# Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History/Chapter 5

Original title: Die Ethik des Marxismus. Original sections: 1. Die Wurzeln der materialistischen Gesichtsauffassung, 2. Der Organismus der menschlichen Gesellschaft, 3. Die Wandlungen der Kraft der sozialen Triebe, 4. Das Geltungsbereich der sozialen Triebe, and 5. Die Satzungen der Moral
CHAPTER V.
The Ethics of Marxism.
1.—The Roots of the Materialist Conception of History.
The rapid progress of the natural sciences since the French Revolution is intimately connected with the expansion of capitalism from that time on. The great capitalist industry depended more and more on the application of science, and, consequently, had every reason to supply it with men and means. Modern technique gives to science not only new objects of activity, but also new tools and new methods. Finally international communication brought a mass of new material. Thus was acquired strength and means to carry the idea of evolution successfully through.
But even more than for natural science was the French Revolution an epoch of importance for the science of society, the so-called mental sciences. Because in natural science the idea of evolution had already given a great stimulus to many thinkers. In mental science, on the other hand, it was only to be found in the most rudimentary attempts. Only after the French Revolution could it develop in them.
The mental sciences—Philosophy, Law, History, Political Economy—had been for the rising bourgeoisie before the French Revolution, in the first place, a means of fighting the ruling powers, social and political, which opposed them, and had their roots in the past. To discredit the past, and to paint the new and coming, in contrast to it, as the only good and useful, formed the principal occupation of these sciences.
That has altered since the Revolution. This gave the bourgeoisie the essence of what they wanted. It revealed to them, however, social forces which wanted to go further than themselves. These new forces began to be more dangerous than the relics of the deposed ​old. To come to an agreement with the latter became merely a requirement of political sagacity on the part of the bourgeoisie. With that, however, their opinion on the past was bound also to grow milder.
On the other hand the Revolution had brought a great disillusionment to the Idealogues themselves. Great as were its achievements for the bourgeoisie, they are not yet up to the expectations of an harmonious empire of "morality," general well-being, and happiness, such as had been looked for from the overthrow of the old. No one dared to build hopes on the new; the more unsatisfactory the present, so much the more terrifying were the reminiscences of the most recent past which the present had brought to a head, so much the more bright did the farther past appear. That produced, as is well known, Romanticism in art. But it produced also similar movements in the mental sciences. Men began to study the past, not in order to condemn it, but to understand it; not to show up its absurdity, but to understand its reasonableness.
But the Revolution had done its work too thoroughly for men to dream of re-establishing what had been set aside. Had the past been rational, so it was necessary to show that it had become irrational. The socially necessary and reasonable ceased with that to appear as an unchangeable conception. Thus arose the view of a social evolution.
That applied first to the knowledge of German history. In Germany the above-described process was most markedly to be seen; there the revolutionary method of thought had not penetrated so deeply, had never struck such deep roots as in France; there the work of the Revolution had not been so complete, the forces and opinions of the past had been shaken in a less degree, and finally had appeared on the scene more as a disturbing than an emancipating element.
But to the study of the German past there associated itself the investigation of similar periods. In America the young community of the United States was already so far advanced that a separate class of the intellectuals had been able to develop a real ​American literature and science. What specially distinguished America from Europe was, however, the close contact of the capitalist civilisation of the white man with Indian barbarism. That was the object which especially attracted literature and science. Soon after the German Romanticism there arose the American-Indian novel, and soon after the rise of the historical school of law, the revival of the old fancy tales and the world of legends, and the comparative philological research in Germany, and the scientific theory of the social and linguistic conditions of the Indians in America.
At an earlier period, however, the settlement of the English in India had afforded the possibility, nay the necessity of a study of the languages, the customs, and the laws of these territories. As far as Germany there had penetrated, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, the knowledge of Sanskrit, which laid the foundation for the comparative study of languages, which in its turn afforded the most valuable insight into the life of the Indo-Germanic peoples in primitive times.
All this rendered it possible to treat the accounts given by civilised observers of primitive peoples, as well as the discoveries of weapons and tools of vanished races, differently from formerly, when they had been simply looked on as curiosities. They now became material by which to extend the partly-revealed chain of human development still further into the past, and to close up many of the gaps.
In this entire historical work there was lacking, however, the object which had, up to then, ruled the entire writing of history—the great man theory. In the written sources, from which formerly the knowledge of human history was exclusively culled, only the extraordinary had been related, because it was that only which seemed noteworthy to the chronicler of the events of his time. To describe everyday occurrences, that which everybody knew, was by no means his task. The extraordinary man, the extraordinary event, such as wars and revolutions, only seemed worth relating. Thus it was that for the traditional historians, who never got beyond writing up from the sources handed ​down to them with more or less criticism, the big man was the motive power in history—in the Feudal period the king, the military commander, the religious founder, and the priest. In the eighteenth century there were very many men branded by the bourgeois intellectuals as the authors of all the evil in the world, and the philosophers, on the other hand, as legislators and teachers, as the only real instruments of progress. But all progress appeared to be only external, a simple change of clothes. That period in which the sources of historical writing began to flow more abundantly, the time of the victory of the Greeks over the Persian invasion, was the culminating period of the social development. From that time on society in the lands round the Mediterranean began to decay; it went down and down till the Barbarian Immigration. Only slowly have the peoples of Europe since then developed themselves again to a higher level socially, and even in the eighteenth century they had not risen far above the level of classical antiquity, so that in many points of politics, of philosophy, and especially of art, the latter could rank as a pattern.
History, as a whole, appeared simply as a rise and fall, a repetition of the same circle, and just as the simple individual can set himself continually higher aims than he arrives at, because as a rule he fails, so did this circle appear as a horrible tragi-comedy in which all that was most elevated and strongest was doomed to play wretched parts.
Quite otherwise was it with primitive history. That, with its individual departments, history of law, comparative philology, ethnology, found in the material which these worked up, not the extraordinary and the individual, but the everyday and common-place described. But for this very reason primitive history can trace with certainty a line of continuous development. And the more the material increases the more it is possible to compare like with like, the more it is discovered that this development is no chance, but according to law. The material which is at our disposal is, on the one side, facts of the technical arrangements of life, on the ​other, of law, custom and religion. To show the law controlling this, means nothing else than to bring technics into a causal connection with the legal, moral, and religious conceptions without the help of extraordinary individuals or events.
This connection was, however, discovered almost simultaneously from another side, namely statistics.
So long as the parish was the most important economic institution statistics were hardly required. In the parish it was easy to get a view of the state of affairs. But even if statistics were made then, they could scarcely suggest scientific observations, as with such small figures the law had no chance of showing itself. That was bound to alter as the capitalist method of production created the modern states, which were not, like the earlier ones, simple groups of communes or parishes and provinces, but unitary bodies with important economic functions.
Besides that, however, the capitalist method of production developed not simply the inner market but, in addition, created the world market. This produced highly complicated connections which could not be controlled without the means of statistics. Founded for the practical purpose of tax-gathering and raising of recruits, for customs, and finally for the insurance societies, it gradually embraced wider and wider spheres, and produced a mass of observations on a large scale, revealing laws which were bound to impress themselves on observant workers-up of the material. In England they had already, towards the end of the seventeenth century, since Petty, arrived at a political arithmetic, in which, however, "estimates" played a very big rôle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the method of statistical inquiries was so complete and its sphere so varied that it was possible to discover with the greatest certainty the laws governing the actions of great masses of men. The Belgian Guelelet made an attempt, in the thirties, to describe in this manner the physiology of human society.
It was seen that the determining element in the alterations of human action was always a material, as a ​rule, an economic change. Thus was the decrease and increase of crime, of suicide, and of marriages shown to be dependent on the price of corn.
Not as if, for instance, economic motives were the sole cause that marriages were made at all. Nobody would declare the sexual passion to be an economic motive. But the alteration in the annual number of marriages is called forth by changes in the economic situation.
Besides all these new sciences, there is finally to be mentioned a change in the character of the modern writing of history. The French Revolution came to the fore so clearly as a class struggle, that not only its historian must recognise that, but a number of the historians were inspired to investigate in other periods of history the rôle of the class wars, and to see in them the motive forces of human development. The classes are, however, again a product of the economic structure of society, and from this spring the antagonisms, therefore the struggles of the classes. What holds every class together, what divides them from other classes, and determines their opposition to these, are the particular class interests, a new kind of interests, of which no moralist of the eighteenth century, whatever school he might belong to, had had any idea.
With all these advances and discoveries, which certainly often enough were only piecemeal and by no means quite clear by the time of the forties in the nineteenth century, all the essential elements of the Materialist Conception of History had been supplied. They only waited for the master who should bring them under control and unify them. That was done by Engels and Marx.
Only to deep thinkers such as they were was an achievement of that nature possible. In so far that was their personal work. But no Engels, no Marx could have achieved it in the eighteenth century, before all the new sciences had produced a sufficient mass of new results. On the other hand, a man of the genius of a Kant or a Helvetius could also have discovered the Materialist Conception of History if at their time ​the requisite scientific conditions had been to hand. And on the other hand, even Engels and Marx, despite their genius, and despite the preparatory work which the new sciences had achieved, would not have been able, even in the time of the forties in the nineteenth century, to discover it, if they had not stood on the standpoint «of the proletariat, and were thus Socialists. That also was absolutely necessary to the discovery of this Conception of History. In this sense it is a proletarian philosophy, and the opposing views are bourgeois philosophies.
The rise of the idea of evolution took place during a period of reaction, when no immediate further development of society was in question. The conception, consequently, only served for the explanation of the previous development, and thereby only in a certain sense—that of a justification; nay, at times, more a glorification of the past. Just as through Romanticism and the historical school of jurisprudence there goes through the entire study of early times, even through Sanskrit study—I may point to the example of Schopenhauer's Buddhism—in the first decades of the last century, a reactionary trait. So was it with that philosophy which made the evolutionary idea of that period the centre of its system—the Hegelian. Even that was only intended to be a panegyric on the previous development, which had now found its close in the monarchy by the will of God. As reactionary philosophy, this philosophy of the development was bound to be an idealist philosohpy, since the present, the reality, was in too great a contradiction with its reactionary tendencies.
As soon as reality—that is, the capitalist society—had got so far as to be able to make itself felt in face of these tendencies, the idealist conception of evolution became impossible. It was superseded by a more or less open Materialism. But only from the proletariat point of view was it possible to translate the social development into a Materialistic one—in other words, to recognise in the present an evolution of society proceeding according to natural laws. The bourgeoisie ​was obliged to close its eyes to all idea of a further social evolution, and repudiate every philosophy of evolution, which did not simply investigate the development of the past to understand this, and also in order to understand the tendencies of the new society of the future, and to hammer out weapons for the struggle of the present, which is destined to bring about this form of society of the future.
Although this period of intellectual reaction after the great Revolution had been overcome, and the bourgeoisie, which had regained self-respect and power, had made an end to all artistic and philosophic romanticism in order to proclaim Materialism, they could not, all the same, get as far as the historic Materialism. Deeply founded as this was in the circumstances of the time, it was no less in the nature of the circumstances that this (the latest form of materialism) could only be a philosophy of the proletariat; that it should be repudiated by science so far as this came under the influence of the bourgeoisie, repudiated to such an extent that even the Socialist author of "The History of Materialism," Albert Lange, only mentions Karl Marx in that work as an economist, and not as a philosopher.
The idea of evolution, generally accepted for the material sciences, even fruitful for certain special branches of mental science, has remained a dead letter for the scientific point of view, as interpreted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie could not even get farther than Hegel in their philosophy. They fell back into a Materialism which stands considerably below that of the eighteenth century, because it is purely natural philosophy and has no theory of society to show. And when this narrow Materialism no longer suited them they turned to the old Kantianism, purified from the defects which had been superseded by science in the meantime, but not emancipated from its Ethic, which was now the bulwark which was to be brought against the Materialist theory of Social Evolution.
In the economic sciences the bourgeoisie hovered between an historic conception, which certainly acknowledges an evolution of society but denies necessary ​laws of this development, and a view which recognises necessary laws of society but denies the. social development, and believes it possible to discover in the psychology of primitive man all the economic categories of modern society. To these conceptions there was added naturalism (or scientific naturalism) which tries to reduce the laws of society to laws of biology—that is, to the laws of animal and plant organisms—and really amounts to nothing short of a denial of social development.
Since the bourgeoisie has grown conservative, only from the proletarian standpoint is a Materialist view of social development possible.
It is true that the dialectical materialism is a materialism of its own kind, which is quite different from the materialism of natural science (naturalism). Many friends have wished, accordingly, in order to avoid misunderstandings, to substitute another word for the word Materialism.
But if Marx and Engels retained the word Materialism, it was on the same ground as the refusal to re-christen their manifesto of the Communists as the manifesto of the Socialists. The word Socialism covers to-day such various wares, among them some really worthless, Christian and national Socialisms of all kinds; the word Communism, on the other hand, describes unmistakably and clearly the aims of a proletariat fighting a revolutionary fight for its emancipation.
So, also, by a designation of the dialectical materialism as dialectical "monism," or "criticism," or "realism," the entire sense of opposition to the bourgeois world is lost. The word "Materialism," on the other hand, has signified since the victory of Christianity a philosophy of the fight against the ruling powers. Therefore, has it come into disrepute with the bourgeoisie, but for that very reason we followers of the proletarian philosophy have the right to hold fast to this very name, which also can be justified in fact. And a conception of Ethics which rises from this philosophy can rank as a Materialistic one.
2.—The Organisation of Human Society.
(a) The Technical Development.
If we regard man, from the standpoint of the Materialist. Conception of History, at the stage at which we left him in the last chapter—at the boundary which divided him from the rest of the animal world—-what is it that raises him above it? Does there exist between him and them only gradual differences, or is there also an essential difference? Neither as thinking nor as moral being is man essentially different from the animals. Does not the difference perhaps lie in the fact that he produces—that is, adapts material found in nature by means of change of form or of place to his purposes? This activity is, however, also found in the animal world. To leave out of account many insects, such as bees and ants, we find among many warm-blooded animals, even among many fishes, species of productive activity, namely, the production of refuges and dwellings, nests, underground buildings, and so on. And however much of this productive. activity is also the product and result of inherited instincts and dispositions, they are often so suitably adapted to various circumstances that consciousness, the knowledge of causal connections, must also play a part thereby.
Or is it the use of tools which raises man above the animals? Also not that. Among animals we find at least the beginnings of the application of tools, of branches of trees for defence, of stones for cracking nuts, and so on. Their intelligence, as well as the development of the feet into hands, enables the apes to do that.
Thus neither the production of means of consumption nor the use of tools distinguishes man from the animals. What, however, alone distinguishes him is the production of tools, which serve for production and defence or attack. The animal can at the most find the tool in nature; it is not capable of inventing such. It may produce things for its immediate use, prepare dwellings, collect provisions, but it does ​not think so far as to produce things which will not serve for direct consumption, but for the production of the means of consumption.
With the production of the means of production, the animal man begins to become the human man; with that he breaks away from the animal world to found his own empire, an empire with its own kind of development, which is wholly unknown to the rest of nature, in which nothing similar is to be found.
So long as the animal only produces with the organs provided by nature, or only uses tools which nature gives him, it cannot rise above the means thus provided for him by nature. Its development only proceeds in the manner that its own organism develops itself; the organs alter themselves, the brain included—a slow and unconscious process carried on by means of the struggle for life, which the animal can in no way hurry on by its conscious activity.
On the other hand the discovery and production of the tool—the word employed in the widest sense—means that man consciously and purposely gives himself new organs, or strengthens or lengthens his natural organs, so that he can still better or easier produce the same that these organs produced; but besides that he is in a position to arrive at results which were formerly quite unattainable by him. But as man is not simply an animal endowed with higher intelligence and hands—the necessary assumption of the application and production of tools—but also must have been, from the very beginning, a social animal, the discovery and production of a tool did not get lost with the death of the specially-gifted individual who had found it—a Marx or Kant or Aristotle inhabiting the trees of the primitive tropical forests. His herd took up the invention and carried it on, won with it an advantage in the struggle for life, so that their descendants could flourish better than the other members of their kind. But the further perspicacity which this fostered in the herd served the purpose for the future of rendering the discovery so complete as to further the invention of fresh tools.
​Even if a certain degree of intelligence and the development of the hand forms the necessary condition for the discovery and production of tools, yet it was the social character of man which offered the conditions for the continual addition of new and the improvement of old discoveries, thus for a continual development of the technique. The slow and unconscious process of the development of the individuals through the struggle for life, as it ruled the entire remaining organic world, gives way more and more in the human world in favour of the conscious transformation, adaptation and improvement of the organs; a development which in its beginning, measured by modern standards, is even then very long and difficult to observe, but which, all the same, goes much quicker than the natural selection. The technical progress forms for the future the foundation of the entire development of man. On that and not on any special divine spark rests all by which man is distinguished from the animals.
Every single step forward on this path of technical development is a conscious and intentional one. Each arises from the endeavour to increase the powers of man over the limits set by nature. But each of these technical advances brings also, of necessity, effects with it, which were not intended by its authors, and could not be, because they were not in a position even to suspect them—effects which, just as much as natural selection, could be called adaptation to the surroundings; surroundings, however, which men had artificially modified. In these adaptations there plays, however, consciousness, the knowledge of the new surroundings and its requirements; again, a rôle; this, nevertheless, is not that of an independent directing force.
(b) Technic and Method of Life.
Let us seek, in order to get a clearer idea of what has been said, to give ourselves an idea what consequences it was bound to have when primitive man arrived at the first tool; where he joined the stone and the stick, which the age had already used, to make a hammer, an axe or a spear. Naturally, the description ​which here follows can only be a hypothetical one, as we have no witness of the whole process; but it is not to serve as a proof, only as an illustration. We make it as simple as possible, disregarding, for example, the influence which fishing could have had on primitive man.
So soon as primitive man possessed the spear he found himself in a position to hunt still bigger animals. His food was, up to then, derived principally from fruits and insects, as well as, probably, little birds and young birds; now he could kill even bigger animals; meat became, henceforth, more important for his food. The majority of the bigger animals, however, live on the earth, not in the trees; hunting thus drew him from his airy regions down to the earth. And further, the animals most chaseable, the ruminants, were but seldom to be found in the primitive forest. The more man became a hunter the more could he emerge from the forest in which primitive man was bred.
This account, as I have said, is purely hypothetical. The process of evolution may have been the reverse. Equally as the discovery of the tool and the weapon may have driven man out of the primitive forest to come forth into open grass land where the trees were farther apart, just as much might forces which drove primitive man from his original abode have been the spur to the discovery of weapons and tools. Let us assume, for instance, that the number of men increased beyond their means of subsistence; or that a glacial period, say the glacier of the central Asiatic mountain range sunk low down, and forced the inhabitants from their forests into the grass plains which bordered it; or that an increasing dryness of the climate even more and more cleared the forest, and caused more and more grass land to come up in it. In all these cases primitive man would have been obliged to give up his tree life, and to move about on the earth; he was obliged from now on to seek for animal food, and could no longer in the same degree feed himself from tree fruits. The new method of life induced him to the frequent ​employment of stones and sticks, and brought him nearer to the discovery of the first tools and weapons.
Whatever development we accept, the first or the second—and both could have taken place independent of each other at different points—from both of them we see clearly the close connection which exists between new means of production, new methods of life and new needs. Each of these factors necessarily produces the other; each becomes necessarily the cause of changes, which in their turn hide fresh changes in their bosom. Thus every discovery produces inevitable changes, which give rise to other discoveries, and therewith bring new needs and methods of life, which again call forth new discoveries, and so on—a chain of endless development which becomes so much more rapid and more complicated the farther it proceeds and the more the possibility and facility of new discoveries advance.
Let us consider the consequences which the rise of hunting, as a source of food for man, and his emergence from the primitive forest was bound to draw with it.
Besides the meat man took, in place of the tree fruits, roots and fruits of the grasses, corn and maize into his bill of fare. In the primitive forest a cultivation of plants is impossible, and to clear the primitive forest is beyond the power of primitive man. The latter, however, could not even have evolved this idea. He lived from tree fruits; to plant fruit trees which would first bear fruit after many years assumes that already a high degree of culture and settlement has been attained. On the other hand, the planting of grasses in meadows and steppes is much easier than in the primitive forest, and can be brought about with much simpler tools. The thought of planting grasses, which often bear fruits after only a few weeks, is, moreover, easier to conceive than that of planting trees. Cause and effect are so nearly connected in this case that their dependence is easier to see, and even the unsettled primitive man might expect to exist during the period ​between seed time and harvest in the neighbourhood of the cultivated ground.
Again, man so soon as he left the primitive forest was far more at the mercy of climatic changes than in his primitive home. In the thick forest the changes of temperature between day and night were much less than on the open plain, on which during the day a burning sun rules, and by night a powerful radiation and loss of heat. Storms are also less noticeable in the forest than in a woodless territory, and against rain and hail this latter offers much less protection than the almost impenetrable foliage of the first. Thus man forced on to the plains was bound to feel a need for shelter and clothing which the primitive man in the tropical forest never felt. If the male apes had already built themselves formal nests for the night’s repose he was bound to go farther and build walls and roofs for protection, or to seek shelter in caves or holes. On the other hand, it was no great step to clothe himself in the skins of animals which remained over after the flesh had been taken out of them. It was certainly the need for protection against cold which caused mankind to aspire for the possession of fire. Its technical utility he could only gradually learn after he had used it a long time. The warmth which it gave out was, naturally, at once evident. How man came to the use of fire will, perhaps, never be certainly known; but it is certain that man in the primitive forest had no need for it as a source of heat, and would not have been able amid the continual damp to maintain it. Only in a drier region, where greater quantities of dry fire materials were to be found at intervals—moss, leaves, brushwood—could fires arise, which made man acquainted with fire; perhaps through lightning, or more likely from the sparks of a flint, the first tool of primitive man, or from the heat which arose from boring holes in hard wood.
We see how the entire life of man, his needs, his dwelling, his means of sustenance were changed; how one discovery brought numerous others in its train so soon as it was once made, so soon as the making ​of a spear or an axe had been achieved. In all these transformations consciousness played a great part, but the consciousness of other generations than those which had discovered the spear or the axe. And the tasks which were presented to the consciousness of the later generation were not set by that of the former; they arose by necessity, and spontaneously as soon as the discovery was made.
But with the change of dwelling, of the need of the winning of sustenance, of the entire method of life, the effects of the discovery are not exhausted.
(c) Animal and Social Organism.
The division of labour among the organs in the animal organisation has certain limits, since they are hide-bound to the animal organism, cannot be changed at pleasure, and their number is limited. There is also a limit set for the variety of the functions which an animal organism is capable of performing. It is for instance, impossible that the same limb should serve equally well for holding things, for running and flying, not to speak of other specialisations.
The tool, on the other hand, can be changed by man. He can adapt it to a single definite purpose. This fulfilled, he puts it on one side; it does not hinder him in other work for which he requires quite other tools. If the number of his limbs are limited, his tools are innumerable.
But not simply the number of the organs of the animal organism is limited, but also the force by which any of them can be moved. It can be in no case greater than the strength of the individual himself to whom they belong; it must always be less since it has to nourish all its organs besides the one in motion. On the other hand, the force which moves a tool is by no means confined to one individual. So soon as it is separated from the human individual many individuals can unite to move it, nay, they can use other than human forces for the purpose—beasts of burden, and again, water, wind or steam.
​Thus in contrast to the animal organism the development of the artificial organs of man is unlimited, at least, as measured by human ideas. They find their limit only in the mass of the moving forces which Sun and Earth place at the disposal of man.
The separation of the artificial organs of man from his personality has, however, still other effects. If the whole organs of the animal organism are bound up with it, that means that every individual has the same organs at his disposal. The sole exception is formed by the organs of reproduction. Only in this region is a division of labour to be found among the higher organisms. Every other division of labour in the animal organism rests on the simple fact that certain individuals take over certain functions for a certain period—for example, the sentry duty, as leaders, etc.—without requiring for the purpose organs which are different from those of other individuals.
The discovery of the tool, on the other hand, made it possible that in a society certain individuals should exclusively use certain tools, or, so much oftener in proportion as they understand their uses better than any one else. Thus we come to a form of division of labour in human society which is of quite another kind from the modest beginnings of such in the animal societies. In the latter there remains, with all the division of labour, a being by itself, which possesses all the organs which it requires for its support. In human society this is less the case the further the division of labour advances in it. The more developed is this latter, so much the greater the number of the organs which society has at its disposal for the gaining of their sustenance and the maintenance of their method of life, but so much the greater, also, the number of the organs which are required, and so much the more dependent the organs over which the individual has command. So much the greater the power of society over nature, but so much the more helpless the individual outside of society, so much the more dependent upon it. The animal society which arose as a natural growth can never raise its members above ​nature. On the other hand, human society forms for the human individual a nature which is a quite peculiar world and apart from the rest; a world which apparently interferes with its being much more than nature, with which latter it imagines itself the better able to cope the more the division of labour increases.
And the latter is practically just as unlimited as the possible progress of technique itself; it finds its limits only in the limits to the expansion of the human race.
If we said above that the animal society is an organism of a peculiar kind, different from the plant and animal, so we now find that human society forms a peculiar organism, not only differing again from the plant and animal individual, but is essentially different from that composed of animals.
Before all there come two distinguishing features into account. We have seen that the animal organism itself possesses all the organs which it requires for its own existence, while the human individual under the advanced division of labour cannot live by itself without society. The Robinson Crusoes who without any means produce everything for themselves are only to be found in children’s story books and the so-called scientific works of bourgeois economists, who believe that the best way to discover the laws of society is to completely ignore them. Man is in his whole nature dependent, on society; it rules him; only through the peculiar nature of this is he to be understood.
The peculiar nature of society is, however, in a continual state of change, because human society, in distinction to the animal one, is always subject to development in consequence of the technical advance. Animal society develops itself, probably, only in the same degree as the animal species which forms it. Far faster does the process of development proceed in human society. But at the same time nothing can be more erroneous than to conceive it as the same as the development of the individual, and distinguish the stages of youth, of maturity, of decay and death in it. So long as the sources of force hold out over which the earth has command, therefore so long as the foundation ​of technical progress does not disappear, we have no decay and death of human society to expect. This, with the development of technique, must ever more and more advance, and is in this sense immortal.
Every society is modelled by the technical apparatus at its command and the people who set it going, for which purpose they enter into the complicated social relations. So long as this technical apparatus keeps on improving, and the people who move it neither diminish in number nor in mental nor physical strength, there can be no talk of a dying out of society.
That state of things has never occurred as a permanent condition in any society as yet. Temporarily, certainly, it occurs, in consequence of peculiarities with which we will make acquaintance later on, that the social relations which sprang from social needs, get petrified and hinder the technical apparatus and the growth of the members of society in number and in intellectual and physical force, nay even give rise to a reactionary movement. That can, however, historically speaking, never last long; sooner or later these fetters of society are burst, either by internal movements, revolutions, or—and that is oftener the case—by impulse from without, by wars. Again, society changes from time to time a part of its members, its boundaries or its names, and it looks to the observer as if the society had shown traces of old age, and was now dead. In reality, however, if we want to take a simile from the animal organism, it has only been suffering from a disease from which it has emerged with renewed strength. Thus, for instance, the society of the Roman Imperial times did not die, but, rejuvenated through German blood, it began, after the migrations of the peoples, with partially new people to improve and build up their technical apparatus.
3.—The Changes tn the Strength of the Social Instincts.
(a) Language.
Human society, in contrast to those of animals, is continually changing, and for that very reason the people in it must continually be doing the same. The alteration in the conditions of life must react on the nature of man; the division of labour necessarily develops some of his natural organs in a greater degree, and transforms many. Thus, for instance, the development of the human ape from a fruit tree eater into a devourer of animals and plants which are to be found on the ground, was bound to be connected with a transformation of the hind pair of hands into feet. On the other hand, since the discovery of the tool, no animal has been subjected to such manifold and rapid changes in his surroundings as man, and no animal confronted with such tremendous and increasing problems of adaptation to his environment as he, and hence none had to use its intellect to the same degree as he. Already at the beginning of that career, which was opened up by the discovery of the first tool, superior to the rest of the animals by reason of his adaptability and his intellectual powers, he was forced in the course of his history to develop both qualities in the highest degree.
If the changes in society are able to transform the organism of man, his hands, his feet, his brain, how much the more, and how much greater, to change his consciousness, his views of that which was useful and harmful, good and bad, possible and impossible.
If man begins his rise above the animals with the discovery of the tool, he has no need to first create a social compact as was believed in the eighteenth century, and, as many theoretical jurists still believe, in the twentieth. He enters on his human development as a social animal with strong social impulses. The first ethical result of them on society could only be to influence the force of these impulses. According to the character of society these impulses will be either strengthened or weakened. There is nothing more ​false than the idea that the social impulses are bound to be continually strengthened as society develops.
At the beginning of human society that certainly will be found true. The impulses, which in the animal world had already developed the social impulses, human society permits to remain in full strength; it adds further to that—co-operation in work. This co-operation itself must have made a new instrument of intercourse, of social understanding, necessary—language. The social animals could correspond with few means of mutual understanding, cries of persuasion, joy, fright, alarm, anger and sensational noises. Every individual is with them a whole, which can exist for itself alone. But sensational noises do not, however, suffice if there is to be common labour, or if different tasks are to be allotted, or different products divided. They do not suffice for individuals who are helpless without the help of other individuals. Division of labour is impossible without a language which describes not merely sensations, but also things and processes. It can only develop in the degree to which language is perfected, and this, for its part, brings with it the need for the former.
In language itself the description of activities, and especially the human, is the most primitive; that of things, the later. The verbs are older than the nouns, the former forming the roots from which these latter are derived.
Thus declares Lazarus Geiger:—
"When we ask ourselves why light and colour were not nameable objects in the first stage of language, but the painting of the colours, the answer lies in this: that man first described only his own actions or those of his kind; he noticed only what happened to himself or in the immediate and, to him, directly interesting neighbourhood, at a period when he had for such things as light and dark, shining objects, and lightning no sense and no power of conception. If we take as examples from the great number which we have already passed under review (in the book); they go back in their beginnings to an extremely limited circle of human ​movements. For this reason the conception of natural objects evolve in such a remarkably roundabout manner from the conception of some human activity, which in one way or other called attention to them, and often brings something that is only a distant approximation to them. So the tree is something stripped of its bark, the earth something ground, the corn which grows on it something without the husk. Thus earth and sea, nay, even the clouds, the heavens themselves, emerge from the same root concept of something ground ("Der Ursprung der Sprache," pp. 151–3).
This course of the development of language is not astonishing if we grasp the fact that the first duty of language was the mutual understanding of men in common activities and common movements. This rôle of language as a help in the process of production makes it clear why language had originally so few descriptions of colour. Gladstone and others have concluded from that that the Homeric Greeks and other primitive peoples could only distinguish few colours. Nothing would be more fallacious. Experiments have shown that barbarian peoples have a very highly developed sense of colour. But their colour technic is only slightly developed, the number of colours which they can produce is small, and thence the number of their descriptions of colour is small.
"When man gets so far as to apply a colouring material then the name of this colouring material, easily takes on an adjectival character for him. In this way arises the first names of colours." (Grant Allen, "The Colour Sum," p. 254.)
Grant Allen points to the fact that even to-day the names of colours increase as the technique of colour grows. The names of the colours serve first the purpose of technic and not that of describing nature.
The development of language is not to be understood without the development of the method of production. From this latter it depends whether a language is to remain the dialect of a tiny tribe or become a world language, spoken by a hundred million men.
​With the development of language a very powerful means of social cohesion is gained, an enormous strengthening and a clear consciousness of the social impetus. But at the same time it certainly produced quite other effects; it is the most effectual means of retaining acquired knowledge, of spreading it, and handing it on to later generations; it first makes it possible to form concepts, to think scientifically, and thus it starts the development of science, and with that brings about the conquest of nature by science.
Now man acquires a mastery over Nature and also an apparent independence of her external influences which arouse in him the idea of freedom. On this I must be allowed a short deviation.
Schopenhauer very rightly says: "The animal has only visual presentations, and consequently only motives which it can visualise: the dependence of its acts of will on the motives is thus clear. In man this is no less the case, and men are impelled (always taking the individual character into account) by the motives with the strictest necessity: only these are not for the most part visual but abstract presentations, that is, conceptions, thoughts which are nevertheless the result of previous views, thus of impressions from without. That gives to man a certain freedom in comparison with the animals. Because he is not, like the animal, determined by the visual surroundings present before him but by his thoughts drawn from previous experiences or transmitted to him through teaching. Hence the motive which necessarily moves him is not at once clear to the observer when the deed happens; but it remains concealed within his mind. That gives not only to his actions taken as a whole, but to all his movements, an obviously different character from those of the animal: he is at the same time drawn by finer invisible wires. Thus all his movements bear the impress of being guided by principles and intentions, which gives them the appearance of independence, and obviously distinguishes them from those of the animal. All these great distinctions depend, however, entirely on the capacity ​for abstract presentations—conceptions." ("Preisschrift ueber die Grundlage der Moral," 1860, p. 148.)
The capacity for abstract presentations depends again on language. Probably it was a deficiency in language which caused the first concept to be formed. In Nature there are only single things; language is, however, too poor to be able to describe every single thing. Man must consequently describe all things which are similar to each other with the same word; but with this he undertakes unconsciously a scientific work, the collection of the similar, the separation of the unlike. Language is then not simply an organ of mutual understanding of different men with each other, but has become an organ of thought. Even when we do not speak to others, but think to ourselves only, the thoughts must be clothed in certain words.
Does language, however, give to man a certain freedom in contrast to the animals, this, all the same, only develops on a higher plane what the formation of the brain had already begun.
In the lower animals the nerves of motion are directly connected with the nerves of sensation; here every external impression at once releases a movement. Gradually, however, there developes a bundle of nerves to a central point of the entire nervous system, which receives all the impressions and is not obliged to transmit all to the motor nerves, but can store them up and work them off. The higher animal gathers experiences which it can utilise, and impulses which even under certain circumstances it can hand on to its descendants.
Thus through the medium of the brain the connection between the external impression and the movement is obscured. Through the language, which renders possible the communication of ideas to others, as well as abstract conceptions, scientific knowledge, and convictions, the connection between sensation and movement becomes in many cases completely unrecognisable.
A very similar thing happens in Economics. The most primitive form of the circulation of wares is that of ​barter of commodities, of products which serve the personal or productive consumption. Here from both sides an article of consumption is given and received. The object of the exchange is clear.
That alters with the rise of an element to facilitate circulation—money. Now it is easy to sell without at once buying, just as the brain makes it possible that impressions should work on the organism without at once releasing a movement. As this renders possible a storing up of experiences and impulses, which can even be transmitted to descendants, so notoriously can a treasury be collected from gold. And as the collection of that treasury of experiences and impulses under the necessary social conditions finally renders possible the development of science and the conquest of nature by science, so does the collection of money treasure render possible, when certain social conditions are also there, the transformation of money into capital, which raises the productivity of human labour to the highest degree and revolutionises the world within a few centuries to a greater degree than formerly occurred in hundreds of thousands of years.
And so just as there are philosophers who believe that the elements, brain and language, intellectual powers and ideas which form the connection between sensation and movement are not simply means to arrange this connection more conveniently for the individual and society, and thus apparently to increase their strength, but that they are of themselves sprung from independent sources of power, starting even from the Creator of the world: so there are economists who imagine that money brings about the circulation of goods, and that as capital renders it possible to develop human production enormously, it is this which is the author of this circulation, the creator of these forces, the producer of all values which are produced over and above the product of the primitive handwork.
The theory of the productivity of capital rests on a process of thought which is very similar to that of the freedom of the will and the assumption of a moral ​law, independent of time and space, which regulates our action in time and space.
It was just as logical when Marx combated the one process of thought as the other.
(b) War and Property.
A further means besides community in work and language to strengthen the social impulses is formed by the social development through the rise of war.
We have no reason to suppose that primitive man was a warlike being. Herds of ape-men who gathered together in the branches of trees with copious sources of food may have squabbled and driven each other away. That this got so far as killing their opponents, there is no example among the living apes of to-day. Of male gorillas it is reported that they occasionally fight each other with such fury that one kills the other, but that is a fight for a wife not a fight for feeding grounds.
That changes so soon as man becomes a hunter, who has command of tools which are directed to killing, and who has grown accustomed to killing, to the shedding of strange blood. Also another factor comes into account, which Engels has already pointed out, to explain the cannibalism which often comes up at this period: the uncertainty of the sources of food. Vegetable food is in the tropical forests in abundance; on the grass plains, on the other hand, roots and fruits are not always to be found, the capture of game is, moreover, for the most part a matter of chance. The beasts of prey have thus acquired the capacity of being able to fast for incredibly long periods. The human stomach has not such powers of endurance. Thus necessity easily forces a tribe of savages to a fight for life or death with another neighbouring tribe, which has got a good hunting territory.; then the passions aroused by the fight and agonising hunger finally drive them not simply to kill the foe but also to eat him.
In this way technical progress lets loose struggles which the ape-man did not know; fights not with animals of other kinds but with the members of his ​own kind themselves: struggles, often more bloody than those with the leopard and the panther, which at least the bigger apes understand very well how to defend themselves against when united in greater numbers.
Nothing is more fallacious than the idea that the progress of culture and increase of knowledge necessarily bring also higher humanity with them. We could far better say, the ape is more human, therefore more human than man. Murder and slaughter of members of his species from economic notions are products of culture of technic in arms. And up to now the perfection of these has ranked as a great part of the intellectual labour of mankind.
Only under special circumstances and in special classes will there be produced in the farther progress of culture what we call the refinement of manners. The progress in division of labour ascribes the task of killing animals and men to certain classes—hunters, butchers, executioners, soldiers, etc.—who then occupy themselves with brutality or cruelty either as a sport or as a business within the boundaries of civilisation. Other classes are entirely relieved of the necessity, nay, even the possibility of shedding blood. As, for instance, the vegetarian peasants in the river valleys of India, who are prevented by nature from keeping great herds of animals, and for whom the ox is too costly as a beast of burden, or the cow as the giver of milk, for them to be in a position to kill them. Even the majority of the town inhabitants of the European States, since the decay of the town republics and the rise of paid armies as well as the rise of a special class of butchers, are relieved of the necessity to take life. Especially the intellectuals have been for centuries unused to the spilling of blood, which they ascribe to their higher intelligence, which roused milder feelings in them. But in the last century the increased military service has become again a general institution of most European States, and wars have again become the wars of peoples, and with that the refinement of manners among our intellectuals has reached its end. ​They have become since then considerably more brutal; the death penalty, which even in the last fifty years of last century was generally condemned, meets with no opposition any longer, and the cruelties of colonial wars, which fifty years ago, at least in Germany, would have made their authors impossible, are excused to-day—even glorified.
In any case, war among modern peoples ceases to play the rôle it did among the nomadic pastoral and hunting tribes. But if it produces cruelty and blood-thirstiness on the one hand, it shows itself on the other as a powerful weapon to strengthen the bonds within the family or society. The greater the dangers which threaten the individual, so much the more dependent does he feel himself upon his society, his family, his class, who alone with their joint forces can protect him. So much the greater the respect enjoyed by the virtues of unselfishness or a bravery which will risk life for the society. The more bloody the wars between tribe and tribe, the more will the system of selection have effect among them; those tribes will assert themselves best who have not only the strongest but also the cleverest, the bravest, the most self-sacrificing and best disciplined members to show. Thus war works in primitive times in the most various manners to strengthen the social instincts in men.
War, however, in the course of the social evolution alters its forms: also its causes change.
Its first cause, the uncertainty of the sources of food, ceases as soon as agriculture and the breeding of animals are more developed. But then begins a new cause of war: the possession of wealth. Not private property, but the tribal property. Side by side with tribes in fruitful regions we find others in unfruitful ones; adjoining nomadic, water-searching and poor shepherds, settled peasants to whom water had no longer value, whose farming produced plentiful surpluses, etc. War now becomes robbery and defence against robbery, and it has remained in essence the same till to-day.
​Even this kind of war has a strengthening effect on the social instincts so long as the property in the tribe is in the main communal. On the other hand, war seems to strengthen the social instincts the more classes are formed in the community, and becomes more and more a simple affair of the ruling classes, whose endeavours are aimed towards an increase in their sphere of exploitation, or to put themselves in the place of another ruling class on a neighbouring land. For the subject classes in such wars it is often enough not a question of their existence, and, occasionally, not even a question of a better or worse standard of life for them, but only who is to be their lord. The army becomes either an aristocratic army, in which, the mass of the people have no part, or when they co-operate it becomes a paid or compulsory army, which is commanded by the ruling classes, and they must put their lives at stake not for their own property, their own wives and children, but to champion the interests of others, often hostile interests. The bond which holds such armies together is no longer that of social interests, but solely fright of a remorselessly cruel penal code. They are divided by the hate of the mass against the leaders, by the indifference, even the mistrust of the latter against their subordinates.
At this stage war ceases to be for the mass of the people a school of social feelings. In the ruling, warrior classes it becomes a school of haughty, overbearing demeanour towards the governed classes, because it teaches the ruling classes to treat the former just as they do the common soldiers in the army, to degrade them to blind subordination to an absolute commander, and to dispose of their forces, nay, even their lives, without any scruples.
This development of war is, as we have already said, a consequence of the development of property, which again arises from the technical development.
Every object which is produced in society, or by means of which production is carried on in it, must be at the disposal of someone, and either a group or a ​single individual can dispose of it, or the entire society. The nature of this disposal is determined in the first place by the nature of the things, the nature of the method of production, and that of the producer, who made and used his weapons himself, just as he prepared himself a garment or an ornament; while on the other hand, it was equally natural that the house which was built by the common labour of the tribe should be inhabited in common by them. The various kinds of enjoyment of the various things for utility were always allowed, and, being repeated from generation to generation, became the fixed customs.
Thus arose a law of custom, which was then extended still further in this way, that as often as quarrels arose over this method of use, or about persons who had this right to use, the assembled members of the tribe decided. Law did not arise from any thought-out legislation or social compact, but from a custom resting on the technical conditions, and where these did not suffice, on individual decisions of the society, which decided each case by itself. Thus arose, little by little, a complicated right of property in the various means of production and products of society.
Common property, however, preponderated in the beginning, especially in the means of production—a soil worked in common, water apparatus, houses, also herds of animals and other things besides. Even this small degree of communism was bound to very largely strengthen the social impulses, the interest in the common good, and also increase the subordination to thesame and the dependence on the same.
Very differently did the private property of single families or individuals work out, so soon as it arrived at such a pitch that it began to usurp the place of common property. That began when, in consequence of the growing division of labour, the various branches of hand work began to separate themselves from agriculture, in which they had hitherto found a large employment; when they became more and more independent and separated into branches.
​This development meant an extension of the sphere of society through the division of labour—an extension of the number of those men who thereby form a society because they work for each other, and thus are materially dependent for their existence on each other. But this extension of the social labour does not develop on the lines of an extension of work in common, but towards a separation of individuals from the common work and to making their work the private work of independent producers, who produce that which they themselves do not consume, and obtain in return the products of other branches to consume them.
Thus at this stage the common production and common property in the means of production of societies, each in the main satisfying its own wants, for example, the mark or at least the home community, was bound to give way before the individual production and property of single individuals, or married couples with children, who produced commodities, not for their own use but for the market.
With that there arose side by side with private property, which had already existed at an earlier period, even if not to so great an extent, an entirely new element in society: the competitive struggle of the different producers of the same kind, who struggle against each other for their share of the market.
War and competition are often regarded as the only forms of the struggle for existence in the entire natural world. In reality, both arise from the technical progress of mankind, and belong to its special peculiarity. Both are distinguished from the struggle for existence of the animal world in that the latter is a struggle of individuals or entire societies against the surrounding nature; a fight against living and inanimate forces of nature in which those best fitted for the particular circumstances can best maintain themselves and reproduce their kind. But it is not a fight for life or death against other individuals of the same kind, with the exception of a few beasts of prey, even with whom the last kind of struggle plays only a secondary part in the struggle for life, with the exception ​of the struggle for sexual natural selection. With men alone, thanks to the perfection of their tools, the struggle against individuals of the same kind to maintain themselves in the struggle for life is developed. But even then there is a great distinction between wars and the struggle for existence. The first is a struggle which breaks out between two different societies; it means an interruption of production, and thus can never be a permanent institution. But at the same time it necessitates, at least where no great class antagonisms exist, the strongest social cohesion, and thus encourages in the highest degree the social instincts. Competition, on the other hand, is a struggle between individuals, and indeed between individuals of the same society. This struggle is a regulator—although certainly a most peculiar one—which keeps the social co-operation of the various individuals going, and arranges that in the last resort these private producers shall always produce what is socially necessary, that is, what is under the given social conditions necessary. If war forms an occasional interruption of production, so does the struggle for life form its constant and necessary companion in the production of wares.
Just as war so does competition mean a tremendous waste of force, but it has been at the same time a means by which to extort the highest degree of tension of all the productive forces and their most rapid improvement.
It has consequently had a great economic importance, and has created such gigantic productive forces that the framework of commodity production becomes too narrow, as at one time the framework of the primitive social or co-operative, production became too narrow for the growing division of labour. But over-production, no less than the artificial limitation of production by employers' associations, shows that the time is past when competition as a spur to production helps on social evolution.
But it has always done even this only because it drove it on to the greatest possible expansion of production. On the other hand, the competitive struggle between individuals of the same society has ​under all circumstances an absolutely deadly effect on the social instincts. Since in this struggle each one asserts himself so much the better the less he allows himself to be led by social considerations, the more exclusively he has his own interest in view. For men under a developed system of production of commodities it seems only too clear that egoism is the only natural impulse in man, and that the social impulses are only a refined egoism, or an invention of priests to get mastery over man, or to be regarded as a supernatural mystery. If in the society of to-day the social impulses have kept any strength, it is only due to the circumstance that general commodity production is quite a young phenomenon, hardly 100 years old, and that in the degree in which the primitive democratic communism disappears, and therewith war ceases to be a source of social impulses, a new source of the same breaks forth so much the stronger—the class war of the forward-struggling exploited classes of the people; a war not by paid soldiers, not by conscripts, but by volunteers—not for other people’s interests, but fought in the interests of their own class.
4.—The Influence of the Social Instincts.
(a) Internationalism.
The sphere in which the social instincts develop changes at a far quicker rate than the degree of strength of these instincts themselves. The traditional Ethics looked on the moral law as the force which regulates the relations of man to man. Since this view sets out from the individual and not from society, it entirely overlooks the fact that the moral law does not regulate the intercourse of men with every other man, but simply with men of the same society. That it only holds good for these will be comprehensible when we recollect the origin of the social instincts. They are a means to increase the social cohesion, to add to the strength of society. The animal has social instincts only for the members of his own herd, the other herds are more or less indifferent to him. Among ​social beasts of prey we find direct hostility to the members of other herds. Thus the pariah dogs of Constantinople in every street look very carefully out that no other dog comes into the district. It would be at once chased away, or even torn to pieces.
At a similar relation do the human herds arrive so soon as hunting and war rise in their midst. One of the most important forms of the struggle for existence is now for them the struggle of the herd against other herds of the same kind. The man who is not a member of the same society becomes a direct enemy. The social impulses not only do not hold good for him but directly oppose him. The stronger they are so much the better does the tribe hold together against the common foe, so much the more energetically do they fight the latter. The social virtues, mutual help, self-sacrifice, love of truth, etc., apply only to fellow-tribesmen, not to the members of another society. It excited much resentment against me when I stated these facts in the "Neue Zeit," and my statement was interpreted as if I had attempted to establish a special Social Democratic principle in opposition to the principles of the eternal moral law, which demands unconditional truthfulness to all men. In reality I have only stated that which has existed as the moral law within our breasts from the time when our forefathers became men, viz., that over against the enemy the social virtues are not required. There is no need, however, on that account that anybody should be especially indignant with the Social-Democracy, because there is no party which interprets the idea of society more widely than they, the party of Internationalism, which draws all nations, all races into the sphere of their solidarity. If the moral law applies only to members of our own society, the extent of the latter is still by no means fixed once for all. Rather does it increase in proportion to the degree in which the division of labour progresses; the productivity of human labour increases as do the means of human intercourse improve. The number of people increase whom a certain territory can support, who are bound to work in a ​certain territory for one another and with one another, and who thus are socially bound together. But also the number of the territories increase whose inhabitants live in connection with each other, in order to work for each other and form one social union. Finally, the range of the territories entering into fixed social dependence on each other and forming a permanent social organisation with a common language, common customs, common laws, extends also.
After the death of Alexander of Macedon, the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean had formed already an international circle, with an international language—Greek. After the rise of the Romans all the lands round the Mediterranean became a still wider international circle, in which the national distinctions disappeared, and who held themselves to be the representatives of humanity.
The new religion of the circle which took the place of the old national religions was, from the very beginning, a world religion with one God, who embraced the entire world, and before whom all men were equal. This religion applied itself to all religions, and declared them all to be children of one God, all workers.
But in fact the moral law held good even here only for the members of their own circle of culture—for "Christians," for "believers." And the centre of gravity in Christianity came ever more and more towards the North and West during the migration of the peoples. In the South and East there formed itself a new circle of culture with its own morality—that of Islam—which forced its way forward in Asia and Africa, as the Christian one had done in Europe.
Now, however, this last expanded itself, thanks to capitalism, ever more and more to a universal civilisation which embraced Buddhists, Moslems, Parsees, Brahmins, as well as Christians, who more and more ceased to be real Christians.
Thus becomes formed a foundation for the final lealisation of that moral conception already expressed by Christianity, although too prematurely to be able to be realised itself for the majority of Christians, for ​whom it in consequence became a mere phrase; this was the conception of the equality of men, the view that the social instincts, the moral virtues are to be exercised towards all men in equal fashion. The foundation of a general human morality is being formed not by a moral improvement of humanity, whatever we are to understand by that, but by the development of the productive forms of man, by the extension of the social division of human labour, the perfection of the means of intercourse. This new morality is, however, even to-day, far from being a morality of all men, even in the economically progressive countries. It is in essence, even to-day, the morality of the class-conscious proletariat; that part of the proletariat which in its feeling and thinking has emancipated itself from the rest of the people, and has formed its own morality in opposition to that of the bourgeoisie.
Certainly it is capital which creates the material foundation for a general human morality, but. it only creates the foundation by treading this morality continually under its feet. The capitalist nations of the circle of European Society spread this by widening their sphere of exploitation, which is only possible by means of force. They thus create the foundations of a future world peace by war; the foundations of the universal solidarity of the nations by a universal exploitation of all nations, and those of the drawing in of all colonial lands into the circle of European culture by the oppression of all colonial lands with the worst and most forcible weapons of a most brutal barbarism. The proletariat alone, who have no share in the capitalist exploitation, fight it, and must fight it, and they will, on the foundation laid down by capital of world intercourse and world commerce, create a form of society, in which the equality of man before the moral law will—instead of a mere pious wish—become reality.
(b) The Class Division.
But if the economic development thus tends to widen the circle of society within which the social ​impulses and virtues have effect till it embraces finally the whole of humanity, it at the same time creates not only private interests within society which are capable of considerably diminishing the effect of these social impulses for the time, but also special classes of society, which, while within their own narrow circle greatly intensifying the strength of the social instincts and virtues, at the same time, however, can materially injure their value for the other members of the entire society, or at least for the opposing sections or classes.
The formation of classes is also a product of the division of labour. Even the animal is no homogeneous formation. Among them there are already various groups which have a different importance in and for the community. Yet the group formation still rests on the natural distinctions. There are, in the first place, those of sex and of age. Then there are the groups of the children, the youths of both sexes, the adults, and, finally, the aged. The discovery of the tool has at first the effect of emphasising still more the separation of certain of these groups. Thus it came about that hunting and war fell to the men, who were more easily able to get about than the women, who are continually burdened with children. That, and not any inferior power of self-defence, it was, probably, which made hunting and fighting a monopoly of man. Wherever in history and fable we come across female huntresses and warriors, they are always the unmarried. Women do not lack in strength, endurance, or courage, but maternity is not easily to be reconciled with the insecure life of the hunter and warrior. As, however, motherhood drives the women rather to continually stay in one place, those duties fall to her which require a settled life, the planting of field fruits, the maintenance of the family hearth, etc.
According to the importance which hunting and war, or, on the other side, agriculture and domestic life, attain for society, and according to the part which each of the two sexes play in either, the importance and relative respect paid to the man and woman in the social life also changes. But even the ​importance of the various ages depends on the method of production. Does hunting preponderate, which renders the sources of food very precarious and from time to time necessitates great migrations, the old people become easily a burden to the society. They are often killed, sometimes even eaten. It is different when the people are settled; the breeding of animals and agriculture produce a more plentiful return. Now the old people can remain at home, and there is no lack of food for them. There is, however, at the same time a great sum of experiences and knowledge stored up, whose guardians, so long as writing was not discovered or become the common property of the people, are the old folk. They are the handers down of what might be called the beginning of science. Thus they are not now looked on as a painful burden, but honoured as the bearers of a higher wisdom. Writing and printing deprives the old people of the privilege to incorporate in their persons the sum of all experiences and traditions of the society. The continual revolutionising of all experience, which is the characteristic feature of the modern system of production, makes the old traditions even hostile to the new. The latter counts, without any further ado, as the better: the old as antiquated, and hence bad. The old only receives sympathy; it enjoys no longer any prestige. There is now no higher praise for an old man, than that he is still young and still capable of taking in new ideas.
As with the respect paid to the sexes, so does the respect paid to the various ages alter in society with the various methods of production.
The progressive division of labour carries them further; distinctions appear within each sex, but chiefly among the men. The woman is, in the first place, more and more tied to the household, whose range diminishes instead of growing, as more and more branches of production break away from it, becoming independent and a domain of the men. Technical progress, division of labour, the separation into trades were up till last century almost exclusively restricted to ​men; only a few reflections from that affected the household and, consequently, woman's work.
The more this separation into different professions advances, the more complicated does the social organism become, whose organs they form. The nature and method of their co-operation in the fundamental social process, in other words, the method of production, has nothing of chance about it. It is quite independent of the will of the individuals, and is necessarily determined by the given material conditions. Among these the technical factor is again the most important, and whose development causes that of the method of production. But it is not the only one.
Let us take an example. The materialist conception of history has been often understood as if certain technical conditions of themselves meant a certain method of production, nay even certain social and political forms. As that, however, is not exact, since the same tools are to be found in various states of society; therefore, it is argued, the materialist conception of history must be false, and the social relations are not determined by the technical conditions. The objection is right, but it does not hit the materialist conception of history, but its caricature, by a confusion of technical conditions and method of production.
It has been said, for instance, the plough forms the foundation of the peasant economy. But manifold are the social circumstances in which this appears!
Certainly. But let us look a little more closely. What brings about the deviations of the various forms of society which arise on the peasant foundations?
Let us take, for example a peasantry which lives on the banks of a great tropical or sub-tropical river, which periodically floods its banks, bringing either decay or fruitfulness to the soil. Water dams, etc., will be required to keep the water back here, and to guide it there. The single village is not able to carry out such works by itself. A number of them must co-operate, and supply labourers; common officials must be appointed, with a commission to set the labour going for making and maintaining the works. The bigger ​the undertaking the more villages must take a part; the greater the number of the forced labourers the greater the special knowledge required to conduct such works, so much the greater the power and knowledge of the leading officials compared with the rest of the population. Then there grows on the foundation of a peasant economy a priest or official class, as in the river plains of the Nile, the Euphrates, or the Whang-Ho.
Another species of development we find there: where a flourishing peasant economy has settled in fruitful, accessible lands in the neighbourhood of robbers—nomadic tribes. The necessity of guarding themselves against these nomads forces the peasants to form a force of guards, which can be done in various ways. Either a part of the peasantry applies itself to the trade of arms and separates itself from the others who yield them services in return, or the robber neighbours are induced by payment of a tribute to keep the peace and to protect their new proteges from other robbers, or, finally, the robbers conquer the land and remain as lords over the peasantry, on whom they levy a tribute, for which, however, they provide a protective force. The result is always the same—the rise of a new feudal nobility which rules and exploits the peasants.
Occasionally the first and second methods of development unite, then we have, besides a priest and official class, a warrior caste.
Again, quite differently does the peasantry develop on a sea with good harbours, which favour sea voyages, and bring them closer to other coasts with well-to-do populations. By the side of agriculture, fishing arises; fishing which soon passes over into war-piracy and sea commerce. At a particularly suitable spot for a harbour is gathered together plunder and merchants' goods, and there is formed a town of rich merchants. Here the peasant finds a market for his goods; now arise for him money receipts, and also the expenditure of money, money obligations, debts. Soon he is the debtor of the money owners in the town.
Sea piracy and sea commerce, as well as sea war, bring, however, a plentiful supply of slaves into the ​country. The town money owners, instead of exploiting their peasant debtors any further, go to work to drive them from their possessions, to unite into great plantations, and to introduce slave work for the peasant, without any change being required in the tools and instruments of agriculture.
Finally, we see a fourth type of peasant development in inaccessible mountain regions. The soil there is poor and difficult to cultivate. By the side of agriculture, the breeding of stock retains the preponderance. Nevertheless, both are not sufficient to sustain a great increase of population. At the foot of the mountains, fruitful, well-tilled lands tempt them. The mountain peasants will make the attempt to conquer and exploit them, or, where they meet with resistance, to hire out their superfluous population as paid soldiers. Their experience in war, in combination with the poverty and inaccessibility of their land, serves to guard it against foreign invaders, to whom in any case its poverty offers no great temptation. There the old peasant democracy still exists, when all around the peasantry have long become dependent on feudal lords, priests, merchants and usurers. Occasionally a primitive democracy of that kind tyrannises and exploits a neighbouring country which they have conquered, in marked contradiction to their own highly-valued liberty. Thus the old cantons of the fatherland of William Tell exercised through their bailiffs in Tessin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a rule, whose crushing weight could compare with that of the tyrannical Geisler.
It will be seen that very different methods of production are compatible with the peasant economy. How are these differences to be explained? The opponents of the materialist conception of history trace them back to force, or again to the difference of the ideas which form themselves at various periods in the various peoples.
Now it is certain that in the erection of all these methods of production force played a great part, and Marx called it the midwife of every new society. But ​whence comes this monopoly of force? How does it come that one section of the people conquers with it and the other not, and that the force produces this and not other results? To all these question the force theory has no answer to give. And equally by the theory of ideas does it remain a mystery where the ideas come from which lead to freedom in the mountain country, to priest rule in the river valley land, to money and slave economy on the shores of the sea, and in hilly undulating countries to feudal serfdom.
We have seen that these differences in the development of the same peasant system rest on differences in the natural and social surroundings in which this system is placed. According to the nature of the land, according to the description of its neighbours will the peasant system of economy be the foundation of very different social forms. These special social forms become, then side by side with the natural factors, further foundations, which give a peculiar form to the development based on them. Thus the Germans found when they burst in on the Roman Empire during the migration of the peoples, the Imperial Government with its bureaucracy, the municipal system, the Christian Church, as social conditions, and these, as well as they could, they incorporated into their system.
All these geographical and historical conditions have to be studied if the particular method of production in a land at a particular time is to be understood. The knowledge of its technical conditions alone does not suffice.
It will be seen that the materialist conception of history is not such a simple formula as its critics usually conceive it to be. The examples here given show us, however, also, how class differences and class antagonisms are produced by the economic development.
Differences not simply between individuals, but also between individual groups within the society, existed already in the animal world, as we have remarked already distinctions in the strength, the reputation, perhaps even of the material position of individuals and groups. Such distinctions are natural, and will be ​hardly likely to disappear even in a Socialist society.
The discovery of tools, the division of labour and its consequences—in short, the economic development contributes still further to increase such difference, or even to create new. In any case, they cannot exceed a certain narrow limit, so long as the social labour does not yield a surplus over that necessary to the maintenance of the members of the society. As long as that is not the case, no idlers can be maintained at the cost of society, none can get considerably more in social products than the other. At the same time, however, there arise at this very stage, owing to the increasing enmity of the tribes to each other and the bloody method of settling their differences, as well as through the common labour and the common property, so many new factors through which the social instincts are strengthened that the small jealousies and differences arising between the families, the different degrees of age, or the various callings can just as little bring a split in the community as that between individuals. Despite the beginnings of division of labour which are to be found there, human society was never more closely bound up together, or more in unison than at the time of the primitive Gentile co-operative society, which preceded the beginning of class antagonisms.
Things, however, alter so soon as social labour begins, in consequence of its necessary productivity, to produce a surplus. Now it becomes possible for single individuals and professions to secure for themselves permanently a greater sh^re in the social product than the others can secure. Single individuals, only seldom, temporarily, and as a matter of exception, will be able to achieve that for themselves alone; on the other hand, it is very obvious that any classes specially favoured in any particular manner by the circumstances—for example, such as are conferred by special knowledge or special powers of self-defence, can acquire the strength to permanently appropriate the social surplus for themselves. Property in the products is narrowly bound up with property in the means of production; who possesses the latter can dispose of the ​former. The endeavours to monopolise the social surplus by the privileged class produces in it the desire to monopolise and take sole possession of the means of production. The forms of this monopoly can be very diverse, either common ownership of the ruling class or caste, or private property of the individual families or individuals of this class.
In one way or another the mass of the workings people become disinherited, degraded to slaves, serfs, wage labourers; and with the loss of common property in the means of production and their use in common is the strongest bond torn asunder which held primitive society together.
And if the social distinctions which managed to form themselves within primitive society were kept within narrow limits, now the class distinctions, which can form themselves, have practically no limit. They can grow on the one side through the technical progress which increases the surplus of the product of the social labour over the amount necessary to the simple maintenance of society; on the other hand, through the expansion of the community, while the number of the exploiters remains the same or even decreases, the number of those working and producing surplus for each exploiter grows. In this way the class distinctions can enormously increase, and with them grow the social antagonisms.
In the degree in which this development advances, society grows more and more divided, the class war becomes the principal, most general and continuous form of the struggle of the individuals for life in human society; in the same degree the social instincts lose strength, but they become so much the stronger within that class whose welfare is on the whole always more and more identical with that of the commonweal.
It is, however, specially the exploited, oppressed, and uprising classes in whom the class war strengthens thus the social instincts and virtues; and that because they are obliged to put their whole personality into this with much more intensity than the ruling classes, who are often in a position to leave their defence, be it with ​the weapons of war, or with the weapons of the intellect, to hirelings. Besides that, however, the ruling classes are often internally deeply divided through the struggles between themselves for the social surplus, and over the means of production. One of the strongest causes of that kind of division we have learned in the battle of competition.
All these factors, which work against the social instincts, find no, or little, soil in the exploited classes. The smaller this soil, the less property that the struggling classes have, the more they are forced back on their own strength, the stronger do their members feel their solidarity against the ruling classes, and the stronger do their own social feelings towards their own class grow.
5.—The Tenets of Morality.
(a) Custom and Convention.
We have seen that the economic development introduces into the moral factors transmitted from the animal world an element of pronounced mutability, in that it gives a varying degree of force to the social instincts and virtues at different times, and also at the same time in different classes; that it, however, in addition, widens, and then again narrows down the scope within which the social impulses have effect; on the one side expanding its influence from the tiny tribe till it embraces the entire humanity, on the other side limiting it to a certain class within the society.
But the same economic development creates in addition a special moral factor, which did not exist at all in the animal world, and is the most changeable of all, since not only its strength, but also its contents are subject to far-reaching change. These are the tenets of morality.
In the animal world we find only strong moral feelings, but no distinct moral precepts which are addressed to the individual. That assumes that a language has been formed, which can describe not only impressions but also things, or at least actions; a language for whose existence in the animal world all ​signs fail, for which also a need first arises with the common work. Then is it possible to address distinct demands to the individual. If these demands arise from individual and exceptional needs, then they will again disappear with the individual exceptional case. If on the other hand they have their origin in the social relations, they will recur again and again, so long as these relations last; and in the beginnings of society, where the development is very slow, one can allow hundreds of thousands of years for the endurance of particular social conditions. The social demands on the individual repeat themselves so often and so regularly, that they become a habit, to which the tendency is finally inherited, as the tendency to peculiar kinds of hunting by the sporting dogs, so that certain suggestions suffice to arouse the habit in the descendants as well; also, for instance, the feeling of shame, the habit of covering certain portions of the body whose nude state appears immoral.
Thus arise demands on the individual from society which are more numerous the more complicated is society, and these demands, finally by force of habit, become, without any further ado, recognised as moral commands.
From this customary character many materialist ethical writers have concluded that the entire being of morals rests alone on custom. With that it is, nevertheless, by no means exhausted. In the first place only such views become, through habit, moral commands, which favour the consideration of the individual for the society, and regulate his conduct to other men. It may be brought against this, that there are individual vices which count as immoral, yet their original condemnation was certainly also in the interest of society. Thus, for example, masturbation, if general, must prejudice the chance of securing a numerous progeny—and such a progeny appeared then, when Malthus had not yet spoken, as one of the weightiest foundations of the well-being and progress of society.
In the Bible (Genesis XXXVIII.) Onan was killed by Jehovah because he allowed his spermatozoa to fall to ​the ground instead of attending to his duty and having intercourse with the wife of his dead brother, so as to raise up seed for the latter.
The moral rules could only for this reason become customs because they met deep-lying, ever-recurring social needs. Finally, however, a simple custom cannot explain the force of the feeling of duty, which often shows itself more powerful than all the demands of self-preservation. The customary element in morals only has the effect that certain rules are forthwith recognised as moral, but it does not produce the social instincts which compel the performance of demands recognised as moral laws.
Thus, for example, it is a matter of habit that counts it as disreputable when a girl shows herself in her nightgown to a man, even when this garment goes down to the feet, and takes in the neck, while it is no way improper if a girl appears in the evening with a much uncovered bosom at a ball before all the world, or if she, in a watering-place, in a wet bathing-dress exposes herself to the lecherous gaze of men of the world. But only the force of the social instincts can bring it about that a sternly moral girl should at no price submit to that which convention, fashion, custom—in short, society—has once stamped as shamelessness, and that she should occasionally even prefer death itself to that which she regards as shame.
Other moralists have carried the idea of the moral regulations as simple customs still farther, and described them as simple conventional fashions, basing this on the phenomena that every nation, nay each class has its own particular moral conceptions which, often stand in absolute contradiction to others, that, consequently, an absolute moral law has no validity. It has been concluded from that that morality is only a changing fashion, which only the thoughtless philistine crowd respect, but which the superman can and must raise himself above as things that appertain to the ordinary throng.
But not only are the social instincts something absolutely not conventional, but something deeply grounded ​in human nature—the nature of man as a social animal; even the moral tenets are nothing arbitrary, but arise from social needs.
It is certainly not possible in every case to fix the condition between certain moral conceptions and the social relations from which they arose. The individual takes moral precepts from his social surroundings without being aware of their social causes. The moral law becomes, then, habit to him, and appears to him as an emanation of his own spiritual being, a priori given to him, without any practical root. Only scientific investigation can gradually show up in a series of laws the relations between particular forms of society and particular moral precepts, and then much remains dark. The social forms from which moral principles arose, and which still hold good at a later period, often lie far back, in very primitive times. Besides that, to understand a moral law, not only the social need must be understood which called it forth, but also the peculiar thought of the society which created it. Every method of production is connected not only with particular tools and particular social relations, but also with the particular content of knowledge, with particular powers of intelligence, a particular view of cause and effect, a particular logic—in short, a particular form of thought. To understand earlier modes of thought is, however, uncommonly difficult, much more difficult than to understand the needs of another or his own society.
All the same, however, the connection between the tenets of morals and the social needs has been already proved by so many practical examples that we can accept it as a general rule. If, however, this connection exists, then, an alteration of society must necessitate an alteration in many moral precepts. Their change is thus not only nothing strange, it would be much more strange if with the change of the cause the effect did not also change. These changes are necessary for that very reason, because every form of society requires certain moral precepts suited for its condition.
​How diverse and changing are the moral rules is well known. Hence one example suffices to illustrate a morality differing from the present-day European.
Fridtjof Nansen gives us in the tenth chapter of his "Eskimo Life," a very fascinating picture of Eskimo morals, from which I take a few passages.
"One of the most beautiful and marked features in the character of the Eskimo is certainly his honourableness. …. For the Eskimo it has especial value that he should be able to rely on his fellows and neighbours. In order, however, that this mutual confidence, without which common action in the battle for life is impossible, should continue, it is necessary that he should act honourably to others as well. … For the same reasons they do not lie readily to each other, especially the men. A touching proof of that is the following feature related by Dalajer: 'If they have to describe to each other anything, they are very careful not to paint it more beautiful than it deserves. Nay, if anyone wants to buy anything which he has not seen, the seller describes the thing, however much he may wish to sell it, always as something less good than it is.'"
The morals of advertising are unknown for the Eskimos as yet. Certainly that applies to their intercourse with each other. To strangers they are less strict.
"Fisticuff fights and that sort of ruffianism is not to be seen among them.” Murder is also a great rarity, "and where it happens is not a consequence of economic quarrels but of love affairs.” They consider it dreadful to kill a fellow man. War is, hence, quite incomprehensible to them, and abominable; their language has not even a word for it; and soldiers and officers who have been trained to the calling of killing people are to them simply butchers of men.
"One of the commandments against which the Greenlanders oftenest sin is the seventh. Virtue and chastity do not stand in great esteem in Greenland. Many look on it (on the West Coast) as no great shame if an unmarried girl has children. While we were in Gothard two girls there were pregnant, but they in ​no way concealed it, and seemed, from the evident proof that they were not looked down on, to be almost proud. But even of the South Coast Holm says that it is there no shame if an unmarried girl has children.
"Egede also says that the women look on it as an especial bit of luck and a great honour to have intimate connection with an Angekok—that is, one of their prophets and wise men—and adds: Even many men are glad, and will pay the Angekok for sleeping with their wives, especially if they themselves cannot have children by them.”
"The freedom of Eskimo women is thus very different to that appertaining to the Germanic woman. The reason certainly lies in the fact that while the maintenance of the inheritance of the race and family has always played a great rôle with the Germans, this has no importance for the Eskimo, because he has nothing to inherit, and for him the main point is to have children.
"We naturally look on this morality as bad. That, however, is by no means to say that it is so for the Eskimos. We must absolutely guard against condemning from our standpoint views which have been developed through many generations and after long experience by a people, however much they contradict our own. The views of good and bad are extraordinarily different on this earth. As an example, I might quote that when Mr. Egede had spoken to an Eskimo girl of love of God and our neighbour, she said, 'I have proved that I love my neighbour, because an old woman who was ill and could not die, begged me that I would take her, for a payment, to the steep cliff from which those always are thrown who can live no more. And,. because I love my people, I took her there for nothing, and threw her down from the rocks.'
"Egede thought that this was a bad act, and said that she had murdered a human being. She said no, she had had great sympathy with the old woman, and had wept as she fell. Are we to call this a good or bad act?
​"We have seen that the necessity of killing old and sick members of society very easily arises with a limited food supply, and this killing becomes, then, signalised as a moral act.
"When the same Egede said that God punished the wicked, an Eskimo said to him he also belonged to those who punished the wicked since he had killed three old women who were witches.
"The same difference in the conception of good and bad is to be seen in regard to the Seventh Commandment. The Eskimo puts the commandment, 'Be fruitful and multiply' higher that chastity. He has every reason for that as his race is by nature less prolific."
Finally, a quotation from a letter sent by a converted Eskimo to Paul Egede, who worked in the middle of the eighteenth century in Greenland as a missionary, and found the Eskimo morals almost untouched by European influence. This Eskimo had heard of the Colonial wars between the English and Dutch, and expresses his horror over this inhumanity.
"If we have only so much food that we can satisfy our hunger, and get enough skin to keep out the cold, we are contented, and thou thyself knowest that we let the next day look after itself. We would not on that account carry war on the sea, even if we could. …. We can say the sea that washes our coasts belongs to us as well as the walruses, whales, seals and salmon swimming in it, still we have no objection when others take what they require from the great supply, as they require it. We have the great luck not to be so greedy by nature as them. …. It is really astonishing, my dear Paul! Your people know that there is a God, the ruler and guider of all things, that after this life they will be either happy or damned, according as they have behaved themselves, and yet they live as though they had been ordered to be wicked, and as if sin would bring them advantage and honour. My countrymen know nothing either of God or Devil, and yet they behave respectably, deal kindly and friendly with each other, tell each other everything, and create their means of existence in common."
​It is the opposition of the morality of a primitive communism to capitalist morality which appears here. But still another distinction arises. In the Eskimo society the theory and practice of morality agree with one another; in capitalist society a division exists between the two. The ground for that we will soon learn.
(b) The System of Production and Its Superstructure.
The moral rules alter with the society, yet not uninterruptedly, and not in the same fashion and degree as the social needs. They become promptly recognised and felt as rules of conduct because they have become habitual. Once they have taken root as such, they can then for a long time lead an independent life, while technical progress advances, and therewith the development of the method of production and the transformation of the social needs goes on.
It is with the principles of morality as with the rest of the complicated sociological superstructure which raises itself on the method of production, it can break away from its foundation and lead an independent life for a time.
The discovery of this fact has relieved all those elements who could not escape the influence of the Marxian thought, but to whom nevertheless the consequences of the economic development are extremely awkward, and who in the manner of Kant would like to smuggle in the spirit as an independent driving power in the development of the social organism. To these the discovery of the fact that the intellectual factors of society can temporarily work independently in it was very convenient. With that they hoped to have finally found the wished-for reciprocal action—the economic factor working on the spirit and the spirit on the economic factor. Both were to rule the social development; either in the manner that at one period the economic factor, at another, again, the spiritual force drives the society forward, or in the manner that both together and side by side produce a common result, that, in other words, our will and wishes can at least ​occasionally break through the hard economic necessity of their own strength, and can change it. Undoubtedly there is a reciprocal action between the economic basis and its spiritual superstructure—morality, religion, art, etc. We do not speak here of the intellectual influence of inventions, that belongs to the technical conditions in which the spirit plays a part ultimately by the side of the tool; technic is the conscious discovery and application of tools by thinking men.
Like the other ideological factors morality can also advance the economic and social development. Just in this lies its social importance. Since certain social rules arise from certain social needs, they will render the social co-operation so much the more easy the better they are adapted to the society which makes them.
Morality thus reacts on the social life. But that only holds good so long as it is dependent upon the latter, as it meets the social needs from which it sprang.
As soon as morality begins to lead a life independent of society, as soon as it is no longer controlled by the latter, the reaction takes on another character. The further it is now developed the more is that development purely logical and formal. As soon as it is cut off from the influence of the outer world it can create no more new conceptions but only arrange those already attained, so that the contradictions disappear from them. Getting rid of the contradictions, winning a unitary conception, solving all problems which arise from the contradictions, that is the work of the thinking spirit. With that it can, however, only secure the intellectual superstructure already set up, not rise superior to itself. Only the appearance of new contradictions, new problems, can affect a new development. The human spirit does not, however, create contradictions from its own inner being; they are produced in it only by the impress of the surrounding world on it.
​As soon as the moral principles grow independent, they cease to be, in consequence, an element of social progress. They ossify, become a conservative element, an obstacle to progress. Thus can that happen in the human society which is impossible in the animal, morality can become, instead of an indispensable social bond, the means of an intolerable restraint on social life. That is also a reciprocal action, but not one in the sense of our anti-materialist moralists.
The contradictions between distinct moral principles and distinct social needs can arrive at a certain degree of intensity in primitive society; they then become, however, still greater with the appearance of class antagonism. If in the society without classes the adherence to particular moral principles is only a matter of habit, it only requires for them supervision that the force of habit be overcome. From now on the maintenance of particular moral principles becomes a matter of interest, often of a very powerful interest. And now appear, also weapons of force, of physical compulsion to keep down the exploited classes, and this means of compulsion is placed also at the service of "morality," to secure obedience to moral principles which are in the interest of the ruling classes.
The classless society needs no such compulsory weapons. Certainly, even in it the social instincts do not always suffice to achieve the observance by every individual of the moral code; the strength of the social impulses is very different in the different individuals, and just as different to that of the other instincts: those of self-maintenance and reproduction. The first do not always win the upper hand. But as a means of compulsion, of punishment for others, public opinion—the opinion of the society—suffices in such cases for the classless society. It does not create in us the moral law, the feeling of duty. Conscience works in us when no one sees us, and the power of public opinion is entirely excluded ; it can even, under circumstances, in a society filled with class antagonisms and contradictory moral codes, force us to defy public opinion.
​But public opinion works in a classless society as a sufficient weapon of police, of the public obedience to moral codes. The individual is so small compared to society that he has not the strength to defy their unanimous voice. This has so crushing an effect that it needs no further means of compulsion or punishment to secure the undisturbed course of the social life. Even to-day in the class society we see that the public opinion of their own class, or, where that has been abandoned, of the class or party which they join, is more powerful that the compulsory weapons of the State. Prison, poverty and death are preferred by people to shame.
But the public opinion of one class does not work on the opposite class. Certainly society can, so long as there are no class antagonisms in it, hold the individual in check through the power of its opinion, and force obedience to its laws, when the social instincts in the breast of the individual do not suffice. But public opinion fails where it is not the individual against society, but class against class. Then the ruling class must apply other weapons of compulsion if they are to prevail; means of superior physical or economic might, of superior organisation, or even of superior intelligence. To the soldiers, police, and judges are joined the priests as an additional means of rule, and it is just the ecclesiastical organisation to whom the special task falls of conserving the traditional morality. This connection between religion and morality is achieved so much easier as the new religions which appear at the time of the decay of the primitive communism and the Gentile society stand in strong opposition to the ancient nature religions, whose roots reach back to the old classless period, and which know no special priest caste. In the old religions Divinity and Ethics are not joined together. The new religions, on the other hand, grow on the soil of that philosophy in which Ethics and the belief in God are most intimately bound up together; the one factor supporting the other. Since then religion and ethics have been intimately bound up together as a weapon of rule. Certainly the ​moral law is a product of the social nature of man; certainly the moral code of a time is the product of particular social needs; certainly have neither the one nor the other anything to do with religion. But that code of morals, which must be maintained for the people in the interests of the ruling class, requires religion badly, and the entire ecclesiastical organism for its support. Without this it would soon go to pieces.
(c) Old and New.
The longer, however, the outlived moral standards remain in force, while the economic development advances and creates new social needs, which demand new moral needs, so much the greater will be the contradiction between the ruling morals of society and the life and action of its members.
But this contradiction shows itself in the different classes in different manners. The conservative classes, those whose existence rest on the old social conditions, cling firmly to the old morality. But only in theory. In actual practice they cannot escape the influence of the new social conditions. The well-known contradiction between moral theory and practice begins here. It seems to many a natural law of morals, whose demands seem as something desirable but unrealisable. Here again, however, the contradiction between theory and practice in morality can take two forms. Classes and indivduals, full of a sense of their own strength, ride roughshod over the demands of the traditional morality, whose necessity they certainly recognise for others. Classes and individuals who feel themselves weak transgress secretly against the moral code which they publicly preach. Thus this phase leads, according to the historical situation of the decaying classes, either to cynicism or hypocrisy. At the same time, however, there disappears very easily, as we have seen, in this very class, the power of the social interests in consequence of the growth of private interests, as well as the possibility of allowing their place in the coming battles to be taken ​by hirelings, whereby they avoid entering personally into the fray.
All these produce in conservative or ruling classes those phenomena which we sum up as immorality.
Materialist moralists, to whom the moral codes are simple conventional fashions, deny the possibility of an immorality of that kind as a social phenomenon. As all morality is relative, is that which is called immorality simply a deviating kind of morality?
On the other hand, idealist moralists conclude from the fact that there are entire immoral classes and societies that there must be a moral code eternal and independent of time and space; a standard independent of the changing social conditions on which we can measure the morals of every society and class.
Unfortunately, however, that element of human morality which, if not independent of time and space, is yet older than the changing social relations, the social instinct, is just that which the human morality has in common with the animal. What, however, is specifically human in morality, the moral codes, is subject to continual change. That does not prove, all the same, that a class or a social group cannot be immoral; it proves simply that so far at least as the moral standards are concerned, there is just as little absolute morality as absolute immorality. Even the immorality is in this respect a relative idea, as absolute immorality is to be regarded only as a lack of those social impulses and virtues which man has inherited from the social animals.
If we look, on the other hand, on immorality as an offence against the laws of morality, then it implies no longer the divergence from a distinct standard holding good for all times and places, but the contradiction of the moral practice to its own moral principles; it implies the transgression against moral laws which people themselves recognise and put forward as necessary. It is thus nonsense to declare particular moral principles of any people or class, which are recognised as such, to be immoral simply because they contradict our moral code. Immorality can never be more than ​a deviation from our own moral code, never from a strange one. The same phenomenon, say, of free sexual intercourse or of indifference to property can in one case be the product of moral depravity, in a society where a strict monogamy and the sacredness of property are recognised as necessary; in another case it can be the highly moral product of a healthy social organism which requires for its social needs neither the fixed property in a particular woman, nor that in particular means of conservation and production.
(d) The Moral Ideal.
If, however, the growing contradiction between the changing social conditions and the weakening hold of morality in the ruling classes tend to growing immorality, and shows itself in an increase of hypocrisy and cynicism, which often goes hand in hand with a weakening of the social impulses, so does it lead to quite other results in the rising and exploited class. Their interests are in complete antagonism to the social foundation which created the ruling morality. They have not the smallest reason to accept it, they have every ground to oppose it. The more conscious they become of their antagonisms to the ruling social order the more will their moral indignation grow as well, the more will they oppose to the old traditional morality a new morality, which they are about to make the morality of society as a whole. Thus arises in the uprising classes a moral ideal, which grows ever bolder the more they gain in strength. At the same time, as we have already seen, the power of the social instincts in the same classes will be especially developed by means of the class war, so that with the daring of the new moral ideal the enthusiasm for the same also increases. Thus the same evolution which produces in conservative or decaying classes increasing immorality, produces in the rising classes a mass of phenomena which we sum up under the name of ethical idealism, which is not, however, to be confused with philosophical idealism. ​The very uprising classes are, indeed, often inclined to philosophical materialism, which the declining classes, oppose from the moment when they become conscious that reality has passed the sentence of death upon them, and feel that they can only look for salvation from Supernatural powers—divine or ethical.
The content of the new moral ideal is not always very clear. It does not emerge from any scientific knowledge of the social organism, which is often enough quite unknown to the authors of the ideal, but from a deep social need, a burning desire, an energetic will for something other than the existing, for something which is the opposite of the existing; and thus, also, this moral ideal is in reality only something purely negative, nothing more than opposition to the existing hypocrisy.
So long as class rule has existed, the ruling morality guards; wherever a sharp class antagonism has been formed, slavery, inequality, exploitation. Thus the moral ideal of the uprising classes in historical times has always had the same appearance, always that which the French Revolution summed up with the words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It would seem as if this were the ideal implanted in every human breast, independent of time and space, as if it were the task of the human race to strive from its beginning for the same moral ideal, as if the evolution of man consisted in the gradual approach to this ideal which continually looms before him.
But if we examine more closely, we find that the agreement of the moral ideal of the various historical epochs is only very superficial, and that behind these lie great differences of social aims, which correspond to the differences of the social situation at the time.
If we compare Christianity, the French Revolution, and the Social-Democracy to-day, we find that Liberty and Equality for all meant something quite different, according to their attitude towards property and production. The primeval Christian demanded equality of property in the manner that they asked for its equal division for purposes of consumption for all, and ​under freedom they understood the emancipation from all work as is the lot of the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin and yet enjoy their life.
The French Revolution again understood by equality the equality of property rights. Private property was declared to be sacred. And true freedom was for it the freedom to apply property in economic life, according to pleasure, in the most profitable manner.
Finally, the Social-Democracy neither swears by private property nor does it demand its division. It demands its socialisation, and the equality which it strives for is the equal right of all to the products of social labour. Again, the social freedom which it asks for is neither freedom to dispose arbitrarily of the means of production and to produce at will, but the limitation of the necessary labour through the gathering in of those capable of working and through the most extended application of labour-saving machinery and methods. In this way the necessary labour which cannot be free, but must be socially regulated, can be reduced to a minimum for all, and to all a sufficient time assured of freedom, for free artistic and scientific activity, for free enjoyment of life. Social freedom—we do not speak here of political—through the greatest possible shortening of the period of necessary labour: that is freedom as meant by the Social-Democracy.
It will be seen that the same moral ideal of Freedom and Equality can embrace very different social ideals. The external agreement of the moral ideals of different times and countries is, however, not the result of a moral law independent of time and space which springs up in man from a supernatural world, but only the consequence of the fact that despite all social differences the main outlines of class rule in human society have always been the same.
All the same, a new moral ideal cannot simply arise from the class antagonism. Even within the conservative classes there may be individuals who develop with their class socially only loose ties and are without class consciousness. With that, however, they possess strong social instincts and virtues, which makes them ​hate all hypocrisy and cynicism, and, being highly intelligent, they see clearly the contradiction between the traditional moral code and the social needs. Such individuals are bound also, to come to the point of setting up the new moral ideal. But whether their new ideal shall obtain social force depends upon whether they result in class ideals or not. Only the motive power of the class war can work fruitfully on the moral ideal, because only the class war, and not the single-handed endeavours of self-interested people, possesses the strength to develop society farther and to meet the needs of the higher developed method of production. And, so far as the moral ideal can in any degree be realised, is only to be attained through an alteration of society.
A peculiar fatality has ruled hitherto that the moral ideal should never be reached. That will be easily understood when we consider its origin. The moral ideal is nothing else than the complex of wishes and endeavours which are called forth by the opposition to the existing state of affairs. As the motive power of the class war, as a means to collect the forces of the uprising classes to the struggle against the existing, and to spur them on, it is a powerful lever in the overturning of this. But the new social conditions, which come in the place of the old, do not depend on the form of the moral ideal, but upon the given natural conditions: the technical conditions, the natural milieu, the nature of the neighbours and predecessors of the existing society, etc.
A new society can thus easily diverge a considerable distance from the moral ideal of those who brought it about, and so much the more the less the moral indignation was allied with knowledge of the material conditions. Thus the ideal ended continually in disillusionment; proving itself to be an illusion after it had done its historical duty and had worked as an inspirer in the destruction of the old.
We have seen above how in the conservative classes the opposition between moral theory and practice arises, so that morality appears to them as that which ​everybody demands but nobody practises—something which is beyond our strength, which is only given to supernatural powers to carry out. Here we see in the revolutionary classes a different kind of antagonism arise between moral theory and practice, the antagonism between the moral ideal and the reality created by the social revolution.
Here, again, morality appears as something which everybody strives for but nobody attains—as, in fact, the unattainable for earthly beings. No wonder then the moralists think that morality has a supernatural origin, and that our animal being which clings to the earth is responsible for the fact that we can only gaze wistfully at its picture from afar without being able to arrive at it.
From this heavenly height morality is drawn down to earth by historical materialism. We make acquaintance with its animal origin, and see how its changes in human society are conditioned by the changes which this has gone through, driven on by the development of the technic. And the moral ideal is revealed in its purely negative character as opposed to the existing moral order, and its importance is recognised as the motive power of the class and as a means to collect and inspire the forces of the revolutionary classes. At the same time, however, the moral ideal will be deprived of its power to direct their policy. Not from our moral ideal, but from distinct material conditions does the policy depend which the social development takes. These material conditions have already at earlier periods, to a certain extent, determined the moral will, the social aims of the uprising classes, but for the most part unconsciously. Or if a conscious directing social knowledge was already to hand, as in the eighteenth century, it worked, all the same, unsystematically, and not consistently, at the formation of the social aims.
It was the materialist conception of history which first completely deposed the moral ideal as the directing factor of the social evolution, and which taught us to deduce our social aims solely from the knowledge of the ​material foundations. And at the same time it has shown how we can ensure that the new reality resulting from the Revolution shall come up to the ideal, how illusions and disappointments are to be avoided. Whether they can be really avoided depends upon the degree of the insight acquired into the laws of development, and of the movement of the social organism, its forces and organs.
With that the moral ideal will not be deprived of its influence on society; this influence will simply be reduced to its proper dimensions. Like the social and the moral instinct the moral ideal is not an aim, but a force or a weapon in the social struggle for life. The moral ideal is a special weapon for the peculiar circumstances of the class war.
Even the Social-Democracy, as the organisation of the proletariat in its class war, cannot do without the moral ideal, the moral indignation against exploitation and class rule. But this ideal has nothing to find in scientific Socialism, which is the scientific examination of the laws of the development and movement of the social organism, for the purpose of knowing the necessary tendencies and aims of the proletarian class war.
Certainly in Socialism the student is always a fighter as well, and no man can artificially cut himself in two parts, of which the one has nothing to do with the other. Thus even with Marx in his scientific research there occasionally breaks through the influence of a moral ideal. But he always endeavours, and rightly, to banish it where he can. Because the moral ideal becomes a source of error in science, when it takes on itself to point out to it its aims. Science has only to do with the recognition of the necessary. It can certainly arrive at prescribing a "shall," but this dare only come up as a consequence of the insight into the necessary. It must decline to discover a "shall" which is not to be recognised as a necessity founded in the world of phenomena. The Ethic must always be only an object of science; this has to study the moral instincts as well as the moral ideals, and explain them; it cannot take advice from them as to the results at ​which it is to arrive. Science stands above Ethics, its results are just as little moral or immoral as necessity is moral or immoral.
All the same, even in the winning and making known of scientific knowledge, morality is not got rid of. New scientific knowledge implies often the upsetting of traditional and deeply-rooted conceptions which had grown to a fixed habit. In societies which include class antagonisms, new scientific knowledge, especially that of social conditions, implies, for the most part however, damage to the interests of particular classes. To discover and propagate scientific knowledge which is incompatible with the interests of the ruling classes, is to declare war on these. It assumes not simply a high degree of intelligence, but also ability and willingness to fight, as well as independence from the ruling classes, and, before all, a strong moral feeling, strong social instincts, a ruthless striving for knowledge, and to spread the truth with a warm desire to help the oppressed, uprising classes.
But even this last desire is likely to mislead if it does not play a simple negative part, as repudiation of the validity of the ideas of the ruling classes, and as a spur to overcoming the obstacles which the opposing class interests bring against the social development, but aspires to rise above that, and to take the direction, laying down certain aims which have to be attained through social study.
Even though the conscious aim of the class war in scientific Socialism has been transformed from a moral into an economic aim, it loses none of its greatness. Since that which appeared to all social renovators hitherto as a moral ideal, which could not be attained by them; for that the economic conditions are at length given, that ideal we can now recognise for the first time in the history of the world as a necessary result of the economic development, viz., the abolition of class, not the abolition of all professional distinctions, not the abolition of division of labour, but certainly the abolition of all social distinctions and antagonisms which arise from private property in the means of ​production and from the exclusive chaining down of the mass of the people to the function of material production. The means of production have become so enormous, that they burst to-day the frame of private property. The productivity of labour is grown so huge that to-day already a considerable diminution of the labour time is possible for all workers. Thus grow the foundations for the abolition, not of the division of labour, not of the professions, but of the antagonism of rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, ignorant and wise.
At the same time, however, the division of labour is so far developed as to embrace that territory which remained so many thousands of years closed to it—the family hearth. The woman is torn from it, and drawn into the realm of division of labour, so long a monopoly of the men. With that, naturally, the natural distinctions which exist between the sexes do not disappear, it can also allow many social distinctions, as well as many a distinction in the moral demands which are made on them, to continue to exist or even revive such, but it will certainly cause all those distinctions to disappear from State and society which arise out of the fact that the woman is tied down to the private household duties, and excluded from the callings of the divided labour. In this sense we shall see not simply the abolition of the exploitation of one class by another, but the abolition of the subjection of woman to man.
And at the same time the world commerce attains such dimensions, the international economic relations are drawn so close that therewith the foundation is laid for superseding private property in the means of production, the overcoming of natural antagonisms, the end of war and armaments, and for the possibility of permanent peace between the nations.
Where is a moral idea which opens such splendid vistas? And yet they are won from sober, economic considerations, and not from intoxication through the moral ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, justice, humanity!
​And these outlooks are no mere expectations of conditions which only ought to come, which we simply wish and will, but outlooks on conditions which must come, which are necessary. Certainly not necessary in the fatalist sense, that a higher power will present them to us of itself, but necessary, unavoidable, in the sense that the inventors improve technic, and the capitalists, in their desire for profit, revolutionise the whole economic life, as it is also inevitable that the workers aim for shorter hours of labour and higher wages, that they organise themselves, that they fight the capitalist class and its state, as it is inevitable that they aim for the conquest of political power and the overthrow of capitalist ruling. Socialism is inevitable because the class war and the victory of the proletariat is inevitable.