First Premises of Materialist Method
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination.
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions
under which they live, both those which they find already existing and
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a
purely empirical way.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to
the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual
physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds
himself � geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of
history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification
in the course of history through the action of men.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a
step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual
material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of
all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence
and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered
simply as being the production of the physical existence of the
individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals,
a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their
part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are,
therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and
with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the
material conditions determining their production.
This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population.
In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with
one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.
[3. Production and Intercourse.
Division of Labour and Forms of Property � Tribal, ancient, feudal]
The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent
to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour
and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But not
only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal
structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached
by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the
productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the
degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new
productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of
productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation
of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour.
The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of
industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the
separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its
further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial
labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these
various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals
co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these
individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture,
industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These
same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the
relations of different nations to one another.
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so
many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division
of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with
reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.
The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum]1 ownership. It
corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives
by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage,
agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated
stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very
elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division
of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore,
limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below
them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the
family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth
of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of
barter.
The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds
especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by
conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal
ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private
property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal
ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in
their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to
the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which
compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of
association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure
of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the
people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private
property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We
already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism
between those states which represent town interests and those which
represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism
between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens
and slaves is now completely developed.
With the development of private property, we find here for the first time
the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive
scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of
private property, which began very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian
law proves 1 ) and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars
and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this,
the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat,
which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied
citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development.
The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity
started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started
out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the
sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large
area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast
to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends
over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread
of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the
declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a
number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed
for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the
rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the
mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property
developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like
tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the
directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of
the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As
soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the
towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed bodies
of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs.
This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal
ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form
of association and the relation to the direct producers were different
because of the different conditions of production.
This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in
the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here
property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The
necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need
for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the
same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming
into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these
combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital
of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing
population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which
brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country.
Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the
one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the
other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the
labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the
restricted conditions of production � the small-scale and primitive
cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little
division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself
the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly
strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility,
clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices
and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of
importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the
strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves
emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the
individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation
of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in
the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual
relations.
The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for
the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class,
the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head.
[4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History
Social Being and Social Consciousness]
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively
active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political
relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out
empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection
of the social and political structure with production. The social structure
and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite
individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or
other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate,
produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits,
presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse
of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental
intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their
material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in
the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a
people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. � real,
active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their
productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its
furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious
existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all
ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical
life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their
physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to
earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set
out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought
of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out
from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we
demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this
life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily,
sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable
and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the
rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no
longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no
development; but men, developing their material production and their
material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their
thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by
consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach
the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the
second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living
individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their
consciousness.
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the
real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men,
not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual,
empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.
As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a
collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still
abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the
idealists.
Where speculation ends � in real life � there real, positive science
begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical
process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and
real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy
as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the
best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general
results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical
development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have
in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the
arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its
separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does
philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our
difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the
arrangement � the real depiction � of our historical material, whether of a
past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed
by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the
study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of
each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these
abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists, and
shall illustrate them by historical examples.
History: Fundamental Conditions
Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must
begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore,
of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live
in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything
else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The
first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these
needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an
historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as
thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order
to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a
minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action
of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has
first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and
all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known
that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had
an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The
French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this
fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion,
particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology,
have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a
materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society,
of commerce and industry.
The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of
satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired)
leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first
historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual ancestry of the
great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they run out of positive
material and when they can serve up neither theological nor political nor
literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the
"prehistoric era". They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we proceed
from this nonsensical "prehistory" to history proper; although, on the
other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this
"prehistory" with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves safe
there from interference on the part of "crude facts", and, at the same
time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse
and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.
The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical
development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make
other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman,
parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the
only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new
social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one
(except in Germany), and must then be treated and analysed according to the
existing empirical data, not according to "the concept of the family", as
is the custom in Germany. [1] These three aspects of social activity are
not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three
aspects or, to make it clear to the Germans, three "moments", which have
existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and
which still assert themselves in history today.
The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in
procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a
natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the
co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in
what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of
production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of
co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a
"productive force". Further, that the multitude of productive forces
accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the
"history of humanity" must always be studied and treated in relation to the
history of industry and exchange. But it is also clear how in Germany it is
impossible to write this sort of history, because the Germans lack not only
the necessary power of comprehension and the material but also the
"evidence of their senses", for across the Rhine you cannot have any
experience of these things since history has stopped happening. Thus it is
quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection
of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode
of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is
ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a "history" independently of
the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may
hold men together.
Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary
historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses
"consciousness", but, even so, not inherent, not "pure" consciousness. From
the start the "spirit" is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with
matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of
air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness,
language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for
that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language,
like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of
intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists
for me: the animal does not enter into "relations" with anything, it does
not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others
does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very
beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.
Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the
immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection
with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing
self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first
appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force,
with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed
like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural
religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We
see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of
men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as
everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the
restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation
to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines
men's restricted relation to nature.) On the other hand, man's
consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around
him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at
all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is
mere herd- consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from
sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct
or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal
consciousness receives its further development and extension through
increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to
both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the
division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour
in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops
spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g.
physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labour only
becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental
labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.)
>From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is
something other than consciousness 'of existing practice, that it really
represents something without representing something real; from now on
consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to
proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics,
etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into
contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because
existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces
of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a particular national
sphere of relations through the appearance of the contradiction, not within
the national orbit, but between this national consciousness and the
practice of other nations, i.e. between the national and the general
consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in Germany).
Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its
own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three
moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness,
can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division
of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and
material activity � enjoyment and labour, production and consumption �
devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their
not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the
division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that "spectres", "bonds",
"the higher being", "concept", "scruple", are merely the idealistic,
spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual,
the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode
of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.
Private Property and Communism
With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are
implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour
in the family and the separation of society into individual families
opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and
indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of
labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of
which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the
husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the
first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to
the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of
the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are,
moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with
reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the
product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the
interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the
communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another.
And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the
imagination, as the "general interest", but first of all in reality, as the
mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided.
And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as
long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage
exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore,
as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed
becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being
controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into
being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is
forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a
fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does
not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where
nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,
without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation
of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an
objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our
expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief
factors in historical development up till now. [2]
The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises
through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by
the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their
co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their
own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the
origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control,
which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages
independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime
governor of these.
How otherwise could for instance property have had a history at all, have
taken on different forms, and landed property, for example, according to
the different premises given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to
centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from centralisation in the
hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the case today? Or how does
it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of
products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world
through the relation of supply and demand � a relation which, as an English
economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and
with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires
and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear � while
with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic
regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the
alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of
the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get
exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own
control again?
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that
separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into
world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power
alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on
the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become
more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world
market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of
the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more
below) and the abolition of private property which is identical with it,
this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved;
and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished
in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history.
>From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the
individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only
then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national
and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material
and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to
acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth
(the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the
world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this
communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these
powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now
overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view
can be expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as
"self-generation of the species" ("society as the subject"), and thereby
the consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each
other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the
mystery of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly
make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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