material life. But this production is not the mechanical juxtaposition of separate labouring individuals, but production of which the subjects are social individuals in a definite type of social connection. The types of this connection are explained by empirical observation. This is the "productive relations", the main social division (in class society, division in the first place into classes), that basis on which the political, moral, philosophical, religious, etc., "superstructure" grows up. Practice engenders theory, material production gives off spiritual; the latter, with the growth of a manifold division of labour and the fixation of the divided functions in classes (which are distinguished from one another by their relationship to the means of production, in the first place by their position in the process of production and distribution), is relatively split off from its foundation and creates the illusion of sovereign independence in the consciousness of its agents. So there arises the illusion of an "independent" history of religion and morality, of law and philosophy, of science and art, etc. Men, social-historical men "as they are conditioned by the means of production of their material life", "are the producers of their own imaginings, ideas, etc."19) The latter are thus "the ideological reflections and expressions of this vital process".20) Which far from excluding, on the contrary, presupposes their active character. Thus society acts on the arena of history in its concrete historical definitiveness. Its productive forces (the unity of means of production and labour power), its economic structure corresponding to the technical production basis and the level of productive forces; its state organisation, its "mode of presentation", comprise a definite morphological unity. So this historical social whole (Totalität) appears as a concrete subject of history with a multitude of its own concrete qualities and corresponding definitions. The task of science is "to represent the whole thing in the aggregate and therefore the reaction of these different aspects on one another". But all this aggregation of influences and connections has its material basis even for the cloudiest sublimations: the material mode of production and consequently, in movement, the process of direct material production of life, active social practice, which gets its expression in social consciousness.
It is not social consciousness which determines social being, but, on the contrary, social being as the foundation determines social consciousness.
But historical society is itself a dialectical unity of opposites. The process of the production of life, that is the process of labour, the process of the growth of productive forces, is its material content, fundamental and direct. The "economic structure of society" is its content form in which the movement of productive forces takes place concretely and historically. The opposition of form and content becomes a contradiction. When this contradiction between productive forces and productive relations breaks up the whole unity, social revolution takes place, society passes from one stage into another. The juridical relations of property (the juridical translation of productive relations), the state superstructure, the old "modes of presentation", all collapse and give place to new forms.21) The old forms were once "forms of development". They have been dialectically converted into "fetters on development", into their own opposite. This contradiction is "cancelled" in the process of revolution. But the process of revolution is not an automatic process: men make their own history.22) However, the laws of social development revealed by Marx tell us how great masses of people, divided and united by common conditions of life, behave when these conditions of life change. The contradiction between the mode of production and the development of productive forces is shown and expressed in a number of other contradictions which lay bare the opposition of classes, intensify class polarisation, sharpen class interests, produce an ideological demarcation of classes, force on the formation of the class self-consciousness of the revolutionary class and its allies, and through the revolution of living people, through the struggle of the revolutionary class against the class which fortifies the old productive relations in the concentrated form of its state power, through the destruction of this power and the smashing of its opponents' forces, through the emancipation of productive forces and the organisation of new forms of movement of these forces, society passes into another form of historical being.
So Marx looks at society as an historically concrete society, the historical form of which is a transitional form. The "general laws" of historical development therefore include the laws of the transition of one social form into another and presuppose specifically historical special laws for different social-economic formations.
There lies at the basis of the theory of historical materialism the materialist premise that all the vital wealth of society, the whole content of its complete process of life, is in the long run determined by the level of power over nature, by the degree of real mastery (and thus of real change) of the external world, i.e. by the movement and self-movement of productive forces, by the process of material labour which always takes place in a concrete historical social form, that is to say, which is continuously connected with the economic structure of society. In relation to the material, productive, motive forces and the changing economic structure of.society, the natural premises are, as such, a relative constant, although an extremely important constant as being historically the starting-point of development. Moreover, the movement of these natural premises, as premises of social development, is derived from the movement of productive forces. The hidden, so-called "natural resources" do not function socially. They must cease to be "hidden". Only when they are transformed from matter into material, from "things in themselves" into "things for us", entering the stream of artificial material transformation, that is the stream of the material labour process, becoming objects of change, are they changed (both qualitatively and quantitatively), as "elements" of social development. But this quantitative and qualitative change is a consequence of the development of productive forces. It is just the same also with biological "human nature", that is with the other aspect of "the natural premises" for social development. "Corporeal organisation", man of the "race" or "species", is the historical premise of social and historical man, and a relatively constant one. Once again, a change in "human nature" (either a corporeal one or its spiritual correlation) is derived from social development. The law of its development is determined by the law of the development of society as a whole at the basis of which lies the law of the development of productive forces, that is a specifically social law. In this way one-sided "geographical materialism" which deduces all historical development from climatic conditions, the soil, rainfall and water supply, and such factors, is rejected, as also is biological materialism (i.e. positivism) which mechanically transfers biological laws to society and deduces the laws of social development from so-called "human nature" as its biological nature. But the materialist conception of history in the first place strikes a mortal blow at all forms of idealism in the social sciences. Phenomena of social consciousness are derived from the phenomena of social being. The material fact of the process of the development of productive forces (or their decline) in its social-historical form, that is the changes in the productivity of social labour and in human relations in the process of that labour (productive relations), these are the main determinants which in the last resort, either directly or indirectly, immediately or through a number of intermediate links, condition the changes in the whole sphere of superstructures, political, juridical, moral, scientific, aesthetic, philosophical. The morphological unity of society (although contradictory and moreover developing these inner contradictions in different directions) is conditioned precisely by the fact that it has a single material basis. The superficial idealist point of view in the social sciences starts from a different species of the forms of social consciousness, without even posing the problem of the objective determinants of this consciousness. The materialist conception of history, on the other hand, analyses just these material determinants, the movement of which determines the movement of the corresponding thought forms. "According to the different modes of production in different countries in different epochs, a hierarchy of soul, mind and understanding corresponds to the definite economic hierarchy .... The psychology of classes corresponds to the hierarchy of social relations and the economic development of classes." 23) The class struggle fills the whole history of class societies, is the vital nerve of the historical process. But this struggle itself, the disposition of class forces, their concrete combination, is conditioned by the development of a definite mode of production. It breaks out, on the other hand, not only in the realm of the struggle of direct material interests, but also in the highest realms of ideas. Even the general forms of thought in an age express and reflect its specific style and its class division, that is, in the long run they express the mode of production together with the level of productive forces.
Marx's doctrine of the movement of social-economic formations is far from being an artificial intellectual system. It generalises an enormous practical and theoretical experience. Of course "economic structures" and their superstructures cannot express all the fullness of the concrete historical stream of full life in all its variety. But, as has already been remarked earlier, while poorer than life, these generalisations are richer than the mosaic offered by banal empiricism which is usually spiced with a dose of "morality". They express the main and decisive relationships, those which determine the routes of historical movement. "Pure capitalism" is, undoubtedly, an abstraction, though in many cases a very useful abstraction. But "impure" capitalism is the reality, both as a combination of "capitalisms" and as "world capitalism" in whose pores the relics of pre-capitalist formations are also contained. Its "pure class structure" is, of course, an abstraction. But the class structure of real capitalism is actually such a structure that the masses are composed of wage workers while the monopolists of the means of production command economy (and the state). The "pure proletariat" is an abstraction. But the living unity of the mass of proletarians of various qualifications with its outer circumference and with a strong, real core, is a reality which is really struggling for its real rule. Therefore the doctrine of the change of historical and economic formations, as a doctrine of the process of "history", adequately expresses the real historical process. The Windelband-Rickert opposition of "history" to "theory" must be put away in the archives. History as a mechanical load of separate facts is not history as a science. The co-ordination of individual facts and their ranking under the teleological and theological command of the Kantian categorical imperative is not a science. "Zweckwissenschaft" à la Stammler, Stolzmann, etc.,24) is not a science. On the other hand, there can be no scientific system which merely gives a bare scheme of abstract character. But the question of the empty abstract character of this or that theory is a concrete question, a question of the factual analysis of that theory, a question of checking it. The opposition of "theory" and "history" is a relic of the outlook which supposed that nature has no history and therefore that its laws are eternal. "Natural" eternal law and the shame-faced system of relations fixed by these "eternal laws" is the basis of "theory". "Theory", according to this view, is a system of " eternal laws " brought into connection and formulated. History, on the other hand, is the outflow of the free creative spirit which creates the new, producing chiefly ever new ethical values. So human history is, as Stammler expresses it, "Gegenstück" with regard to nature, while the sciences of the spirit are "Gegenstück" with regard to the natural sciences. Together with the destruction of the dualism in principle of nature and society, of natural and social laws, there also goes the opposition in principle of theory and history.
So the materialist conception of history is materialist dialectic in its specific and enriched form; it is the dialectic of a social and historical process which reveals its objective dialectic. Marx was the first to deduce the laws of historical development on the basis of a wealth of material, a great sea of facts, a vast acquaintance with the historical material of various ages and peoples, an unusually rich experience of modern European history and of the practice of the social class struggle of which he was himself a great master in all its spheres. This is a monumental theoretical structure the like of which the world has never seen. Where formerly "chance" ruled, the actions of warriors and kings, Cleopatra's nose or Napoleon's stomach, where man saw an incomprehensible struggle of abstractions and symbols, a bloody carnage for the forms of religion or the sign of cross against crescent, where idealist philosophy gave a substitute for explana tion by compelling the "spirit" to embody itself permanently in the real historical process, here for the first time real science assumed its place, destroying the illusory connections of things and processes and putting actual connections in their place. Society, historical society, was scientifically "discovered" as alive and complex, internally contradictory and mobile, connected with nature and actively influencing it, a unity developing its contradictions and passing from one qualitatively defined forma tion to another, with peculiar specific laws. So the general laws of social and historical development (Engels) already melt into themselves the special laws of the movement of specific social and historic formations expressing the specific forms of moving contradictions. The laws of the development of feudalism, for example, are not the same as the laws of the development of capitalism. The laws of movement of each such formation are original, although they also "act" on the basis of general laves, established by the theory of historical materialism. Nor can it be otherwise, for the productive forces are different (both qualita tively and quantitatively), the economic structures are different, the classes are different, the whole vital unity and all its con tradictions are different. Therefore, for example, it would be foolish to look for the law of periodical crises of over-production in natural forms of economy just as it would be foolish to look for flexible forms of scientific thought in stagnant societies. This is not the consensus of Comte, with its wooden hierarchical cate gories. Here everything is contradictory, mobile, dialectic, here vital historical life is at play. Marx established an infinite variety of general and partial laws of "the second order" besides the vast and mighty generalisations which form the "core" of the materialist conception of history. His brilliant analysis of the groups within a class, of ideologues and practicians; his analysis of the division of labour and the influence of this division on the whole structure of thought; his analysis of the different forms of superstructure and, in the first place, his teaching on the state, which is in itself a whole revolution in thought and the sharpest weapon in the practical political struggle of the proletariat,25) and so on, and so on, these are all most important achievements in science. It can be said without any exaggeration that his very footnotes (the theoretical ones, of course) have nourished a whole pleiade of the most important minds in the camp of official science. Take, for example, his remark about the rôle of Protestantism in the genesis of capitalism,26) which has evoked a whole literature (Sombart, Max Weber, in particular, Tröltsch, etc.).
In the theory of historical materialism the teaching on classes and class struggle has particular importance. Classes are the living collectors and agents of the contradictions of each (class, i.e. presupposing class society) mode of production. The movement of these contradictions and their revolutionary solution runs through the class struggle in its triune economic, political and theoretical form. Certainly the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class and the dominant "mode of presentation" (or "Wissensform", as Max Scheler calls it "for originality") is the "mode of presentation" characteristic of it. Thus here are formed within society its living Totalitäten, classes of which one in the course of development becomes the revolutionary class par excellence. Under definite historical conditions it becomes the grave-digger of the old society.
The materialist conception of history, with its doctrine of class struggle and revolution, is an objective scientific theory. It explains, by starting from the most general laws of being and becoming (materialist dialectic or dialectical materialism), the general objective laws of human history. This is not a subjectivist structure. It is not a voluntarist theory with the will as primal and all-determining factor. The will is limited at each given moment by definite conditions. But this theory is in the highest degree active and revolutionary. It has nothing in common with the disgusting fatalistic caricature on Marxism of which social-democracy is the organised apostle. The "objectivism" of this caricature is historical fatalism, which is, in its turn, the weapon of Fascist activism. The Marxist doctrine of the laws of social development is an instrument for the overthrow of capital. It gets its further interpretation in the theory of capitalist development, in which the general laws of social dialectic assume an even more concrete form as the laws of the development and doom of capitalist society and the laws of its inevitable transition into socialism through the revolution of the proletariat and its dictatorship.
1) See Engels, Dialectic of Nature, pp. 371-3.
2) See A. Kronenberg, Historischer and naturwissenschaftlicher Materialismus, "Die Naturwissenschaften", VI. Jahrg., Heft 26 (28 June, 1918).
3) Marx and Engels, German Ideology. Extract on Feuerbach.
4) Engels, Dialectic of Nature, p. 147.
5) See N. N. Alexeyev, "The Social and Natural Sciences in the Historical Mutual Relationship of their Methods. Essays in the History and Methodology of the Social Sciences". Part 1: Mechanical Theories of Society. Historical Materialism, Moscow, 1912.
6) Engels, Dialectic of Nature, p. 85.
7) See our article"Marxism and Darwinism"in the miscellany"Studies", Moscow-Leningrad, 1932.
8) F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach.
9) Karl Marx,"Towards the critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law", p. 15, Selected Essays, London and New York, 1926.
10) Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, Works, Vol. 1, p. 118.
11) Ibid., p. 107.
12) Even some bourgeois scientists understand this. See E. R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, 2nd ed. revised, New York, 1924: "To the extent, then, that the theory of economic interpretation is simply (!) a part of the general doctrine of social environment, the contention that it necessarily leads to an unreasoning fatalism is baseless. Men are the product of history, but history is made bymen" (pp. 100-1).
13) Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy, p. 293.
14) Max Weber, Miscellany, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, 1921. Article, "Die Objektivität Sozialwissenschaftlicher and sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis", pp. 178-9.
15) Ibid., p. 214.
16) G. Tröltsch, Der Historismus, pp. 367-8. Tröltsch here notes the great influence of Marx.
17) Karl Marx and F. Engels on Feuerbach, Archiv., I, p. 225.
18) Ibid., p. 214.
19) Ibid., pp.215-16.
20) Ibid.
21) Ibid., p. 227.
22) K. Marx, Critique of Political Economy.
23) Antonio Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l'histoire.
24) R. Stammler, Wirtschaft und Recht; R. Stolzmann, Der Zweck in der Volkswirtschaftslehre.
25) See below, Lenin's classical work, State and Revolution.
26) K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I.