E. Belfort Bax

Essays in Socialism


The Materialistic Doctrine of History

 
From Essays in Socialism New & Old (1907), pp.13-19.
 

THE materialistic conception of historic evolution may be defined generally as meaning the view that the social life of mankind on all its sides, including its moral, intellectual and aesthetic, is either the direct or indirect outcome of the psychological reflection of its economic conditions, i.e., of the conditions under which its wealth is produced and distributed.

According to this view in its most extreme form, morality, religious conceptions and art are not simply modified by economic conditions, but are merely the metamorphosed reflection of those conditions in the social consciousness. In short, the substance of all things human is wealth, qua its production and its distribution. Religion, art, morality, etc., are its accidents, i.e., each and all of their manifestations are traceable directly or indirectly to economic causes.

That this doctrine contains an infinitely larger element of truth than the previously accepted one, that the dominating influence in human affairs is the speculative theories holding sway at any particular time, is, I take it, incontestable. But this fact by no means necessarily entitles us to regard economic condition as the sole determinant of progress – for such is practically the position taken up by certain exponents of the “materialistic conception of history.” Those who adopt it seem to me to deny or ignore the fact that human nature always implies a synthesis, and, as such, more than one element. They further seem to think that in the reduction of any given psychological or social phenomenon to its earliest expression – it may be back to an earlier animal form or even to simple organic tissue – they have thereby disclosed the essence, the “true inwardness,” of the phenomenon in question. The mere tracing of a thing back to its beginning in the order of time does not, however, necessarily disclose its intrinsic import, or affect its ultimate significance. An illustration of the fallacy here referred to is to be found in the debate on the subject of this article between M. Jaurès and M. Lafargue held some years ago in Paris. M. Jaurès maintained (whether rightly or wrongly does not affect my present purpose) that in the earliest psychological stages of humanity the notion of Justice and Equality can be traced, and that all subsequent popular movements have simply represented progressive manifestations of these ideas, though of course, as modified by the economic conditions of the period in question. To this Lafargue suggests that his opponent should carry his argument further and demonstrate the existence of such ideas in the ape and even the oyster. The answer to Lafargue is, to my thinking, perfectly simple. In the first place, Jaurès was not dealing with oysters, or even with apes, but with human society. His contention was that certain ethical notions or tendencies are first clearly and definitely manifested as such in the earliest stages of man’s development as a social being; that, often obscured, they have been never quite lost throughout his subsequent development; and that they reach their full fruition in Socialism.

The saying natura non facit saltum is doubtless true in sociology as elsewhere, and therefore no one has right to say that, assuming M. Jaurès’s assumption to be correct, something corresponding to these ethical tendencies, Justice, Equality, etc. might not be found in the ape bearing an analogy with the same tendency displayed in man. The like observation may be carried further back even unto the oyster, or possibly if one likes, to inorganic matter. In the “irritability,” the reactive response to stimulus, of the body of the mollusc with the sensibility we infer to accompany it, we have the direct precursor of the conditions presupposing man’s moral, intellectual and artistic impulses. The merely sensitive “reflex action” of the mollusc represents unquestionably at its stage of evolution the “higher,” no less than the lower, consciousness of Humanity – it contains all these tendencies implicitly – so to say, in potentia. But the mere fact that in the time-sequence the one is preceded by the other does not enlighten us as to the nature either of “higher consciousness” and “conscious volition,” or of mere blind sentiency and reflex action, still less as to the ulterior forms of human consciousness lying hidden in the future.

The endeavour to reduce the whole of human life to one element alone, to reconstruct all history on the basis of economics, as already said, ignores the fact that every concrete reality must have a material and a formal side – that it must have at least two ultimate elements – all reality as opposed to abstraction consisting in a synthesis. The attempt to evolve the many-sidedness of human life out of one of its factors, no matter how important that factor may be, reminds one of the attempts of the early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce Nature to one element, such as water, air, fire. With Plato and Aristotle, the Greeks gave up their efforts to trace back even external nature, much less experience in general, to any single factor within it. Now the more extreme partisans of the Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung would make of economic basis their “source and origin” of all things in the manner of the old Greek Hylozoists. In disputing this pretension on one occasion with an eminent partisan of the extreme view, I was maintaining that there were things in the heaven and earth of human affairs that were not dreamt of in his philosophy – that there were moral, intellectual and aesthetic facts of life which could not be traced back even remotely to purely economic causes. His reply was significant. “Where do they come from then?” he said, “they don’t fall down from heaven.” The impossibility of any alternative between their being the psychological reflection of economic conditions and their “falling down from heaven” struck me as extremely naive. The possibility of declining to accept either horn of the pretended dilemma never seemed to present itself to my friend.

As a matter of fact the theory under discussion would seem to require correction in the following sense:– “The speculative, ethical and artistic faculties in Man exist as such ab initio in human society, although undeveloped, and are not merely products of the material facts of man’s existence, albeit their manifestations at any given time throughout the past have been always slightly and often considerably modified by those facts. The total evolution of society, thus far, has been in a far larger degree determined by its material groundwork than it has by any purely speculative, ethical, or artistic cause. But this is no equivalent to saying that you can resolve any such “ideological” factor back into a purely material condition. I maintain that no sort of demonstration has been given of the possibility of resolving any single epoch-making speculative, moral or aesthetic conception into being the product of mere economic circumstance. This may enter into it and modify it in its realisation, but it has never been shown that it can explain it more than partially. The same remark applies to any historical period or event. This too has never been exhaustively explained as a product of past or present, material conditions, although in certain cases I admit it may be sufficiently so for practical purposes, just as society has a distinct economical development, so it has also a distinct psychological development, the interaction of these two lines of causation giving us social evolution in the concrete.

An important distinction is, moreover, usually ignored by exponents of the theory, to wit, that between negative condition and positive cause. New material conditions of society which have merely removed previous hindrances to the development of an idea cannot be treated as the cause of that idea. The removal of those hindrances may be an antecedent condition inseparable from the realisation of the idea or the ideal, but it is no more its cause than the removal of a mechanical hindrance to the straight growth of a tree is the cause of its normal form or stature. Instances enough of this must occur to the reader from the domain of history. The precise form a movement takes, be it intellectual, ethical or artistic, I fully admit is determined by the material circumstances of the society in which it acquires form and shape, but it is also determined by those fundamental psychological tendencies which have given it birth. For example, the reasoning faculty, the power of generalisation, the bringing of events into the relation of cause and effect, can certainly not be reduced to the “psychological reflection of economic conditions,” even though the earliest stimulus to its exercise might be shown to have been due to them or its results to have been modified by their influence. The reasoning faculty generalises certain external perceptions, i.e., it reduces them under a rule of universal application, or in other words explains them. Its subject-matter is primarily the phenomena of the world as perceived. The earlier hypotheses in which it envisages natural occurrences may be crude, but the fact at their foundation is a naive observation of external nature, rather than reflection of economic conditions. Again philosophy is the outcome of, at first, observation of nature, and later, of the analysis of the elements of consciousness in and through which nature is given. Undoubtedly by way of unconscious analogy, the social life of the society in which the mind has grown up has a tendency to modify the conclusions arrived at. But this does not constitute the total result the mere “psychological reflection of economic conditions.” There is a great deal beside this to account for, that cannot he so explained.

Indeed in some cases the hypothesis of economic cause is superfluous, as for example when a speculative belief arrived at directly or indirectly by simple inference from observation, by reflection, or by analogy, has come to be held as an article of faith – not merely as a “pious opinion,” but as something which is to him who holds it as real as the facts of his everyday life. Its influence on action and on the course of human affairs in such a case is absolutely certain and may be quite as powerful as that of any form of economic circumstance. Thus, the early Christian communities among whom the belief in the approaching miraculous “end of the age” or (later) in personal immortality was absolutely undoubting, unquestionably had their whole mind and action determined by these beliefs. The latter developed of course upon lines which to the then existing social and political condition of the Roman world were those of least resistance – but these external conditions did not create them.

A plant presupposes certain conditions – soil, climate, moisture – in order that the seed may take root and grow up. But soil and climate are not the plant, the seed itself is the plant (potentially) and this notwithstanding that soil, climate, and other outward circumstances play a part small or large in modifying the plant, and this again in modifying that plant’s subsequent seed, and so on to infinity. But all the same, trace back as far as we can go, follow modification after modification indefinitely, we yet never get to a stage at which soil and plant become one. The double element of germ and soil remains throughout. So in Human Evolution, go as far back as we may we never can eliminate one of the two ultimate elements. We are always driven back upon the reciprocal determination of outward material condition and inward “ideological” spontaneity. These two elements are found in inseparable interaction in every concrete human society, even the earliest and the simplest. The elimination of either one of them leaves you with an abstraction.

We now come to the important question, in what relative proportion they operate at different periods. That one sometimes preponderates very considerably, and that this one throughout the historical period been the material element, I regard as, nowadays, incontestable. But that even within the period covered by historical records there have been exceptional occasions when the “ideological” has overweighed the former, is unquestionably also true – viz. when a speculative belief has become so real to a considerable body of believers as to dwarf the importance of the material interests of life. The first beginnings of Christianity as already stated, are a case in point. The tendency has been of course for the material and (especially) economic factor to reassert itself the moment large masses of men are concerned, and this was to an increasing degree the case with Christianity after the first century. A similar remark applies also to the religious movements of the Reformation. In the evolution of Christianity during the first two generations material conditions played a very minor role, and, such as it was, almost purely negative. In the early period of the heretical movements of the Middle Ages the speculative factor was likewise dominant.

But apart from the special case of a speculative belief firmly held, we can discover considerable variations in the relative distribution of influence between the “ideological” and material sides of life throughout history in different periods. The question here arises, Can we formulate any law of those variations? Can we show the principle on which they depend? I think we can, and that it is to be found in the relative security or the reverse of the necessities of life for large sections of the population. The basis of social development is obviously material, since human beings consist of animal bodies dependent for their existence on food, shelter, clothing, utensils, etc. Hence, the securing of these things is the first concern, the sine qua non of all societies. When therefore these means of existence are inadequate or are placed in jeopardy, their attainment plays the primary role and occupies the foremost place in human consciousness. The higher human activities in the long run presuppose the satisfaction of the lower. So long as the lower animal wants remain unsatisfied, they must always fill the whole horizon of thought and action. The mind must be ceaselessly pre-occupied with them. This applies as much to the ascetic as to the ordinary man, only in an inverted form. The ascetic is concerned with his animal nature which he endeavours to suppress quite as much as the ordinary man is with his animal nature which he endeavours to satisfy. There is no possibility of evading this natural basis of all things. Now, as already said, given the want of the material necessaries of life, or given difficulty in their procurement, or insecurity in their tenure, you are mutatis mutandis bound to have the economic factor predominant. And it has been the case throughout history that for large classes of society, in most cases for the majority, one or all of the above mentioned conditions have obtained, though in varying degrees in different periods. Hence throughout history “ideological” products have been largely coloured and in many cases entirely moulded by economic causes. In this connection I may quote what I have said in another place (Outlooks from the New Standpoint, pp.127-8), to wit, that, to put the matter shortly, “for economics to be the primary motive power of progress, we must have (1) a class in a position in which it is either deprived of the average necessities and comforts of life possessed by another class, or in which its enjoyment of them is precarious; (2) a consciousness in the former class of this deprivation, i.e., of its own inferiority and precarious state: (3) a belief in the possibility of attaining the coveted comfort, leisure, or security by class-action. These, I say, are the conditions for the economic movement to make itself felt in history. They are conditions under which when present in a class forming the majority, or even a considerable minority, in the state, it must make itself felt.” This may take place unconsciously no less than consciously. In the former case, men will probably think they are actuated by political or religious motives, when they are really moved by consideration of the material well-being and prosperity of themselves and their class. In the past this has often enough been the case. Nowadays, on the contrary, the cloak of religion is seldom anything but a conscious or at best semi-conscious sham.

To sum up the contention I have here sketched out in opposition to the extreme view of the Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung:– For the latter human affairs are determined solely from without by the economical causes, just as for the antagonistic view they are determined solely from within by psychical or “ideological” causes. Both these views seem to me to be erroneous, because one-sided, although the former is nearer the truth than the latter, inasmuch as throughout historic evolution up to the present time, the determination from without by physical (i.e., economical) conditions has unquestionably predominated; while at the present day this predominance is so overwhelming as to strike even the most unobservant. This last circumstance it is which has contributed to the spread of what I term the extreme materialist view. Because we are passing through a period in which economic conditions dwarf all other considerations, it is difficult to conceive of a time when they did not do so. The notion that theology should ever have been so undoubtingly believed in by men of the world as to seriously influence their actions, or that chivalry, feudal devotion, or tribal sentiment should ever have been so strong as to subordinate all else in life, seems inconceivable to the modern man. I know I shall be told that all these things were themselves in their origin the outcome of material (economic) conditions, to which I reply by a reference to the theory that Tenterden steeple was the cause of Goodwin Sands, both having appeared together. Of course “ideological” conception to bear fruit must be planted in suitable economic soil, but this economic soil, as such, is merely a negative condition. The active, formative element lies in the seed, i.e. the “ideological” conception. And this is the case even in Socialism in so far is it is a conscious movement. That, to continue our metaphor, the economic soil is not alone enough to produce a change, however ripe it may be for such a change, is aptly illustrated by the fact that it is Germany and not England or the United States (where the great industry has been longer existing and is much further developed) that has produced the most powerful Socialist party up to date. In Germany the “ideological” or psychological factor, to wit, the Socialist theory working on an educated population, was present under economic conditions, relatively unfavourable, at least in its earlier stages, and a great result followed; in the other, the psychological factor was absent or but little developed, and though the economic conditions were ten times as favourable, both a very much later and a very much less powerful result followed. This is very significant in an age and in a movement where economic condition plays, and must necessarily play, a role of the first magnitude. Here you have a doctrine based on economics and proclaiming the necessary ultimate evolution of the great industry into Socialism, which is nevertheless weaker in those countries where economic conditions are most advanced, such as England and the United States, than it is on the continent of Europe where the great industry is a comparatively recent importation. The proletariat is larger, and probably greater misery exists in the cities of Britain and America than in most parts of Germany, yet Socialism in Britain and America is as yet struggling with an imperfectly class-conscious working class. Economic conditions, let them press never so hardly, require the fertilising influence of an idea and an enthusiasm before they can give birth to a great movement, let alone to a new society.

I have already pointed out how the proportionate share of either of the two elements in the total result varies at different periods, and have indicated what I deem to be the law governing this variation. We have admitted that in the present day economic conditions so far dwarf all others in men’s minds as to seem on a cursory view the only factor in human progress. But even despite this actual overwhelming predominance we have seen that what I may term the original psychological spontaneity – the ideological faculty within man – has first of all to seize and transform the results of the economic pressure from without into the form of an Ideal, before the progressive movement can really make headway. When it does not do this the progressive movement, and therewith the general social advance, spreads itself aimlessly, like a river passing through marshy country. That because hitherto the economic factor in progress has been the leading one throughout most periods of history, it does not follow that it always will be so. On the contrary, assuming the correctness of my statement of the law governing the proportion in which one or the other of the two reciprocating elements of social evolution – the outer or economic and the inner or psychological – enters into the social synthesis of any given period, it follows that once you get rid of class-society, i.e., the monopoly of the necessaries and comforts of life by a limited section of the population to the exclusion of the rest, you abolish the leverage which mere material circumstance has hitherto had in determining the trend of human affairs. Hitherto when class-conditions have prevailed, the outer has overpowered the inner, the material circumstance has moulded the psychological determination. This, as already stated, must always be so when you have an unstable economic equilibrium, in other words, when a possessing class confronts a dispossessed class and the consciousness of the dispossessed class is dominated by the want of material necessities and the desire to obtain them. Every idea emanating from such a class will then necessarily bear the impress of this fact. Similarly the possessing class will likewise per contra have its consciousness dominated by the economic necessity always present to it of defending its position.

On the contrary, when classes have ceased to exist, – where all society forms one class – the specific economic pressure disappears and the spontaneous psychological movement has free play. It may be true that you can never completely eliminate the economic element. Nature herself must sometimes exercise a pressure, although with the advance of technical knowledge and invention such pressure, common in primitive times – when man’s power over nature was limited, when the social group was limited and more or less isolated, and hence when a bad harvest, a hailstorm, or the predatory incursion of a neighbouring tribe meant a dislocation of all existing social conditions – would tend to disappear. Yet notwithstanding that with our greater power over natural forces this direct influence of external nature might be reduced to the minimum, it would scarcely vanish entirely, still less could the friction arising from disturbances due to changes incidental to the internal development of society be got rid of completely. But in spite of all this, the economic factor in progress would henceforth be definitely subordinated and never again dominate the movement of social or intellectual life. Those social modifications which were previously determined unconsciously by material conditions, methods of production, distribution, and the like, will henceforward be consciously shaped by the will of man.

My object iii t he foregoing has been to point out the completely reciprocal action of the elements of social dynamics – that like every real synthesis they include at least two main factors, that the one is not and cannot be directly or indirectly the cause of the other, however unequal may be the respective preponderance in the total result in different phases of development, but that they are alike cofactors whose united action and reaction creates the reality which is their synthesis. These factors in social development are outward material circumstance (mainly economic in its character), in its widest sense, acting on what we may term (relative to the more mechanical determination of the other factor) the spontaneity of human intelligence, and reacted upon by it. The latter like the former follows its own distinct line of causation up to a certain point, but history consists in the unity of these two lines in their action and reaction. The separate syntheses which evolve themselves and acquire a relatively independent existence and development of their own within the great synthesis of social life (the wheels within wheels) are practically infinite. The mode in which economical forms are continually throwing off new offshoots and a life of their own is admirably touched upon in a letter of the late Friedrich Engels, published as a supplement to the Leipziger Volkszeitung for the 26th of October, 1895. The same applies mutatis mutandis to the other and ulterior departments of human activity. The religious, political, scientific, philosophical, moral, aesthetic sides of life also have a tendency to develop subsidiary forms, each of which acquires a relatively substantial and independent, though subordinate, life of its own. All alike are in varying degrees the products of economic development acting on psychical initiative and psychical initiative reacting on economic development. But at each stage this action and reaction becomes more complex than in the preceding stage, there being no economic form absolutely the product of external forces, nor any intellectual, moral, or artistic form absolutely determined by psychical initiative. Human evolution is a product of these elements. Abstracted from each other they have no causal existence. Their only reality as causes of progressive change in society is as distinguished in their total result.

The hope for humanity under Socialism consists in the fact that then for the first time will the psychical initiative of man be freed from the distorting and crushing weight of economic conditions and material environment, and will hence, in its turn, dominate human life. Of the incalculable magnitude of the revolution this will imply, none can doubt who have once grasped the meaning of historic development in the past.

 


Last updated on 13.1.2006