1892 English Edition Introduction

[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]

The present little book is, originally, part of a
larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University,
suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,
and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory,
but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society.
As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he
honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the same time when the two sections of the
Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected
their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength,
but, what was more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength
against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming
a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered
unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form
around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus,
became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight
out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.

This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently
a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly
ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever
you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers
a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system.
He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental
laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose
than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And
Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing
less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and,
finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes
in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments
mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general,
and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution
in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat
of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism;
from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral
ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future
society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me
the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected
form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on
this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which
made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig
Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1],
and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft"
(Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared
in Zurich, 1886.

At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative
of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of
this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under
the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this
French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our
German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian,
Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German
text, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this
little book circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist
work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital,
has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about
20,000 copies in all.

The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the intention of spreading
among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history
and development of landed property in Germany. This seemed all the more
necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people
of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural
laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been included
in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land common to all
Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in
England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original,
without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky,
according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the
members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account
by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several generations
(as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and that
the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so
as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably
quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].

The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are new,
agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital.
We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles
are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose
of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase
extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our
present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production
only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the
means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all
means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess
of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history
of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:

handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices,
where each laborer produces a complete article;

manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment,
produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each
workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete
only after having passed successively through the hands of all;

modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power,
and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting
the performance of the mechanical agent.

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection
from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals
had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability",
we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call
"historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears
of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated,
but materialism is utterly inadmissible.

And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the
17th century onwards, is England.

"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the
British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the
matter to think?'

"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence
— i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist.
Nominalism,
the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.

"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him,
natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon
the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes
as his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the
source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists
in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of
investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment,
are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities
inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form
of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse,
a vital spirit, a tension — or a 'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's
[2] — of
matter.

"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within
itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter,
surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity
by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine
pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.

"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes
is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon
the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience
of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.
Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic,
flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism
has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it
passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the
consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.

"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge
is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms,
divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but
give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one
of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction
if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the
world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word;
that, besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one
and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual,
nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body.
Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It
is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter
is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite
is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing
an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible
to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence
alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has
a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man
is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.

"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a
proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge
from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human
Understanding, supplied this proof.

"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism;
Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last
theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events,
for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid
of religion."

Karl Marx

The Holy Family

p. 201 - 204

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If
Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their
ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon,
Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism
which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won
over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century,
even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders,
in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.

There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what
struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England,
was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity
of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists,
or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable
that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts
of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell
should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with
the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared
to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters,
you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were
then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.

But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of
1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became
gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as
much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here.
Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only
to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental
scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism,
though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England,
is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism,
and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing
that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely
regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany", like so
many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than
their descendants now dare to venture.

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire
term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is
materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law,
and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he
adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence
of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good
at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's
Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned,
proudly replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in
our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room
for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out
from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as
it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon
the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive
through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects,
or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely
the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line
of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But
before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die
That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And
human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented
it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn
to our own use of these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in
them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our
sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate
of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our
attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find
that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose
we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of
it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.
And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally
are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the
perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or
combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by
them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train
our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed
by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find
that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions
with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance,
so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically
controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are,
by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent
incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly
perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental
process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our
ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities
of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that
the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you
that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's
celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that
in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary
that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them,
a mysterious "thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable
things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced
by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly
cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this
century, organic substances were such mysterious objects; now we learn to
build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the
aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical
constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its
elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest
organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we
should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed
with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall
at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest
to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous
bodies.

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental
reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.
He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it
is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we
have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But
if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he
will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism
in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far
as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler
of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither
be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function
of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable
laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he
knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres
about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and
calls it agnosticism.

At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic,
it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched
out in this little book as "historical agnosticism". Religious people would
laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I making fun of them?
And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if
I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical
materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks
the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic
events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes
of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into
distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the sooner
if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British
respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago,
any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was
then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English
respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable
English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked
to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.

1892 English Edition Introduction

[History (the role of Religion) in the English middle-class]

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising
middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had
conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but
this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The
development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible
with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore,
had to fall.

But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman
Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite
of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much
to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized
its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far
the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil
of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked
in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had
to be destroyed.

Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the
great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology
were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its
industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of
Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the
Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for
that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church;
the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join
in the rebellion.

The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising
middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion,
will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested
in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie;
and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to
take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in
the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities
started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the
masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle
for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.

The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated
in three great, decisive battles.

The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two
insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both
were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties
most interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes
of which we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated
into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended
by blotting out Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations
of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion
adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-east
Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to
serfs.

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was
one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial
world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity
or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not
of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown
superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic
revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by
new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even
the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver
– began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution of God
was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to
monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing
tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland,
and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine
ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class
of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought
it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the
peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined
by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell,
the yeomanry of england had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been
for that yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the
bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter
end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to
secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering
at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further – exactly
as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one
of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.

Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the point
where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations,
the new centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point.
The grand period of English history, known to respectability under the
name of "the Great Rebellion", and the struggles succeeding it, were brought
to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians
"the Glorious Revolution".

The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class
and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy,
had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe
in France became at a much later period: "The first bourgeois of the kingdom".
Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during
the War of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old
families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they
constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois
than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began
to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing
them with sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created
fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during
the whole of the 17th century, had the same result. Consequently, ever
since Henry VII, the English "aristocracy", far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly
profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners
willing, from economical or political reasons, to cooperate with the leading
men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and
place" were left to the great landowning families, provided the economic
interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class
were sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that
time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There
might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.

From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized,
component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them, it had
a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the
nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,
or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his clerks,
his work-people, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they had to be
trained to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had
supplied the standard under which he had fought the king and the lords;
he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered
him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them
submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over
them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping
down the "lower orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one
of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.

There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the religious
leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in England.
This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the middle-class;
it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated
men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for the
uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes, it stepped on
the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called
upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus
["Robust but malicious boy"] – to wit, the people. Similarly, with the
successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic
form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore,
hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois
political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism and
deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had furnished the
flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to furnish
the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even today
the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".

In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France, where
it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers,
a branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively
aristocratic doctrine. But, soon, its revolutionary character asserted
itself. The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters
of religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition
or political institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their
doctrine to universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly
applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they
were named – the Encyclopaedia. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms
– avowed materialism or deism – it became the creed of the whole culture's
youth of France; so much so that, when the Great Revolution broke out,
the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French
Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. The Great French Revolution was the third uprising
of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious
cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the first,
too, that was really fought out up to the destruction of one of the combatants,
the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie.
In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
institutions, and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found
its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious
preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France, the Revolution
constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared
out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the Code Civil
a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law – that almost perfect expression
of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by
Marx the production of commodities – to modern capitalist conditions;
so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model
for reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting
England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to express
the economic relations of capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language
which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds
to English pronunciation – vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople,
said a Frenchman – that same English law is the only one which has preserved
through ages, and transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part
of that old Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence
from all interference (but that of the law courts), which on the Continent
has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been
as yet fully recovered.

To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave
him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies,
to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush
the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why
he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much
against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt
to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois
do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were,
and invented fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army,
which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions
and new markets aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the
bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to
under the compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy
middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless
in Parliament.

Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution,
the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.
Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the
religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism
and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications
of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck
to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another,
but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.

While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie
in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated
an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of gravity
of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably
faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself,
the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed
into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even
after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie,
no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it. The
character of these parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was
very different from that of the preceding century. The political power
still left to the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions
of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic
interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could
end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act
was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of the
French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and
powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move
toward free-trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers,
over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.
Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social
power – first its ally, but soon its rival.

The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing
capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of manufacturing
work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in proportion as
the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another,
and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it proved
as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts
forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen
constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having
excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's
Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first
working-men's party of modern times.

Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March 1848,
in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the
point of view of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction.
First, the defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then the crushing
of the Paris workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year; then the
disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory
of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, December 2, 1851. For a time, at least,
the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost!
If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of
maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he
feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers
of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of
thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders;
not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother
Jonathan 1),
the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported
from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like;
and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which
revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the
elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element
of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become troublesome
to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.

It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie
can in no European country get hold of political power – at least for
any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism
was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession
of the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's
reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom;
by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification.
Under the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for
three years only; their incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is
only now, in the Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept
possession of the helm for more than 20 years; and they are already showing
lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been
possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and
society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even
in France and America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people,
are already knocking at the door.

In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the
victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession
of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the middle-class
submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech, implored the young
men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and
quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet
Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary
as English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as
a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy
those superior Government places where other qualifications were required
than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business
sharpness. 2)
Even now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show
that the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough
for the best education, and looks to something more modest. Thus, even
after the repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course that
the men who had carried the day – the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc.
– should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the
country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act opened to them the
door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day,
so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep
up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste of
drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they
consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found
worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured,
after all, by themselves.

The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not
yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage.
The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions,
as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66 (ascribed
vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development
of railways, ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again
driven the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which
they formed, as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to
the franchise, however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders
of the Liberals "funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the
Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the
boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot;
then, in 1884, the extension of household suffrage to the counties and
a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral districts were, to
some extent, equalized. All these measures considerably increased the electoral
power of the working-class, so much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies
that class now furnished the majority of the voters. But parliamentary
government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the
middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully
called "our old nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up
with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters",
the middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the
model workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master,
and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled
our German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable
communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.

But the English middle-class – good men of business as they are
– saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their powers
but reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist
years, what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the people, is capable
of. And since that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better
part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now,
if ever, the people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first
and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and remains
– religion. Hence the parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence
the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all
sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation Army.

And now came the triumph of British respectability over the free
thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen
of France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected
with Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular
as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy.
The puer robustus, here, turned from day-to-day more malitiosus.
Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource
but to silently drop their free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness
creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly
on board; one-by-one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior, spoke
with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with
the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeois dined maigre
on Fridays, and German ones say out long Protestant sermons in their pews
on Sundays. They had come to grief with materialism. "Die Religion muss
dem Volk erhalten werden" – religion must be kept alive for the people
– that was the only and the last means to save society from utter ruin.
Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find this out until they had
done their level best to break up religion for ever. And now it was the
turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I
could have told you that 200 years ago!"

However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British,
nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will
stem the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force,
is the vis inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is sure
to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist
society. If our juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more
or less remote offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given
society, such ideas cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a
complete change in these relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural
revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to
prop up a tottering society.

In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to move
again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois
traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two parties,
Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out its
salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Working-men's traditions,
inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such
as the exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants
who have not gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding,
by every such union, of its own blacklegs. But, for all that, the English
working-class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had
to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things
in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more
or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with
an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually
absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of
the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled
laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what a splendid impulse
these fresh forces have given it in return. And if the pace of the movement
is not up to the impatience of some people, let them not forget that it
is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English
character, and that, if a step in advance is once gained in England, it
is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists,
for reasons unexplained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons
bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.

But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend
upon England alone. It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at least,
England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries, the working-class
movement is well ahead of England. In Germany, it is even within measurable
distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last 25
years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the
German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political
capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class
have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago,
Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class;
as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany
will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European proletariat?

Frederick Engels

London

April 20, 1892