Parliament or Soviet. A Reply to the ‘Proletarian’ (U.S.A.) (1930)

From the December 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

In our August number we pointed out that a certain John Keracher, of the American “Proletarian”, contributed an article to their July number which contained a covert attack on our principles and policy. That although our Declaration of Principles was quoted, our name had not been mentioned.

The October number of the “Proletarian” contains a reply to our criticism. Although Keracher had not thought it worth while mentioning our name in the previous article he now finds the matter so important that he devotes nearly twelve columns (nearly half of the paper) to us. And further, the matter was of such urgency that copies of the “Proletarian” were sent to the branches of our Party!

Throughout these twelve columns Keracher quotes portions of paragraphs of Marx and Engels in the effort to wring out of them an interpretation they will not bear. We pointed out in our criticism that quotations in the previous article had been made without the source being indicated. Keracher now tries to take refuge in the statement that we ought to know the source! The “Proletarian” is supposed to be a paper written for working men, and therefore, if working men are to test the truth of the evidence brought forward they must be able to go to the source for that purpose. But as the “Proletarian”, like other Communist organs, depends upon the ignorance of the workers, its writers are not over-anxious to give the workers the opportunity to see the frailty of the case put forward. As we cannot spare twelve columns to deal with Keracher, we will only take his leading points, and demonstrate his slipperiness, without following up all his by-paths.

At the end of our criticism of the “Proletarian” article we asked how they proposed getting rid of the armed force, at present controlled by the capitalists through Parliament, which stood in the way of any attempt to alter the foundations of society. This is the reply:

“Getting control of Parliament does not mean that the workers have gained control of the public power of coercion, the state. At such a critical moment the capitalist class (not so stupid as the S.P. of G.B.) will send its ‘armed forces’ to disperse Parliamentary representatives. The real State will show itself.”

For sheer stupidity the above takes the palm. How can the “capitalist class send its armed forces”? Are the capitalists sitting in a room somewhere, issuing orders?

The issuing of orders, the appointment and control of officials, and everything else connected with the operation of the armed forces, is in the hands of the group in Parliament that for the time constitutes the Government, i.e, has the majority. Time after time we have given abundant evidence of this fact in these columns.

The armed force is a part of the governmental machinery, the whole of which depends for its efficiency upon co-ordination. If the co-ordination breaks down the machinery becomes useless, or anarchy sets in. The co-ordination comes from the centre—Parliament.

After the above quotation comes the following paragraph:

“If ‘the armed forces of the nation’, most of it working men, remains loyal to the ruling class, then the proletariat will have to submit to a military dictatorship of the capitalists. If, on the other hand, the rank and file of the army and navy goes over to the working class, then the political power will have passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. It is during this period that the new state form…will make its appearance. The Paris Commune and the Russian Soviet arose spontaneously out of the revolution itself.”

A couple of “ifs”  are very weak material to base a course of action upon. Secondly, as the capitalists are alleged to be able to send their armed forces where they like, irrespective of the intentions of Parliament, surely the only inference to be drawn is that there is already a military dictatorship here and now. Thirdly, how is “the new State form” going to make its appearance; pop up suddenly like a mushroom over night? Fourthly, the Russian Soviet did not arise in 1917, but many years before. Fifthly, according to Trotsky, “It is true that the English Trades Unions may become a powerful lever for the revolution; they may even, in circumstances and for a certain time, be a substitute for the Workers’ Soviets.” (The Lessons of October, 1917, p.75.) Sixthly, the Paris Commune was able to arise because the armed force of the French Government was “resting” in German prison camps.

In the cases of both the Communards and the Bolsheviks they were able to seize power because, owing to an unusually favourable set of circumstances, the armed force that would have stood in the way would have stood in the way had already been got rid of, or rendered innocuous by those who previously controlled State power. Are we asked to depend upon such a situation in the future instead of using the weapons we have at hand? Could stupidity go further?

Now let us gave an example of Keracher’s slippery method of arguing. He says:

“ ‘The Communards proposed decentralisation,’ writes Gilmac approvingly.”  There is nothing approving or disapproving in a statement of fact. But Keracher, unable to meet the point, takes refuge, like other wrigglers, in trying to foist upon his opponents views which they do not hold.

Mr. Keracher wants to have it both ways. To him the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviet Government are both “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.”

Let us give quotations from authorities upon each form.

Engels, in his introduction to the Paris Commune, points out that the Blanquists in the Commune acted in a way exactly the opposite of their former attitude:

“The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the School of Conspiracy, held together by the rigid discipline essential to it, they started from the conception that a comparatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able not only to grasp the helm of State at a favourable moment, but also through the display of great energy and reckless daring, to hold it as long as required; that is, until they had succeeded in carrying the masses of the people into the revolutionary current, and ranging them around the small leading band. To accomplish this, what was necessary, above all else, was the most stringent dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune do—which in the majority consisted of these Blanquists? In all its proclamations to the French people in the Provinces, it called upon them for a free federation of all French communes with Paris, for a National Organisation, which for the first time was to be the real creation of the nation. The Army, the political police, the Bureaucracy, all those agencies of oppression in a centralised government, which Napoleon had created in 1789, and which since then every new government had gladly used and kept up as ready weapons against its enemies, were to be abolished everywhere as they had been abolished in Paris.”

(The Paris Commune ,p.10, N.Y.L.N.Co)

The following quotations from Lenin and Zinovieff show the rigid centralisation of the Bolshevik Government, and the way a portion of the Russian Communist Party kept power to themselves:

“It proves that unqualified centralisation and the strictest discipline of the proletariat are among the principal conditions for the victory over the bourgeoisie.” (Left Wing Communism, N. Lenin, p.110.)

“If Bolshevism could successfully, and under the greatest difficulties, achieve in 1917-1920 the strictest centralisation and iron discipline, it was due simply to a series of historical peculiarities of Russia.” (Left Wing Communism, p.11)

“Our central Committee has decided to deprive certain categories of party members the right to vote at the Congress of the Party. Certainly it is unheard of to limit the right of voting within the party, but the entire party has approved this measure, which is to ensure the homogenous unity of the Communists.

So that, in fact, we have 500,000 members who manage the entire State machine from top to bottom.” (Report by Zinovieff to First Congress of 3rd International, March, 1919. The Socialist, 29th April, 1920.)

“One of our misfortunes was that we had to take over the old State apparatus.” (The New Economic Policy, by Lenin. The Communist, 16th Dec., 1922.)

Now, Mr. Keracher, which is “the political form at last discovered,” the Commune or the Soviet government? Attempted witticisms are no answer to facts.

Keracher quotes a statement from Engels’ Origin of the Family. But he only quotes a few lines from a paragraph, but in connection with a different matter. The part he quotes first and attempts to make considerable use of is as follows:

“Universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It can and never will be anything else in the modern State. But that is sufficient. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage reaches its boiling point among the labourers, they as well as the capitalists will know what to do.”

Keracher, at the end of his article, asks us what Engels meant by this. We will tell him in Engels’ own words. First from another, and later writing of Engels, and then from the paragraph from which the above is torn, as well as from what is probably the most read of all Engels’ writings, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

In 1895, the year of his death, and twenty-three years after the Paris Commune, Engels wrote an introduction to a reprint of Marx’s Class Struggles in France. In his introduction Engels says:

“When Bismarck now found it necessary to introduce universal suffrage as the only means of interesting the masses of the people in his designs, our workers were not slow to make a serious use of the new opportunity, and they sent August Bebel to the first constituent Reichstag. From that day to this they have utilised the suffrage in a manner which has rewarded them a thousandfold, and been an example to the workers of all other lands. To quote the words concerning the suffrage in the French Marxist programme, ‘ils l’ont transformé, de moyen duperie qu’il a été jusqu’ici , en instrument d’émancipation—they have changed it from a means of deceit, such as it has been hitherto, into a means of emancipation… even if it did no more than allow us to gauge our own strength and that of our opponents, thus preserving us alike from undue faintheartedness and from overweening rashness—if that were all universal suffrage had done for us, it would have been amply worth while.

But it has done more than this. Electoral agitation supplied us with a method of unsurpassed value for getting into contact with those strata of the populace which still held aloof from us, and for compelling the other parties to defend themselves publicly against the attacks we delivered upon their opinions and their actions. Moreover, in the Reichstag it provided our representatives with a platform from which to their opponents in Parliament and to the masses outside they could speak alike with far more authority and with greater freedom than had been possible in the Press and in public meetings. Of what use to the Government and to the bourgeoisie was their Socialist Law when electoral agitation and the speeches of Socialist deputies in the Reichstag were continually rendering its restrictions in the nugatory?

With the successful employment of universal suffrage an entirely new proletarian tactic had come into being, and this tactic speedily underwent further development.  It was found that the governmental institutions in which the dominion of the bourgeoisie had secured organic expression provided a leverage whereby the proletariat could work for the overthrow of these very institutions. The workers participated in the elections to the diets; they voted in the municipal elections; they took their places in the arbitration courts; in their conflict with the bourgeoisie they disputed the possession of every post. The result of all this was that the bourgeoisie and the government grew far more afraid of the constitutional than the unconstitutional activities of the working class party, and came to dread the results of an election far more than they dreaded the results of a rebellion.

The day of surprise attacks has passed, the day when small but resolute minorities could achieve revolutions by leading the masses to the onslaught. Where the question is one of a complete transformation in the social organism, the masses must wittingly participate, must fully understand what they are about. We have learned this from the history of the past 50 years. But if we are to enlighten the masses concerning the issue, prolonged and arduous toil will be requisite. This is the task on which we are now engaged, and with so much success that our adversaries are becoming desperately alarmed.

The irony of history turns everything topsy-turvy. We, the ‘revolutionists’, thrive better by the use of constitutional means than by unconstitutional and revolutionary methods. The parties of law and order, as they term themselves, are being destroyed by the constitutional implements which they themselves have fashioned.”

The paragraph in the Origin of the Family, from which Keracher quotes, is a long one, and starts on page 209 of Kerr’s edition. In the early part of it the following sentences occur:

“The highest form of the State, the democratic republic, knows officially nothing of property distinctions. It is the State, which under modern conditions of society, becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity. The last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can only be fought out under this State form.”  (Italics ours.)

The paragraph then ends as follows:

“The possessing class rules directly through universal suffrage. For as long as the oppressed class—in this case the proletariat—is not ripe for its emancipation, just so long will its majority regard the existing form of society as the only one possible, and form the tail, the extreme left wing, of the capitalist class. But the more the proletariat matures towards its self-emancipation, the more does it constitute itself as a separate class and elect its own representatives in place of the capitalists. Universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It can and never will be that in the modern State. But that is sufficient. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage reaches its boiling point among the labourers, they as well as the capitalists will know what to do.” (Italics ours.)

On the day when the thermometer reaches its boiling point the workers will have elected a majority of delegates to Parliament. That is Engels’ answer to the question. For further evidence let us turn to Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, pp.74-77. (Sonneschien, 1892).

“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes also the State as State. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organisation of the particular class which was pro tempore the exploiting class, an organisation for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production and, therefore especially for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie.

When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as the class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then it dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out. ” (pp.74-77.)

“ III. Proletarian Revolution. – Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by the means of this transforms the socialised means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus borne, and gives their socialised character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialised production on a pre-determined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over nature, his own master—free. (p.86.)

Note the commencement of the last paragraph: “The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of production…into public property,” and take along with it the following, from the end of Engels’ 1891 introduction to The Paris Commune (New York Lab. News. Co.):

“But in reality the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and that no less so in the democratic republic than the monarchy. At the very best it is an inheritance of evil, bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at once, as the Commune did, until a new race, grown up under new, free social conditions, will be in a position to shake off from itself the State rubbish in its entirety.”

The above quotations prove the correctness, according to Engels, of paragraph 6 of our Declaration of Principles, to which Mr. Keracher takes exception, and also the correctness of the summary of the Marxian view, given in our August number, to which Mr. Keracher also takes exception, i.e., that you cannot carry on socialism with capitalist governmental machinery; that you must transform the government of one class by another into the administration of social affairs; that between capitalist society and Socialist society lies a period of transformation during which one after another of the political forms of to-day will disappear, but the worst features must be lopped off immediately the working class obtains supremacy in the State.

In the last column Mr. Keracher, speaking of ourselves, says:

“They have not yet discovered how the workers of Paris and Russia got "rid of the armed forces controlled by the capitalists." ”

The answer is that neither Communists nor Bolsheviks got rid of the armed forces of the capitalists. In each case the capitalists, owing to the exigencies of war, did it.

Marx’s view of universal suffrage was clearly given in his article on the Chartists, in which he said:

“But universal suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of itself as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants,  but landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England, would, therefore, be a far more Socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent.

Its inevitable result here, is the political supremacy of the working class.”  (‘N.Y. Tribune,’ 25th Aug. 1852; quoted by ‘Labour Monthly,’ Dec., 1929.)

Keracher, like the rest of the pro-Bolsheviks, tries to foist upon Marx and Engels their own views of “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” As was pointed out in the May number of the “S.S.,” in all the voluminous writings of Marx and Engels they only use the expression three times. Marx twice; once in a private letter criticising the “free people’s state” (The Gotha Program), and once in the Class Struggle in France, where, dealing with the large peasantry and small working class in France, he said that if the workers got power there would be a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Engels used it only once, at the end of the Paris Commune, were he advised opponents to look at the Paris Commune, that was the dictatorship of the proletariat. And these three references (one of which was not intended for public consumption) are the basis  of all the post-war talk of “Dictatorship”!

We have no further space to spare for Mr. Keracher’s other twists and turns. The above, however, will give a fair idea of the shifts he is compelled to resort to. In the whole of twelve columns he failed to show how the working class could obtain control of the armed forces, by ignoring parliament, and what force, and how, the Proletarian Party would meet the political power of the capitalists. We are evidently supposed to guess this!

Gilmac.

The Materialist Conception of History. by Frederick Engels. (1920)

From the March 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Further Letter on the Subject By Frederick Engels.

Translated for the “Proletarian" by Prof. J. I. Cheskis, of the University of Michigan.

A young student addressed to Engels the following questions:

1. How is it that, after the consanguineous family ceased to exist, marriage between brothers and sisters was still permitted by the Greeks, as Cornelius Nepos attests?

2. How was the fundamental principle of historical materialism understood by Marx and Engels themselves; are the production and reproduction of actual life alone the determining factors, or are they only the basis of all the other conditions acting by themselves?

Frederick Engels replied:

London, Sept. 21, 1890.

Dear Sir,

Your letter of the 3rd inst. was forwarded to me at Folkestone; but not having the book I needed I could not reply. Having returned on the 12th of the same month, I found such an amount of pressing work that only to-day am I able to write a few lines. Please excuse my delay.

To your first question:— First of all you can see on p. 19 of my “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," the Punalua family is represented as developing so slowly that even in this century in the royal family there have been marriages between brothers and sisters. In antiquity we find examples of marriages between brothers and sisters, for instance, the Ptolemies. We must make a distinction between brothers and sisters on the mothers' side and brothers and sisters on the fathers' side. The Greek Adelphos (brother) and Adelphon (sister) are both derived from Delphos (mother), indicating thus the origin of brother and sister on the mother’s side. And from the period of the Matriarchate there has been preserved for a long time the feeling that the children of one mother but of different fathers are more closely related than the children of one father but by different mothers. The Punalua form of the family excludes only marriages among the first, not among the second, since the latter, while the Matriarchate lasted, were not even considered relatives. Cases of matrimony between brothers and sisters in Ancient Greece are limited to those in which the contracting parties are descended from different mothers, or to those of whom the parental relationship was unknown, and hence the marriage was not forbidden. This, therefore, is not absolutely in contrast with the Punalua custom. You have noticed, then, that between the Punalua period and Greek monogamy there is a jump from the Matriarchate to the Patriarchate, which changes things considerably.

According to the “Greek Antiquities" of Wachsmuth, one finds in the heroic period of Greece “no trace of scruples due to a too close relationship of the contracting parties independently of the relationship between the parents and children." (P. 156.) “ Marriage with a carnal sister was not at all scandalous in Crete." (Ibid., p. 170.) This last affirmation is based on Strabone (X) but at the present moment I cannot find this passage because of faulty division of chapters. Under the expression “carnal sister" I understand, until proof to the contrary is furnished, a sister on the part of the father.

To the second question: — 

I have interpreted your first main phrase in the following way: According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure—the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems—all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one. The Prussian State has itself been born and developed because of certain historical reasons, and, in the last instance, economic reasons. But it is very difficult to determine without pedantry that, among the many small States of northern Germany, precisely Brandenburg has been destined by economic necessity and not also by other factors (above all its complications with Poland after the Prussian conquest and hence, also, with international politics—which, besides has also been decisive in the formation of the power of the Austrian ruling family), to become that great power in which are personified the economic, linguistic, and—after the Reformation—also the religious difference between the North and South. It would be mighty difficult for one who does not want to make himself ridiculous to explain from the economic point of view the existence of each small German State of the past and present, or even the phonetic differentiation of High German which extended the geographic division formed already by the Sudetti mountains as far as the Faunus.

In the second place history forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant—the historical event —which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way history runs its course like a natural process, and has substantially the same laws of motion. But, because of the fact that the individual wills—each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)—do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.

I would further ask you to study the theory from its original sources and not from secondhand works; it is really much easier. One can say that Marx has written nothing in which some part of the theory is not found. An excellent example of its application in a specific way is the “Eighteenth Brumaire of L. Bonaparte." Also in “Capital" (III) are many illustrations. And also permit me to recommend to you my writings, Herr E. Duehring’s “Umwalzung der Wissenchaft," and "Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen deutschen Philosophie," in which I have given the most ample illustrations of Historical Materialism which to my knowledge exists. That the young people give to the economic factor more importance than belongs to it is in part the fault of Marx and myself. Facing our adversaries we had to lay especial stress on the essential principle denied by them, and, besides, we had not always the time, place, or occasion to assign to the other factors which participate in producing the reciprocal effect, the part which belongs to them. But scarcely has one come to the representation of a particular historical period, that is, to a practical application of the theory, when things changed their aspect, and such an error was no longer permissible. It happens too often that one believes he has perfectly understood a new theory, and is able to manage it without any aid, when he has scarcely learned the first principles, and not even those correctly. This reproof I cannot spare to some of our new Marxists; and in truth it has been written by the wearer of the marvellous robe himself. [That is, by Marx.—Editor.]

To the first question:—Yesterday (I am writing these words on the 22nd of Sept.) I also found in Schomann, “Greek Antiquities," Berlin, 1855, Vol. I, p. 52, the following words, which confirm definitely the explanation given by me. “It is noteworthy that in later Greece marriages between brothers and sisters of different mothers were not considered incest."

I hope you will not be dismayed by the terrible parentheses which for the sake of brevity overflow from my pen. And I subscribe myself .

Your devoted,

F. Engels

Blogger's Note:

This letter also appeared in the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Materialist Conception of History. by Frederick Engels. (1920)

From the February 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Translated for "The Proletarian" by Prof. J. I. Cheskis, of the University of Michigan.

[The letter printed below is interesting to students of Socialism as one of the instances that show how false is the charge of the superior persons of the Labour Party and the I.L.P., of the "dogmatism" of Marx and Engels. It should also be remembered that a fight was being waged at the time the letter was written between the followers of Marx and the Anarchists of Germany, in which the latter were attempting to stretch some of the phrases of Marx and Engels on the Class War into a support of street fighting and barricades as the essential method of working-class emancipation. Similar tales are sometimes told in this country, and it is a significant fact that every new translation of Marx's and Engels' writings shows still further the falsity of these tales, and how all through their propaganda it was the capture of political power they insisted upon, as the essential that the working class must rely upon for their escape from slavery.—Ed. Com., "S.S."] 

In the course of a discussion that followed a public lecture, given at a seminary, a student asked Engels to give him precise explanations of the two following points:

1. To what extent do economic conditions act as a causative influence ?
2. What part is played by the race and by the individual according to the "historical materialism" of Marx and Engels ?

Engels replied:

London. Jan. 25, 1895. 

122 Regents Park Road, N.W. 

Dear Sir,—Following is the reply to your two questions :

1. The economic conditions, which we consider as the determinative basis in the history of society, we understand to be the manner in which men in a given society produce their means of subsistence and the ways in which they effect the exchange of products among themselves (this as long as division of labour exists). The entire technique of production and transportation is here included. According to our conception this technique determines the mode of exchange, of distribution of products, and—after the disintegration of the tribal system—the division of society into classes, the conditions of master and slave, of State, of politics, law, etc. Further, among the economic conditions under which these phenomena obtain, must be included the geographical environment, and also the actual remains of former phases of economic evolution which often persisted by force of tradition, inertia, or because of circumstances which surrounds that form of society.

Even if, as you say, technique largely depends on the conditions of science, yet, in a greater measure, does the latter depend on the conditions of and the need for technique. If society is in the need of the development of a certain technique, this helps science more than ten universities. The science of hydrostatics was the sole result of the need that Italy felt in the 16th and 17th centuries of controlling the course of her torrents in the mountains. We began to understand the science of electricity only when we discovered its practical application. In Germany, however, they have become accustomed to treat the history of science as though it had fallen out of the sky.

2. We hold, that in the final analysis, economic conditions constitute the determinative factor in historical evolution. Here, therefore, we must hold in view two points:

(A). That the political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc. evolutions are based on the economic evolution. They all re-act upon each other and upon the economic basis. It does not mean that the economic factor is the sole active cause and all the others merely passive effects. But the whole situation presents a mutual interaction among the various forces on the basis of economic necessity, which latter force ultimately prevails. The State, for instance, exerts an influence by means of protective tariffs, free exchange, good or bad revenue laws; and even the boundless stupidity and impotence of the German petty Bourgeoisie—which grew out of Germany's economic misery during the period from 1648 to 1830, and which first manifested itself in piety, then in sentimentality and fawning servility before the nobles and princes— was not without its economic consequences. It was one of the greatest obstacles to the renaissance and was not shaken off until the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the economic wretchedness unbearable. History is not as some would imagine for the sake of their greater convenience, an automatic effect of the economic situation, but men themselves make their own history. Certain it is, however, that men act in accordance with the prevailing conditions that dominate their field of action. And among these the economic circumstances, however much influenced by political and ideological forces, are always of chief importance. In the final reckoning they constitute the decisive factor and form the golden thread which guides the student to the correct, all-comprehensive, understanding of the subject.

(B). Men make their own history, but not as the result of a general volition nor in accordance with some general plan,—not even in a given limited social group. Men's aspirations oppose each other. Out of this circumstance, in every similar group, arises an imperative need whose chance concomitant or accidentality is at once the complement and the form of its manifestation. The need or necessity which here underlies every chance appearance is in the end the economic necessity. The so-called great man appears. But the fact that it happens to be a certain great man, appearing at a certain time and at a certain given place, is simply mere chance. But if we eliminate him there arises an immediate demand for a substitute, and this substitute in time found, tant bien que mal. That Napoleon became a military dictator —of which the French republic, exhausted by civil wars, stood in need—was merest chance ; but that in the event of Napoleon's non-appearance there would have been another to occupy his place is proven by the fact that in every instance in which there was such a need the man was found—Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. If it happened to be Marx who discovered the law of historical materialism, yet Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, who up to 1850 were writing English histories, proves that such a notion already existed, and the discovery of the same idea by Morgan further proves that the times were ripe for such an event and the discovery was an imperative need.

And so it is with every other true or apparent accidentality in history. The farther the field that we may be examining recedes from the economic, and the nearer it approaches the merely abstract ideologic, the more we shall find—in its evolution—such accidentalities appearing on the scene, and the more does the curve of its evolution fluctuate. If one should attempt, however, to trace the axis of this curve, one should find that the longer the time period observed and the larger the field thus treated, the more nearly does this axis run parallel to the axis of the economic evolution.

In Germany the great hindrance to a true understanding of these things lies in the inexcusable neglect of this subject by the writers of economic history. It is so difficult to rid oneself of the historical conceptions inculcated by schools, and still more difficult to collect the necessary materials. Who, for example, has read old J. V. Julich, who includes in his dry collections so many explanations of various political phenomena!

Moreover, it seems to me the beautiful example given us by Marx in his "Eighteenth Brumaire" furnishes a sufficient answer to your questions—the more so because it is a practical illustration. And I believe myself to have touched upon those points in "Anti-Duehring," I., chapters 9-11, II., chapters 2-4, and III., chapter 1, and also in the introduction and in the last chapter of "Feuerbach."

I would ask you not to pass judgment on this letter, but to consider only the thoughts it conveys. I am sorry I have not the time to write you with that exactness I should employ when writing for the public.

Kindly give my regards to Mr. _____ and thank him for the . . . which has given me much pleasure.

With profound respect,

Most devotedly yours,

F. Engels.

Blogger's Note:

See also 'The Materialist Conception of
 History' (1934)

The Materialist Conception of History (1934)

From the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Further Letter on the Subject 

By Frederick Engels.

Translated for the “Proletarian" by Prof. J. I. Cheskis, of the University of Michigan.

A young student addressed to Engels the following questions:

1. How is it that, after the consanguineous family ceased to exist, marriage between brothers and sisters was still permitted by the Greeks, as Cornelius Nepos attests?
2. How was the fundamental principle of historical materialism understood by Marx and Engels themselves; are the production and reproduction of actual life alone the determining factors, or are they only the basis of all the other conditions acting by themselves?

Frederick Engels replied:

London, Sept. 21, 1890.

Dear Sir,

Your letter of the 3rd inst. was forwarded to me at Folkestone; but not having the book I needed I could not reply. Having returned on the 12th of the same month, I found such an amount of pressing work that only to-day am I able to write a few lines. Please excuse my delay.

To your first question:— First of all you can see on p. 19 of my “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," the Punalua family is represented as developing so slowly that even in this century in the royal family there have been marriages between brothers and sisters. In antiquity we find examples of marriages between brothers and sisters, for instance, the Ptolemies. We must make a distinction between brothers and sisters on the mothers' side and brothers and sisters on the fathers' side. The Greek Adelphos (brother) and Adelphon (sister) are both derived from Delphos (mother), indicating thus the origin of brother and sister on the mother’s side. And from the period of the Matriarchate there has been preserved for a long time the feeling that the children of one mother but of different fathers are more closely related than the children of one father but by different mothers. The Punalua form of the family excludes only marriages among the first, not among the second, since the latter, while the Matriarchate lasted, were not even considered relatives. Cases of matrimony between brothers and sisters in Ancient Greece are limited to those in which the contracting parties are descended from different mothers, or to those of whom the parental relationship was unknown, and hence the marriage was not forbidden. This, therefore, is not absolutely in contrast with the Punalua custom. You have noticed, then, that between the Punalua period and Greek monogamy there is a jump from the Matriarchate to the Patriarchate, which changes things considerably.

According to the “Greek Antiquities" of Wachsmuth, one finds in the heroic period of Greece “no trace of scruples due to a too close relationship of the contracting parties independently of the relationship between the parents and children." (P. 156.) “ Marriage with a carnal sister was not at all scandalous in Crete." (Ibid., p. 170.) This last affirmation is based on Strabone (X) but at the present moment I cannot find this passage because of faulty division of chapters. Under the expression “carnal sister" I understand, until proof to the contrary is furnished, a sister on the part of the father.

To the second question: — I have interpreted your first main phrase in the following way: According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure—the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems—all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one. The Prussian State has itself been born and developed because of certain historical reasons, and, in the last instance, economic reasons. But it is very difficult to determine without pedantry that, among the many small States of northern Germany, precisely Brandenburg has been destined by economic necessity and not also by other factors (above all its complications with Poland after the Prussian conquest and hence, also, with international politics —which, besides has also been decisive in the formation of the power of the Austrian ruling family), to become that great power in which are personified the economic, linguistic, and—after the Reformation—also the religious difference between the North and South. It would be mighty difficult for one who does not want to make himself ridiculous to explain from the economic point of view the existence of each small German State of the past and present, or even the phonetic differentiation of High German which extended the geographic division formed already by the Sudetti mountains as far as the Faunus.

In the second place history forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant—the historical event —which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way history runs its course like a natural process, and has substantially the same laws of motion. But, because of the fact that the individual wills—each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)—do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.

I would further ask you to study the theory from its original sources and not from secondhand works; it is really much easier. One can say that Marx has written nothing in which some part of the theory is not found. An excellent example of its application in a specific way is the “Eighteenth Brumaire of L. Bonaparte." Also in “Capital" (III) are many illustrations. And also permit me to recommend to you my writings, Herr E. Duehring’s “Umwalzung der Wissenchaft," and "Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen deutschen Philosophie," in which I have given the most ample illustrations of Historical Materialism which to my knowledge exists. That the young people give to the economic factor more importance than belongs to it is in part the fault of Marx and myself. Facing our adversaries we had to lay especial stress on the essential principle denied by them, and, besides, we had not always the time, place, or occasion to assign to the other factors which participate in producing the reciprocal effect, the part which belongs to them. But scarcely has one come to the representation of a particular historical period, that is, to a practical application of the theory, when things changed their aspect, and such an error was no longer permissible. It happens too often that one believes he has perfectly understood a new theory, and is able to manage it without any aid, when he has scarcely learned the first principles, and not even those correctly. This reproof I cannot spare to some of our new Marxists; and in truth it has been written by the wearer of the marvellous robe himself. [That is, by Marx.—Editor.]

To the first question:—Yesterday (I am writing these words on the 22nd of Sept.) I also found in Schomann, “Greek Antiquities," Berlin, 1855, Vol. I, p. 52, the following words, which confirm definitely the explanation given by me. “It is noteworthy that in later Greece marriages between brothers and sisters of different mothers were not considered incest."

I hope you will not be dismayed by the terrible parentheses which for the sake of brevity overflow from my pen. And I subscribe myself .

Your devoted,

F. Engels

Blogger's Note:

The second part of this letter - with a different translation - is already on the Marxist Internet Archive site. According to MIA, the letter was addressed to J. Bloch.

Grant Allen: A Tribute to His Scientific Work (1919)

At the time of publication, The Proletarian was the paper of the Proletarian University of America. It's editor John Keracher, and its leading supporters Dennis Batt and Oakley C. Johnson were still part of the left-wing of the Michigan State Socialist Party. The Proletarian Party was not to form until the spring of 1920. The author of this article, Adolph Kohn, was an SPGBer who left Britain during World War 1 to avoid being conscripted and was involved in radical circles in and around Detroit. One of the pen-names he took during this period was 'John O'London'.

 From the May 1919 issue of The Proletarian

Many of the ablest thinks of the revolutionary movement are forgotten except by a few. Social science has given us notable pioneers whose work and memory are neglected because they did not serve in a popular cause. Karl Marx set an example in giving due recognition to his fore-runners. In “The Poverty of Philosophy” (1847) he is careful to acknowledge the able work of the early socialist of Ireland—William Thompson—whose “Inquiry into the Principle of Human Happiness” (1827) was a book on surplus value, remarkable for its time. John Gray, author of “The Social System” (1831) and J. F. Bray, who wrote “Labor’s Wrongs and Labor’s Remedy” (1839) were both rescued from oblivion by Marx’s international lectures and studies. How easily gifted workers for socialism are eclipsed in our memory can be gathered from the few who recall the writings and activities of Peter Lavroff and Felix Volkhovsky who did so much for the Russian revolution and died in exile before they saw the Promised Land of their ideals. So too, men like Paul Lafargue and women such as Eleanor Marx Aveling never received one-tenth the attention given to less able if more popular stars in the socialist firmament. And the same is true of natural science. Lamarck the deep and original thinker of evolution who died in abject poverty has been practically forgotten by those who praise Darwin to the skies. Professor William Kingdon Clifford, the brilliant essayist of evolution and rationalism, died when young and his spirited warfare against superstition and ignorance is now hardly known. Half a century ago in the days when Darwinism was fighting for its life, the soldiers of science used no kid gloves and called a spade a spade unlike our respectable and apologetic rationalists and men of science now living. And in sheer abiltiy and quality of effort they are unequalled in this age of cut-throat commerce and break-neck-speed industry. Modern America is the country, par excellence, where instruction is plentiful but ideas scarce. The record of the fine work and unrewarded genius of such a thinker as Grant Allen should be useful to stimulate study and illustrate the truths we teach.

Born in Canada in the memorable year of 1848, Grant Allen came from Celtic stock. His father was an Irish clergyman who later revolted against the compulsory reading of the Anthanasian Creed with its damnation clauses for those who honestly disbelieved. His mother was Scotch of French parentage and thus the Celtic spirit of lively, alert and fluent power combined with scientific knowledge to make Allen the man he was. Life as a boy amongst the flora and fauna of the “Thousand Islands” of Eastern Canada, taught him much of that fine grasp of plant and animal life which blossomed later into the scientific studies which have charmed and helped our generation. Those flower and bird and insect rambles ripened into his “Evolution at Large,” “Flowers and Their Pedigrees,” “The Colors of Flowers,” “In Nature’s Workshop,” “Common Sense Science,” “Science in Arcady,” “Falling in Love,” “Story of Plant Life,” “Colin Clouts Calendar,” “Vignettes from Nature” and many others. These books combine charm and simplicity of language with the latest science such as not even Huxley could excel.

Adverse falls in family affairs cut short his Oxford University life and drove him to private tutorship— the last hope of a university man. Spencer, Darwin, Huxely, Tyndall, and others were making scientific history and Grant Allen saw his life work in the same field. He began to accumulate materials for an investigation into the History of Religion but he had to spend his days in a bitter struggle to provide food and shelter for himself and wife and child. He became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Spanish Town Government College, Jamaica, but British capitalist domination did not arouse the negro to education and Allen’s classes lacked pupils and he was jobless again. So like many others he found that unless you prostituted your education to the service of the few—poverty stares you in the face. As Jack London has so bitterly recorded—you can make more money writing rubbish than scientific books.

People spoke of London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” as good dog stories, whereas they were written as applications of Spencer and Darwin’s teachings on heredity and the struggle for existence. Grant Allen incorporated truths of science—heredity, ethnology and psychology in his stories but people saw the romance and tragedy and understood nothing more. Like Jack London—Grant Allen had to satisfy popular “taste” and his own pressing needs by writing potboilers such as “Hilda Wade,” “The Typewriter Girl,” “The African Millionaire,” etc. “What’s Bred in the Bone,” “The Great Taboo,” “Rev. John Creedy” were written to embody scientific principles but publishers wanted “light stuff” and the talented man of science bitterly turned his back on the real work of his life for many years. As soon as possible, however, he began to write books which pleased himself and will please many generations to come—if they value knowledge.

In his earlier days he had written many magazine articles such as “The Positive Aspect of Communism,” “Socialism and Natural Inequality,” “The Genesis of Genesis” and many articles on woman’s share in primitive social life, in debate with Lester Ward whose theories of the female being the original sex Allen disagreed with. His study of original materials gave us “Anglo-Saxon Briton”—a history of social institutions and social evolution in early Britain—not a history of kings and heroes but a great advance upon the history-writing methods of his day. Andrew Lang —the prominent writer on mythology—said of Allen’s “genius, the most versatile, beyond comparison of any man of his age. Had he been able to devote himself entirely to physical science, as he desired, it is not for me to conjecture what he might have added to the sum of human knowledge. But”—here the tragedy—“he had to live by his pen—by scientific work he could not live.”

Allen found more money in writing guide-books to Italy and France than by his most brilliant studies in science. He stopped writing a “Philosophy of History” based on the facts of evolution in order to write such novels as “All Shades” to keep from starvation. Long study of physics caused him to plan the original work on “Force and Energy” which he was compelled to issue privately in 1873. Publishers did not care to speculate. The theory of attractive force and repulsive energy foreshadowed many ideas which are commonpalce in our day. Jack London and Grant Allen had in common profound regard for the writing of Herbert Spencer who influenced the views of both these men considerably. Spencer had nothing but high praise for that now scarce book of Allen’s “Physiological Aesthetics,” an original treatise on the origin of the pleasure we derive from natural and artificial products. Allen showed that the foundation of all sensation is in the laws of nervous action and that all aesthetic feeling is finally based on sense delight, tastes, smells, touches, sounds, forms or colors. Dedicated to Herbert Spencer the latter said it was a valuable development of evolutionary thought. Spencer tried to get Allen a position as educator, but in vain. Not more than three hundred copies of the book were sold and Allen lost two hundred and fifty dollars through advancing science. In 1879 he published that remarkable study in psychology—“The Color Sense.” Darwin, Wallace and Spencer esteemed it a valuable investigation into that difficult problem of comparative psychology—The Origin of a Color Sense. After ten years Allen obtained one hundred and fifty dollars from the book and he sarcastically said: “As it took me only eighteen months, and involved little more than five or six thousand references, this result may be regarded as very fair pay for an educated man’s time and labor, and should warrant the reproach of the thoughtless critics for deserting the noble pursuit of science in favor of fiction and the filthy lucre.”

Allen’s journalistic work on the staff of “London” came to a sudden end with the collapse of that paper and he accepted the drudgery of compiling an index for the Indian Gazeteer. This was done to the end that he could later devote hmiself to his late work on the inquiry into the origins of religion, and after twenty years’ patient study, collection and comparison of materials he published the book that took him ten years to write—“The Evolution of the Idea of God” (1897). The title was suggested by Herbert Spencer and the book is one of the greatest proofs of the earthly origins of Gods and belief in “Spirits” ever written. Huxely and Spencer, amongst many others, considered it a masterpiece, though the view Allen took of the origin or religion differed in some respects from his contemporary investigators. Those who are familiar with the great work of Frazer “The Golden Bough”, Tylor’s “Anthropology” and Spencer’s “Sociology” will find easy indications of the foundations of Allen’s views.

Allen adopted the essentials of Spencer’s position that religion arose among savages in Ancestor Worship. Answering the question, “By what successive steps did men come to frame for themselves the conception of a deity?” Allen summarizes the evidence of the early beliefs of savages, past or present, and the testimony of historical documents and ancient monuments. How did men come to believe first in many gods —polytheism? How did men come to remove most of their gods until eventually certain races believed in one single, supreme and all-powerful God? And from that how did the advanced races and civilizations conceive of God as a trinity with a human person as one of its three forms—The Origin of Christianity? Allen followed the main conclusion of Spencer but added to it and modified it many ways. He adopted the view that ghost worship was the foundation of belief in gods, and the worship of corpses and not the association of spirits with non-living things was the first form of practiced religion.

The conception of the life of the dead was shown to pass through three stages, corpse worship, ghost worship and shade worship, and were associated with the three stages of mummification, burial and cremation. “In its origin,” says Allen, p. 16, “the concept of a God is nothing more than that of a dead man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed with increased or supernatural powers and qualities.” The worship of the sun, moon and the stars is not primitive, but a later derivation. Many writers hold that religion grew out of fear, but Allen shows that does not answer the question, why men revered and worshipped their gods as a beneficient and generous father. Allen demonstrated that religion consists not in ethical theory but in ceremonial practice and custom—prayer, propitiation, praise, offering, etc. “In its simplest surviving savage type, religion consists wholly and solely in certain acts of deference paid by the living to the persons of the dead.”

In England the Rationalist Press Association published a twelve cent edition of this wonderful book, and in a short time one hundred thousand copies were sold to working men—much to the dismay of a historic enemy—the church. Those who want to understand the reasons for socialists taking their stand on the scientific grounds of criticism of religion must read Grant Allen. For two years Allen went from publisher to publisher, but they were afraid to publish until a relatively obscure man did so. After Allen’s death the materials for a second volume were found and published as they stood under the title of “The Hand of God”— a study in the “Worship of Death”. This is a brilliant addition to the earlier work and contains many essays on modern evolution.

The little book on “Charles Darwin” by Grant Allen is one of the best studies ever written, and as Spencer well said, is one of the few books on this subject that is fair to Darwin’s contemporaries and accurate in its views. It shows the credit due to Spencer for his presentation of cosmic evolution and to Darwin for his discovery of the origin of species. It shows also how every great mind depends upon the society of his time for his success.

The barbarous religions and social conventions of his time found a burning critic in Grant Allen. The hypocrisy of “respectable society”—the idiotic and property relations between the sexes gave us articles like the “New Hedonism” and those poems on the woman victims of a rotten system, printed in his charming “Lower Slopes”—the only book of verses Allen issued.

When he felt the hardest part of his sordid struggle with poverty ending Allen embodied his views on the marriage and social question in two novels—written to please himself—not his publishers. After a long struggle he succeeded in getting a publisher and “The Woman Who Did” and “The British Barbarians” upset the respectable world of his time. They picture people trying to avoid the conventional codes of morality and show their treatment by the “upright” hypocrites around them.

They trace the paralysing influence on men and women of established institutions and point a better way to a brighter life. These two books are well worth attention by the seeker after real pictures of social life.

In 1898 he was asked to write an article on the Defense of the Dominion for the Canadian Yearbook, and his reply is a good lesson for the Haeckels and Lankesters of today. Allen wrote:

  “You can know very little of my aims and ideals if you think I would willingly do anything to help on a work whose avowed object is to arouse ‘military enthusiasm’. Military enthusiasm means enthusiasm for killing people. My desire in life has been not to kill, but to help and aid all mankind, irrespective of nationality, creed, language or cult. I hate war, and everything that leads to it, as I hate murder, rapine, or the ill treatment of women. I dislike slavery, however cloaked under the guise of ‘imperialism’. I contribute gladly to works designed to strengthen the bonds of amity between nations ands to render war impossible, but I cannot contribute to one which aims at making peaceful Canadian citizens throw themselves into the devouring whirlpool of militarism.”

After a lifetime of illness, Allen died on October 25th, 1898, at the early age of fifty, with much of his chief projects unfinished. , Down to his last day he was in Shelley’s words 

Singing songs unbidden, till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heedeth not.

Adolph Kohn

This article was signed under Kohn's pen-name of 'John O'London'.