Part 1 — PART I (continued 2)

Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history and we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development? The very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has not yet reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its processus, and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process of birth before our eyes, as for example, in Japan. In so far as it is society which transforms all the products of human labor into commodities by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old proprietorship, to speak the language of the jurists. In one country it elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of sociology.

As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the class struggle were already implicitly contained in it.

This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of production had thrown light upon itself and its processus in creating the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.

Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was associated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to accumulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex sides of the problem of wealth; it developed in the passage from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French Revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of “natural right” which developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the Constitution of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the Physiocrats.

In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed the elements and the forms of the processus of production, of circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, accumulating its analyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it illustrated was the natural order, and that private property in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income from land rents.

The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the “natural order” is overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social antitheses without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry. The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This antithesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic constancy and unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical precision even into his thoughts of its details.

The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered, there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society by as many appropriate remedies.[22]

In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain? Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc.? These demands reduce the things, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasonings, and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and gearings.

The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of classical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these relations arise in certain historic conditions but they constitute a system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular one which returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish thing to assume that this system of facts which the ruling class has established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is to demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who, reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed with a definition and a syllogism.

The partisans of critical communism recognized that history has the right to follow its course. The bourgeois phase can be outgrown and it will be. But as long as it exists it has its laws. The relativity of these consists in the fact that they grow and develop in certain determined conditions, but their relativity is not simply the opposite of necessity, a mere appearance, a soap-bubble. These laws may disappear and they will disappear by the very fact of the change of society, but they do not yield to the arbitrary suggestion which demands a change, proclaims a reform, or formulates a programme. Communism makes common cause with the proletariat because in this resides the revolutionary force which, bursts, breaks, shakes and dissolves the present social form and creates in it, little by little, new conditions; or to be more exact, the very fact of its movement shows to us that these new conditions are already born.

The theory of the class struggle was found. It was seen to appear both in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic processus was already illustrated by the science of economics), and in this new appearance of the proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was discovered, but at the same time their relative necessity was understood. Herein lies the whole method and justification of the new materialistic conception of history. Those deceive themselves who, calling it the economic interpretation of history, think they understand it completely. That designation is better suited, and is only suited, to certain analytic attempts,[25] which, taking separately and in a distinct fashion on the one side the economic forms and categories, and on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs,—proceed to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life considered in an abstract fashion. Quite different is our position. Ours is the organic conception of history. The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics and to explain the other changes by means of its changes. Therein lies our answer to all the criticisms which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are sentimental or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has done in his Capital, not the first book of critical communism, but the last great book of bourgeois economics.

At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did not go beyond the classic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the prosaic conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now quite another thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to the ancient deposits of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the Semitic traditions. And it extends still further back into prehistory, that is to say, into, unwritten history. Morgan has given us a knowledge of ancient society, that is to say a pre-political society, and the key to understand how from it came all the later forms marked by monogamy, the development of the paternal family, the appearance of property, first of the gens, then of the family, lastly individual, and by the successive establishment of the alliances between gentes which are the origin of the State. All this is illustrated by the knowledge of the process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this process upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and making it traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be corrected at certain points, notably by the study of the different specific fashions according to which in different parts of the world the passage from barbarism to civilization has been effected. But, henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that we have before our eyes the general embryogenic record of human development from primitive communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome with their constitutions of citizens arranged in classes according to census which not long ago constituted the columns of Hercules for research into written tradition. The classes which the Manifesto assumed have been later resolved into their process of formation and in this can already be recognized the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for the categories of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream of Fourier to find a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of a long and vast process has been realized. A scientific solution has been found for the problem of the origin of inequality among men which Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments of an original dialectic, relying however upon too few real data.

At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable. One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of the society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the philosophers. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with the new historic conception is not an easy thing. We must not be over-hasty in tabulating it. At the very beginning we must understand the economics relative to each epoch,[26] in order to explain specifically the classes which develop in it, avoiding hypothetical and uncertain data and taking care not to carry over our own conditions into each epoch. For that, skilled fingers are needed. Thus, for example, what the Manifesto says of the first origin of the bourgeoisie proceeding from the serfs of the Middle Ages incorporated little by little into the cities is not a general truth. This mode of origin is peculiar to Germany and to the other countries which reproduce its process. It is not the case either in Italy, nor in Southern France, nor in Spain, which were the fields upon which began the first history of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, of modern civilization. In this first phase are found all the premises of the whole capitalist society as Marx informed us in a note to the first volume of Capital.[27] This first phase which reaches its perfect form in the Italian municipalities forms the pre-historic background for that capitalist accumulation which Marx has explained with so many characteristic details in the evolution of England. But I will stop there.

The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future. That with which all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the conditions of the future. The knowledge of the past is practically of use and of interest only in so far as it throws light upon and explains the present. For the moment it is enough to say that the partisans of critical communism fifty years ago conceived the elements of the new and definite philosophy of history. Soon this fashion of seeing will impose itself because it will be impossible to think the contrary; and this discovery will have the fate of Columbus’ egg. And perhaps before an army of scientists has made an application of this conception to the continuous narration of the whole history, the success of the proletariat will have become such that the bourgeois epoch will appear to all as something that must be left behind because it will nearly be so in reality. To understand is to leave behind (Hegel).

When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the circumference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual passion. The probable circumference in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circumference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach. The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself.

All those who were communists ideological, religious and utopian, or even prophetic and apocalyptic in the past have always believed that the reign of justice, equality and happiness was destined to have the world for its theatre. To-day the world is invaded by civilization and everywhere is developing that society which lives upon class antagonisms and class domination, the form of bourgeois production. (Japan may serve us for an example.) The coexistence of the two nations in one and the same state, which the divine Plato had already described, is perpetuated. The earth will not be won over to communism to-morrow. But as the confines of the bourgeois world enlarge, more numerous are those who enter into it, abandoning and leaving behind the lower forms of production,—and thus the attempt of communism gains in firmness and precision; especially because in the domain and struggle of competition, the deviations due to conquest and colonization are diminishing. The proletarian International, while embryonic in the Communist League of fifty years ago, henceforth becomes Interoceanic and it affirms on the first of every May that the proletarians of the whole world are really and actively united. The future grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie and their descendants to many generations will ever remember the date of the Communist Manifesto.

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