Part 5 (2/2)
Ancient history (Hebrew, Greek, Roman) is full of these social struggles; all the great reform laws of these peoples were attempts to establish social peace, but the rich and the poor, the Patricians and the Plebeians, the Slaves and Freemen, continued their struggles until the downfall of the old world, which has bequeathed to us great intellectual treasures as the fruit of these struggles. In the Middle Ages social struggles between the feudal lords and the traders, between n.o.bles and peasants, were kindled. In more recent times the middle cla.s.ses fought Autocracy and Squirearchy, and at length the proletariat was pitted against the bourgeoisie--cla.s.s struggles which led to rebellions and revolutions, and powerfully influenced the intellectual life.
From these historical antagonisms and struggles arose the intellectual and political antagonisms, personified by the leaders of the social groups and cla.s.ses, of which world-history relates: opposing religious and philosophical systems: Brahma and Buddha, Baal and Jahveh, National G.o.d and Universal G.o.d, Heathendom and Christendom, Catholicism and Protestantism, Materialism and Idealism, Realism and Nominalism. However abstract or metaphysical, however remote from actual life and material production they may appear to be, nevertheless, in the last resort they are to be traced back through many intermediate stages to changes in the economic foundation of the society in question, to the contradiction between this foundation and the conditions of production, as well as to the great struggles between conflicting interests which spring therefrom. The ethical, political, and politico-economic systems which strive with each other for mastery, as well as national and world wars, are separated from the real basis of society by a progressively smaller number of intermediate stages: the questions of idealist or utilitarian ethics, monarchy or republic, oligarchy or democracy, protection or free trade, State regulation or free scope for the economic forces, Socialism or private enterprise, etc., however lofty and humanitarian may be the arguments and ideal motives which their champions may adduce, are connected with the material foundation and the conditions of production which have come into conflict with it.
Marx and Engels have set forth this conception in the Communist Manifesto, in popular form, as follows:
”Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
”What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling cla.s.s.
”When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
”When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succ.u.mbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free compet.i.tion within the domain of knowledge.”
Now one step farther. When the conditions of production, the social divisions into cla.s.ses, and the laws of property become fetters to the productive forces, when the conflict of interests condense themselves into cla.s.s struggles, then comes a period of social revolution.
”With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic--in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we are not able to judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the conditions of production.”--(Preface to ”Critique of Political Economy.”)
The revolutionary period only closes when the social order that had become full of contradictions liberates the productive forces and strikes off their fetters, and creates new conditions of production which correspond to them. The old society, which is doomed to disappear, evolves the new conditions of existence before it sinks into oblivion. The men who a.s.sist the progress of the new society accordingly occupy themselves with problems which they are able to solve, as the means thereto are given in the material development.
Such problems are set before them because, regarded from the theoretical standpoint, they are the mental reflex of the contradictions and revolutionary tendencies within society.
Accordingly, the essence of the historical development of human society has been so far the progressive dialectical unfolding and perfection of the productive forces.
”In broad outlines,” says Marx, ”we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production, as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production--antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism.
This social formation const.i.tutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.”
Prehistoric stage of human society! What significant words! The capitalist economic order is the last phase of this stage, which is written in streams of blood and tears of the dispossessed and exploited, and to which is given the task of developing the productive forces and liberating men from the material fetters, so that they may enter into a life of mental culture. The materialist conception of history, unethical and unidealist like all natural science, opens up wide and elevating prospects. During thousands of years man struggled on the physical plane to obtain release from the animal kingdom, and was subjected to the discipline of unfeeling nature. After he had emerged from the animal kingdom, man laboured for thousands of years to lay the foundation of human society, a process which was performed under the hunger whip of stern taskmasters, and which powerfully stimulated the intellectual capacities of men, but only disclosed the ideal of justice and humanity as a remote and inaccessible star.
The materialist conception of history has shown itself to be a fruitful method of historical investigation. Some aspects of this idea were uttered both before and during Marx's lifetime. The revolution in the positions of cla.s.ses and the struggles which followed hard on the English industrial revolution (1760-1825), and everywhere attended the transition from an agrarian to an industrial State, were too palpable to be overlooked. It was Marx who fused these ideas, with the aid of the Hegelian dialectics made of them a method of investigation, and pressed them into the service of Socialism and historical research.
II. CLa.s.sES, CLa.s.s STRUGGLES, AND CLa.s.s-CONSCIOUSNESS.
One of the most important contributions of Marx to the understanding of historical processes is his conception of social cla.s.ses and of cla.s.s struggles. Although, prior to Marx, there were historians and politicians who pointed out the part played by social cla.s.ses in politics and in social convulsions, it was Marx who first grasped this conception in its entire scope and significance, giving it precise form, and making it an essential part of political and social thought.
He refers to the subject in the Communist Manifesto in the following terms:
”The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. The founders of these systems see, indeed, the cla.s.s antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a cla.s.s without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.”
The cla.s.sification of the various groups of society, or the division of human society into cla.s.ses, is as logical a process, that is, a result attained by the operations of reason, as the division of animals, plants, and minerals into various cla.s.ses. A specific group of social beings, which bear the stamp of common characteristics, is put in a certain cla.s.s by social science. This cla.s.sification cannot be made by purely empirical methods of immediate sensuous perceptions.
It cannot be determined from the appearance of modern men, whether they are capitalists or workers. We must look for certain scientifically established features which determine the social cla.s.sification of men. As we have just seen, Marx held economic facts to be fundamental, and he contended that the economic characteristics were valid for purposes of cla.s.sification. In his view, the manner in which a specific human group obtained its sustenance was the chief characteristic. Men whose chief means of life are wages form the working cla.s.s. Men whose most important source of livelihood is the owners.h.i.+p of capital (land, buildings, workshops, and raw material) form the capitalist cla.s.s. It is of little moment that a worker owns a savings-bankbook, and draws interest or dividends from a co-operative society, or that a capitalist personally supervises his undertaking, or organises his business, so that his profits partly consist in wages of superintendence or salary. The outstanding feature is that the chief interest of the worker is concentrated on wages, whilst that of the capitalist is directed on property. It goes without saying that the social cla.s.ses are not completely h.o.m.ogeneous. Like botanical and zoological cla.s.ses, they may be divided into kinds and species; the working cla.s.ses include well-paid hand and brain workers, as well as sweated sections; but all the subdivisions of the social cla.s.ses possess the common outstanding quality of the same source of livelihood, which is either personal labour or the possession of capital. One cla.s.s disposes only of labour-power, while the other cla.s.s owns the means of production.
Between these two cla.s.ses, says Marx, there are deep-seated, unbridgeable antagonisms, which lead to a cla.s.s struggle. The antagonisms are primarily of an economic nature. The wage-earners, as the owners of labour power, are constrained to sell this as dear as possible, i.e., to obtain the highest possible wages, whereas the owners of capital endeavour to buy such labour-power as cheap as possible, i.e., to pay the least possible wages. This antagonism is indeed fundamental, but, at first sight, does not touch the intellectual sphere very deeply. On the surface, this antagonism is only one as between buyer and seller, but in reality the distinction is very great, as the seller of labour-power will quickly starve if he does not market his commodity. The owner of the means of production is therefore in a position to cause the seller of labour-power to starve, if the latter does not accept the conditions which the capitalist imposes. Owners.h.i.+p of capital reveals itself as a power that can oppress the owner of labour-power.
This antagonism leads to the formation of Trade Unions. It is also the prime cause of the cla.s.s struggle, but mere trade unionism is but its incipient stage. It develops into a cla.s.s struggle when the workers recognise that their condition of subjection is not a temporary state, but the result of the economic system of private capitalism, that the subjection will last so long as this economic system exists, and that the latter could be replaced by an economic order in which the means of production belong to all the members of society. The wage-workers only partic.i.p.ate in the cla.s.s struggle when they learn to think in a Socialist sense, when hostility to the existing social order develops out of the sporadic and unrelated wage struggle and actions of Trade Unions, and when the proletariat, as an organised cla.s.s, turns from the preoccupations of the present to the tasks of the future, and strives to change the basis of society from private property to common property. The workers then become aware that there can be neither freedom nor equality for them in the existing society, and that their emanc.i.p.ation can only be attained through Socialism. The cla.s.s struggle may, however, stop short at the recognition of these facts.
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