Part 1 : 
Society
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People :
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Author : Karl Korsch

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1. Marxism and Sociology2. The Principle of Historical Specification3. The Principle of Historical Specification (continued)4. The Principle of Change5. The Principle of Criticism6. A New Type of Generalization7. Practical Implications
Chapter 1. Marxism and Sociology
What is the relationship between Marxism and modern sociological 
 teaching? If we think of the Sociology begun by Comte and in fact first 
 named by him, we shall not find any affinity or link between it and 
 Marxism. Marx and Engels, with all their keen desire to extend and enhance 
 the knowledge of society, paid no attention to either the name or contents 
 of that ostensibly new approach to the social studies. Nor were they 
 impressed by the gains the Comtist school made among the progressive 
 intelligentsia of their time. It appears from their correspondence that 
 Marx at one time in the sixties, with his main attention concentrated on 
 the final manuscript of his principal work, picked up from the shelves of 
 the British Museum and read through Comte’s Cours de philosophie 
 positive of 1830-42, “because the English and French make such a fuss 
 about the fellow.” Yet there is even more evidence in the text of 
 Capital itself that this reading left no mark in his theoretical 
 work. On still another occasion, in writing to an otherwise highly 
 esteemed Comtist, Marx made it perfectly clear that he was “thoroughly 
 opposed to Comtism as a politician” and had “a very poor opinion of it as 
 a man of science.”
 Marx’s attitude is theoretically and historically well founded. The 
 science of socialism as formulated by Marx, owed nothing to this 
 “sociology” of the 19th and 20th centuries which originated with Comte and 
 was propagated by Mill and Spencer. It would be more correct to say that 
 since the days when young Auguste Comte, hitherto the most enthusiastic 
 disciple of the Utopian socialist Saint-Simon, suddenly broke with his 
 “great master” to work out his own pedantic system of a “positivistic” 
 sociology from a few of the formidable mass of ideas continuously poured 
 forth by that excessively productive mind, bourgeois social thought has 
 been a reaction against the theory and thus also against the practice of 
 modern socialism. Up to the present day “sociologists” have endeavored to 
 submit another way of answering the embarrassing questions first raised by 
 the rising proletarian movement. From this standpoint only is it possible 
 to understand the essential unity of the manifold theoretical and 
 practical tendencies which during the last hundred years have found their 
 expression under the common denomination of Sociology.
 Marxism, then, stands in a much more original and direct relationship 
 to those new problems which modern historic development has put on the 
 agenda of present-day society, than the whole of the so-called “sociology” 
 of Comte, Spencer, and their followers. Bourgeois sociologists refer to 
 the revolutionary socialist science of the proletariat as an “unscientific 
 mixture of theory and politics.” Socialists, on the other hand, dismiss 
 the whole bourgeois sociology as mere “ideology.”
 There is, however, quite a different relation between the Marxian 
 theory and another body of social thought which descended from an earlier 
 time when the name of “sociology” had not yet been invented, but “society” 
 had already been discovered and recognized along with physical nature as 
 an equally material and important realm of human knowledge and human 
 action.
 As Marx himself records in 1859, he embarked upon his new materialistic 
 theory of society, sixteen years before, because of certain grave doubts 
 which had recently assailed his belief in the idealistic philosophy of 
 Hegel. He had at that time just gone through the new and stimulating 
 experiences of his first short period of political activity. As an editor 
 of the Rheinische Zeitung (1842-43) he had for the first time found 
 himself called upon to take part in the discussion of “so-called material 
 interests.” He had thus been led to occupy himself with “economic 
 questions.” On the other hand, he had become aware of the decisive 
 importance which a closer study of the ideas of “French socialism and 
 communism” was bound to have for the furtherance of revolutionary 
 developments in Germany. While the combined effect of all these new 
 impulses had already considerably undermined his faith in the old Hegelian 
 formulas, the real nature of that Prussian State which had been so 
 sublimely exalted by Hegel was finally revealed to him by a most 
 conclusive personal experience. He was compelled to resign from the staff 
 of the Rheinische Zeitung which under his leadership within less 
 than a year had become the most conspicuous organ of the progressive 
 movement in pre-revolutionary Germany. Nor was his withdrawal sufficient, 
 as had been hoped by the frightened managers, to arrest the judgment of 
 suppression pronounced against the Rheinische Zeitung by an equally 
 frightened government.
 Thus confronted with an increasing number of striking discrepancies 
 between his philosophical creed and his actual experiences, Marx turned 
 once more to Hegel. A detailed “critical revision” of Hegel’s 
 Philosophy of Law, on which he concentrated for the next five 
 months, led him to the conclusion that

legal relations as well as forms of State cannot be understood out of 
 themselves nor out of the so-called general development of the human 
 mind but, on the contrary, are rooted in the material conditions of 
 life, the aggregate of which Hegel, following the precedent of the 
 English and French of the 18th century, grouped together under the name 
 of “civil society,” and that the anatomy of civil society is to be 
 sought for in Political Economy.
 We see here the decisive significance which the concept of “civil 
 society” had gained for the young Marx who was then just passing from 
 Hegelian idealism to his later materialistic theory. While still formally 
 basing his criticism of Hegel’s glorification of the State on the 
 realistic statements concerning the nature of civil society embodied in 
 the same Hegelian work, Marx now definitely abandoned Hegel and all his 
 idealistic philosophy. Instead, he associated himself with those great 
 enquirers into the social nature of man who, in the preceding centuries, 
 had first set up the new idea of Civil Society as a revolutionary slogan, 
 and had even unearthed, in the new science of Political Economy, the 
 material foundations of that new and “civilized” form of society.
 Hegel, indeed, had not derived the deep realistic knowledge which, 
 under the heading of Civil Society, stands out in such sharp relief 
 against the rest of his book from an independent study of the as yet 
 extremely backward conditions of German society. He took both the name and 
 contents of his “civil society” ready-made from the French and English 
 social philosophers, politicians, and economists. Behind Hegel, as Marx 
 said, stood the “English and French of the 18th century” with their new 
 discoveries of the structure and movement of society who, in their turn, 
 reflected the real historical development which culminated in the 
 Industrial Revolution in England after the middle of the 18th century and 
 in the great French Revolution of 1789-1815.
 Marx, then, in developing his new socialist and proletarian science, 
 took his cue from that early study of society which, although first 
 communicated to him by Hegel, had really been born of the revolutionary 
 epoch of the bourgeoisie. This appears most strikingly in his complete 
 adoption of the scientific results of classical Political Economy as 
 developed by Petty and Boisguillebert, Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo, and 
 taken from them by Marx’s immediate predecessors, the German idealist 
 philosophers Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. There is, so far, not much 
 difference between Marx’s reference to Political Economy as an “anatomy of 
 civil society,” and Hegel’s philosophical attempt to base the State on 
 Civil Society, and Civil Society on the “System of Needs” as explored by 
 the new science of “Political Economy.” He had even more expressly, in an 
 earlier study, described the “system of needs” as the “first form of 
 government,” underlying such higher developed forms as the State and the 
 law. Yet there is this tremendous difference from the outset that Hegel 
 had all along used the realistic knowledge borrowed from the classical 
 economists only for the purpose of enhancing the importance of his 
 ultimately idealistic system, while Marx made Political Economy the pivot 
 of a wholly materialistic theory of society.
 The very pungency with which Marx in his later writings repeatedly 
 pointed out that post-classical bourgeois economy (the so-called “vulgar” 
 economy) had not advanced beyond Ricardo in any important points, and 
 scornfully dismissed the new socio-scientific synthesis of Comte’s 
 “Positivism” for the infinitely greater achievement of Hegel, shows once 
 more the lasting importance of that early phase of economic and social 
 thought for the theory of Marx. This is true even though he far 
 transcended those older theories in asserting the new development of 
 society and the new needs and aims of the proletariat, now arising as an 
 independent class. The proletariat guided by Marxian theory is therefore 
 not only, as Friedrich Engels put it, “the inheritor of German classical 
 philosophy.” It is also the inheritor of classical bourgeois economics and 
 social research. As such, it has transformed the traditional classical 
 theory in accordance with the intervening changes in historical 
 conditions. 
 Marx no longer regards bourgeois society from the standpoint of its 
 first phase of development and its opposition to the feudal structure of 
 medieval society. He is not interested only in the static laws of its 
 existence. He treats bourgeois society in all its aspects as a transitory 
 historical phenomenon. He explores the whole process of its genesis, and 
 the tendencies contained therein which, in their further development, will 
 lead to its revolutionary overthrow. He finds these tendencies twofold: 
 objective in the economic basis of bourgeois society, 
 subjective in the new division of social classes arising out of 
 this same economic basis and not out of politics, law, ethics, etc. Thus 
 “civil society,” which until then had constituted a homogeneous whole, 
 opposed only to feudalism, is now torn into two opposed “parties.” The 
 assumed “civil society” is in reality “bourgeois society,” namely, a 
 society based on the cleavage of classes, in which the bourgeois class 
 controls other classes economically and therefore politically and 
 culturally. So at last “la classe la plus laborieuse et la plus misérable” 
 enters the widened horizon of social science. Marxian theory recognizes 
 the class war of the oppressed and exploited wage laborers to be a war 
 for the abolition of present-day society. As a materialistic science of 
 the contemporary development of bourgeois society, Marxian theory is at 
 the same time a practical guide for the proletariat in its struggle to 
 realize proletarian society.
 The later artificial detachment of sociology as a special branch of 
 learning, which dates its scientific origin from Comte, and at its best 
 allows the great original thinkers who did the real productive work in 
 this field to stand as its “forerunners,” represents nothing more than an 
 escape from the practical, and therefore also theoretical, tasks of the 
 present historical epoch. Marx’s new socialist and proletarian science 
 which, in a changed historical situation, further developed the 
 revolutionary theory of the classical founders of the doctrine of society, 
 is the genuine social science of our time.
Chapter 2. The Principle of Historical Specification
Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a definite 
 historical epoch. He criticizes all the categories of the bourgeois 
 theorists of society in which that specific character has been effaced. 
 Already in his first economic work we find him reproaching Ricardo for 
 having applied the specifically bourgeois concept of rent to 
 “landed property of all epochs and of all countries. This is the error of 
 all economists who represent bourgeois production conditions as 
 eternal.”
 The scope of the principle of historical specification is clearly 
 demonstrated in this example. Landed property has been widely 
 different in character and has played very different parts in the various 
 historical epochs of society. The different ways in which primitive 
 communal property in land had been broken up directly influenced the 
 varied forms of the later development of society based upon private 
 property. Up to the Middle Ages landed property, i.e., agriculture, 
 constituted the central category dominating all the other categories of 
 production, just as capital does in present-day bourgeois society. 
 The different ways in which, in different parts of the world, feudal 
 property in land, upon the victory of the bourgeois mode of production, 
 was subjected to capital, the different ways in which rent was transformed 
 into a part of capitalistic surplus value, and agriculture into an 
 industry, determined to a great extent the structure of the various 
 capitalistic systems which arose therefrom. They retain an importance even 
 for the forms of the labor movements which were later to arise within 
 them, and for the different forms in which the transition to the socialist 
 mode of production will ultimately be effected in each of the different 
 systems. For this reason Marx investigated with particular care, to the 
 end of his life, the history of landed property and rent as shown on the 
 one hand in the United States, and on the other hand in 
 Russia. Similarly, Lenin, in his book on The Development of 
 Capitalism in Russia, at the end of the 19th century, analyzed the 
 specific historical forms of this transitionary process. Yet all this 
 comprehensive study of the various historical forms, serves only, both 
 with Marx and Lenin, as a base for the working out of the specific 
 character of capitalistic rent in the fully developed bourgeois 
 society.
 In the fundamental analysis of the modern Capitalistic Mode of 
 Production which forms the subject matter of the first book of 
 Capital, Marx does not deal with the category of rent at all. What 
 is discussed here, in addition to the general function of the soil as an 
 element of the labor process itself, is only the manner in which the 
 historical transition to the modern capitalistic mode of production 
 reacted upon the conditions of the agricultural proletariat, first, in 
 fully developed industrial countries, second, in such countries as Ireland 
 that have fallen behind in the process of industrialization, and finally 
 in actual colonies. The proper place for a discussion of “rent” is in a 
 section of the third book of Capital in which the forms of 
 Capitalistic Distribution are analyzed, as they arise from the 
 historical forms of Capitalistic Production. Even here, there is no room 
 for an independent analysis of earlier historical forms. A few scattered 
 remarks serve to illuminate the contrast between the modern bourgeois form 
 of landed property and past historical forms; and consideration of the 
 historical Genesis of Capitalistic Rent is relegated to a 
 supplementary chapter at the end.
  “Rent,” then, as discussed in the Marxian theory, is in no way a 
 general term referring to landed property of all epochs. It refers to “a 
 specific historical form into which feudal land ownership and small 
 peasants’ agriculture have been transformed through the influence 
 of capital and of the capitalistic mode of production.” In this sense, and 
 in this sense only, an analysis of modern capitalistic rent, or of the 
 portion of the surplus value produced by the industrial capital which 
 falls into the hands of the capitalistic landowner, forms a necessary part 
 of the complete analysis of the process of capitalistic production 
 contained in the three books of Capital.
 The principle of historical specification is further demonstrated by 
 the way Marx deals with the different historical forms of “capital” 
 itself. Just as in the present epoch Industrial Capital appears as 
 the standard form of all capital, so did  “Merchants’ Capital” and 
 its twin brother, “Interest-bearing Capital,” and the various 
 sub-forms of these (more exactly described by Marx as “capital for trading 
 in goods,” “capital for trading in money,” “capital for lending money”), 
 occupy an independent and, in certain respects, a predominating position 
 in the epochs preceding capitalistic society and, indeed, in the first 
 phases of capitalist society itself. Even within the fully developed 
 capitalist economy of today the merchant and the banker, though not 
 involved in actual production like the industrial capitalist, perform a 
 definite function in the circulation of capital. They also participate in 
 the distribution of the “surplus value”; a considerable part of the yearly 
 amount at the disposal of the capitalist class as a whole falls to their 
 share as “commercial profit” and “interest” – just as we have seen another 
 part of it going in the form of “rent” to the landed-property-owners who 
 have as little to do with actual production. Moneylenders’ capital has 
 even recaptured an important position – though not, as some Marxists have 
 recently believed, a definite supremacy – in its new form as an integral 
 part of the modern so-called “finance capital,” i.e., a system of highly 
 concentrated capital obtained by the fusion of private and 
 State-controlled bank capital with trust and State-controlled industrial 
 capital.
 The Marxian analysis of modern capitalistic production starts from the 
 assumption that the previously independent forms of trading-capital and 
 money-capital have been transformed into mere accessories of the 
 now prevailing form. It is true that all capitalistic production bears the 
 stamp of its historical origin from the intrusion of the merchant into the 
 sphere of feudal production. Capitalistic production remains, even today, 
 essentially a production for sale. Every article resulting from 
 capitalistic production is to be sold as a commodity, whether to another 
 industrial capitalist who needs it for carrying on his own process of 
 production or, ultimately, to the immediate consumer. Again, all 
 capitalistic production is conditioned by a given amount of disposable 
 money. Thus the very way in which “capital” first arose and gained 
 control of production through the money supplied by wealthy individuals, 
 merchants, usurers, etc., constantly repeats itself under the present 
 conditions of a fully developed industrial production. “Every new 
 aggregate of capital,” says Marx, “comes on the stage, that is, on the 
 market, whether of commodities, labor, or money, even in our days, in the 
 form of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into 
 capital.”
 Nevertheless the “secret,” not only of “how capital produces” but also 
 of “how capital is produced” – and incidentally the key to the 
 abolition of all capitalistic exploitation and wage slavery – can in no 
 way be discovered through an analysis of the functions performed by those 
 “accessory” forms of capital in the process of circulation, or of the 
 revenues which accrue to the capitalists concerned, in consideration of 
 the “services” performed in that sphere. “One will therefore understand,” 
 says Marx, “why in our analysis of the basic form of capital, of the form 
 in which it determines the economic organization of modern society, its 
 popular, and, as it were, antediluvian forms, ‘trading capital’ and 
 ‘usurers’ capital,’ for the present (viz., in the analysis of the actual 
 process of the capitalistic production in the first book of 
 Capital) are entirely ignored.”
 Even when, in the second and third books of Capital, Marx comes 
 back to these “antediluvian forms” in dealing with Capitalistic 
 Circulation and Distribution, he takes as his main theme not their 
 historical development but only the specific forms into which they have 
 been transformed by the action of modern industrial capital. The 
 historical analyzes which run through the whole of the sections concerned, 
 and both of the supplementary chapters under the headings  “Historical 
 data concerning merchants’ capital” and “Pre-capitalistic 
 conditions” merely serve to enlighten that great historical process 
 through which, in the course of centuries and millenaries, trade 
 and money transactions lost more and more of their originally 
 dominating position until they assumed their present place as mere 
 subordinate modes of existence of the various functions which industrial 
 capital sometimes adopts and sometimes discards within the sphere of its 
 circulation.
 There is one aspect alone under which rent as well as trading 
 capital and money-capital might have been treated as a proper 
 theme in Marx’s analysis of the modern capitalistic mode of production. 
 According to an original and more comprehensive scheme of procedure, Marx 
 would have followed up the more strictly economic topics of production, 
 circulation and distribution, social classes, etc., as now discussed in 
 the three books of Capital, by an investigation of what may be 
 called “economic questions of a higher order” such as the relation between 
 town and country and the international relations of 
 production.
 Only with these later researches would Marx’s analysis have reached the 
 point where the antagonism of landed property to capital, as 
 well as that of trade and money-capital to industrial 
 capital, survives in present-day society – the latter as a 
 characteristic difference in general structure and outlook between trading 
 cities and factory towns, commercial and industrial States; the former as 
 a persisting conflict between the aims of the rural farmers and the 
 industrial and commercial interests represented by the towns; and, on an 
 international scale, between primarily agricultural and definitely 
 industrial countries.
 The principle of historical specification as illustrated by the 
 preceding examples (landed property and the various forms of capital) is 
 strictly adhered to by Marx. He deals with all categories of his economic 
 and socio-historical research in that specific form and in that specific 
 connection in which they appear in modern bourgeois society. He does not 
 treat them as eternal categories. Nor does he, for that matter, transform 
 himself into an historian. While fully aware of the different specific 
 forms in which many economic categories of modern bourgeois society had 
 occurred in earlier epochs, he does not go into the history of “money,” of 
 “exchange of commodities,” of “wage-labor,” or of that of “cooperation,” 
 “division of labor,” etc. He discusses the different stages of the 
 historical development of all these economic concepts, and of the 
 political, juridical, and other ideological concepts bound up with them, 
 only in so far as it is necessary for his main theme, i.e. the specific 
 character assumed by them in modern bourgeois society.
 The contrast which exists in this respect between Marx and his 
 forerunners comes out most strikingly upon comparison. While the work of 
 the last representative of classical bourgeois economy, David Ricardo, is 
 devoted to the “Principles of Political Economy,” Marx restricted 
 his economic research to “modern bourgeois production” and finally gave 
 the work which contains his analysis and critique of the whole of 
 traditional Political Economy the plain and definite name 
 “Capital.” Ricardo begins the exposition of his system with the 
 general concept of “value”; Marx commences the critical investigation of 
 the theory and the facts underlying modern bourgeois economy with an 
 external object, a palpable thing, “commodity.” While Ricardo frees the 
 economic concept of “value” from the last earthly impurities that were 
 still attached to it by his predecessors, Marx regards even the more 
 concrete term of “commodity” as still too abstract to serve as a starting 
 point for his critical analysis of modern bourgeois production. He 
 therefore excludes from his application of the term those cases in which 
 an exchange of commodities has occurred as an isolated phenomenon, 
 under entirely different historical conditions. He deals with “commodity” 
 only as an offshoot of the “general commodity production” 
 prevailing in modern industrial society. The single commodity, then, is 
 not an independent entity. It is but one of the units into which that 
 “immense collection of commodities,” which had been defined by the 
 classical economists as the “wealth of nations,” is to be resolved 
 for the purpose of scientific investigation. It is an element of that mass 
 of exchangeable products which Marx, by a most significant alteration of 
 the accepted Smithian term, called the “bourgeois wealth” or, more 
 precisely, the “wealth of those societies in which the capitalistic 
 mode of production prevails.” Only thus specifically defined do 
 “commodities” form the subject matter of Marx’s economic analysis. Only as 
 properties of a commodity so defined do the general concepts of “value 
 in use” and “value in exchange,” and the other terms of the 
 classical economic system derived from those fundamental concepts, 
 interest him.
 This applies even to the most general term of “value” which, 
 according to Marx, must still be distinguished from “value in exchange” – 
 the latter being only the external form in which the intrinsic “value” of 
 a given commodity manifests itself in the ratio of exchange of such 
 commodities. This most abstract term, which Marx adopted from the later 
 classical economists, has been highly suspect to some well-meaning but 
 superficial interpreters of Marx who found that the concept of an 
 intrinsic “value,” distinct from exchange-value, reeks of scholasticism, 
 metaphysical realism, Hegelian idealism, and what not, and for this reason 
 does no credit to a “materialistic” science. As a matter of fact, the 
 somewhat “minute” Marxian analysis of the “form of value or value in 
 exchange” as contained in a section of the first chapter of 
 Capital, has not unjustly been indicted, as Marx himself 
 anticipated it to be, on the count of difficulty. Nevertheless, there is 
 no point in accepting the term “exchange value,” as taken by Marx from his 
 forerunners, the founders of classical Political Economy, and rejecting 
 that of an intrinsic “value” which was used by him only as a means to work 
 out more clearly the true contents of the classical value concept, and to 
 expose critically the “Fetishism” bound up with the term as used by his 
 predecessors.
 The Marxian interpretation of “value” is far removed from that peculiar 
 misconception by which some earlier writers had held it to be a physical 
 property belonging to things along with those other physical properties 
 which establish the utility of such things for human wants or their 
 “use-value.” Nor did he share the more refined mistake which at his time, 
 in spite of several refutations, still lingered in the minds of the 
 economists, and by which “value” was regarded as a metaphysical property 
 belonging, not to the things themselves nor to their substance but, as it 
 were, to “things in exchange.” Value, according to Marx, is first of all 
 no physical property. “So far no chemist has ever discovered 
 exchange-value either in a pearl or in a diamond.” The value pertaining to 
 useful things when they are exchanged as commodities may well be called a 
 “meta-physical” quality, but only in that extremely unmetaphysical sense 
 of being not a physical but a social quality, applying to the 
 products of human labor or rather to the labor itself by which such 
 useful things are produced and to the laborers producing them within a 
 “commodity-producing society,” i.e., under the conditions prevailing in 
 present-day capitalistic society.
 Modern economists have tried to improve upon classical economic theory 
 by pointing to the fact that “value” is not a property pertaining to a 
 thing (or to the members of a class of things), but is rather a 
 relation connecting two or more things, and Jevons has made much of 
 that “discovery.” In fact, there is nothing particularly new in this 
 Jevonsian “relativism” as against those classical writers who had defined 
 the value pertaining to “things of exchange” as a purely quantitative 
 relation, and it altogether misses the point where the classical concept 
 of “value” was indeed vulnerable. Marx was fully conscious of the fact 
 that all concepts of “value” are strictly “relative” terms. They either 
 denote an immediate relation between objects and man (which is realized by 
 actual “use” or consumption), or a relation of a different order (realized 
 by the “exchange” of such objects), viz., the quantitative relation in 
 which use-values of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort 
 whenever they are exchanged. The relations of the latter order had been 
 regarded by the classical economists as the only “value” to be dealt with 
 in a strictly economic science, and had been styled by them “value in 
 exchange,” as distinguished from mere utility or “value in use.” Marx 
 easily agreed with the classical writers when they established the 
 difference in kind prevailing between “exchange-value” as a 
 quantitative relation arising through the selling and buying of 
 commodities on the market, i.e., by a social process; and 
 “use-value” as a merely qualitative relation between external 
 objects and man. But he did not agree with them in the ultimate 
 location of the social relations manifesting themselves in the “value” 
 relations of commodities as established by their exchange. For the purpose 
 of bringing out the point which really interested him, he made use of the 
 as yet vague distinction, made by the classicists, between 
 “exchange-value” as the apparent phenomenon and “value” as the hidden 
 entity underlying its appearance. By an apparently notional development 
 (in the best Hegelian style) of the various connotations of the classical 
 term of “value,” he in fact disclosed the real social nature of the 
 fundamental human relations underlying the so-called “value” of the 
 classicists. They do not arise between the commodities as exchanged on the 
 market nor, for that matter, between the persons selling and buying such 
 commodities, but rather they are previously established by the definite 
 forms in which the workers producing such commodities cooperate in their 
 production under the control of the capitalist. Thus, the relation 
 manifested by the “value” of things is essentially a “social relation 
 of production” arising between men and men. Indeed, as we shall 
 see in a more detailed way in the second part of this book, the main 
 result of Marx’s “Critique” of the traditional theory of Political Economy 
 consists in the discovery and description of these fundamental social 
 relations of men – relations which, for a definite historical epoch, 
 appear to the subjects concerned in the disguised and, as it were, 
 perverted form of relations of things, viz., as “value-relations” of the 
 commodities cooperatively produced by them and mutually exchanged on the 
 market.
 ”Value” then, in all its denominations, like other economic things or 
 relations such as “commodity,” “money,” “labor-power,” “capital,” etc., 
 means to Marx a socio-historical fact or something which though not 
 described in physical terms is still empirically given in a strictly 
 verifiable manner. “We must always keep in mind in dealing with economic 
 theory, as indeed with all other socio-historical science, that the 
 subject matter, here modern bourgeois society, is given in the mind of the 
 observer just as it is in reality, and that its categories express, 
 therefore, forms of being, modes of existence, and often only single 
 aspects of this definite society or subject matter.”
 We shall later study the far-reaching theoretical and practical 
 implications of the difference between this Marxian principle of 
 historical specification and the abstract concepts of classical Political 
 Economy. We here confine ourselves to one most important result. The 
 concept of “commodity” in the specific form and context in which it 
 appears under the conditions of the present system of “capitalistic 
 commodity production,” includes from the very beginning a commodity of a 
 peculiar nature, incorporating the flesh and blood in the hands and heads 
 wage-laborers – the commodity labor-power. “These laborers who 
 have to sell themselves piecemeal are a commodity like every other article 
 of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of 
 competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” Furthermore, the 
 sellers of that peculiar commodity, under the very condition of its sale, 
 are never in the position of free agents, for they “live only so long as 
 they find work, and find work only so long as their labor increases 
 capital.”
 Thus the term of “commodity” as used by Marx presupposes the 
 transformation of labor power into a commodity, and “commodity 
 production” is equivalent to present-day capitalistic commodity 
 production. Only by bearing this in mind can we understand the 
 importance of that general analysis of “Commodity” which in Marx’s book 
 precedes all further analysis and critique of the economic conditions 
 prevailing in present society. It is only thus that the distinctive 
 historical conditions of the present epoch of a fully developed 
 capitalistic mode of production can be brought out in full relief without 
 cutting them off from their more general, but equally historical, 
 background. Commodity, according to Marx, means 
 capital; but capital, both historically and theoretically, means a 
 lot more than a mere exchange of commodities. Marx is aware of the 
 “definite historical conditions” which are necessary that a product may 
 become a “commodity” and that, in the further development, “money” may 
 appear as the general commodity, for the purpose of exchange. “The 
 appearance of products as commodities presupposed such a 
 development of the social division of labor, that the separation of 
 use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first began with barter, 
 must already have been completed.” Again, “the particular functions of 
 money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of 
 commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard, or 
 as universal money, point to very different stages in the process of 
 social production.” Yet we know by experience that a relatively primitive 
 development of society suffices for the production of all these forms. 
 It is otherwise with capital. “The historical conditions of its 
 existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and 
 commodities. It can spring into life only when the owner of the means of 
 production and subsistence meets in the market with the free laborer 
 selling his labor-power. And this one historical condition comprises a 
 world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a 
 new epoch in the process of social production.”
 Only at this stage are we able to grasp the full importance of 
 industrial capital as the only form which adequately represents the 
 nature of modern capitalistic production. “Industrial capital,” according 
 to an express assertion of Marx which we may safely take to be his final 
 and most complete statement on this matter, “gives to production its 
 capitalistic character. Its existence includes that of class antagonism 
 between capitalists and laborers. To the extent that it assumes control 
 over social production, the technique and social organization of the 
 labor process are revolutionized and with them the economic and 
 historical type of society. The other kinds of capital, which appear 
 before the industrial capital amid past or declining conditions of social 
 production, are not only subordinated to it and suffer changes in the 
 mechanism of their functions corresponding with it, but move on it as a 
 basis; they live and die, stand and fall, as this, their basis, lives and 
 dies, stands and falls.”
Chapter 3. The Principle of Historical Specification (continued)
The principle of historical specification, besides its theoretical 
 significance as an improved method of sociological analysis and research, 
 becomes of first-rate importance as a polemical weapon in the practical 
 struggle waged against the existing conditions of society. The manner in 
 which this weapon is wielded by the Marxists appears most clearly in a 
 section of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, dealing with “the 
 bourgeois objections to communism.” One basic form of argument recurs in 
 all the replies to the bourgeois indictment of communism. In answer to the 
 accusation that they want to abolish property, individuality, liberty, 
 culture, law, family, “fatherland,” etc., the communists say that the 
 point at issue is not the general conditions of all social life but only 
 the specific historical form assumed by them in present-day bourgeois 
 society. All economic, class, and other characters constituting that 
 specific historical form are discussed, with the result that the would-be 
 defenders of the natural and necessary foundations of society are revealed 
 to be the biased protagonists of the particular conditions of the 
 existing bourgeois order and the particular needs of the bourgeois 
 class.
 The first objection raised by the bourgeoisie is that the Communists 
 want to abolish property. To this, the Manifesto 
replies:

The abolition of existing property relations is not a peculiar 
 feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have been 
 continually subject to historical change. 
 The French revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor 
 of bourgeois property. The distinguishing 
 feature of Communism is not the abolition of all property, but the 
 abolition of bourgeois property. But modern 
 bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of 
 the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on 
 class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the 
 few.

In this sense, the theory of the 
 Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private 
 property.
 It is then further argued that this modern form of property can no 
 longer be described as a “hard-won, personally acquired property” forming 
 “the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.” A 
 property answering that ideological concept of the theoretical spokesmen 
 of the bourgeoisie was “the property of the petty artisan and of the small 
 peasant,” a form of property that existed before the bourgeois form. The 
 communists have no need to abolish that. “The development of industry has 
 abolished it and is abolishing it daily.” “The present form of property 
 moves in the antagonism of capital to wage-labor.” It has a specific and 
 different significance for each of the two great classes confronting each 
 other in modern bourgeois society. “To be a capitalist is to have not 
 only a personal, but a social, status in production.” In the same way, 
 wage-labor, labor of the proletarian, does not create property for the 
 laborer, it creates capital, i.e., the social power that exploits 
 wage-labor. “The abolition of property, therefore, does not mean the 
 transformation of personal property into social property; it is only the 
 social character of the property that undergoes a change, it loses its 
 class character.”
 The second objection of the bourgeoisie is that the communists want to 
 destroy individuality and freedom. Communism replies that 
 what is at stake here is only the “bourgeois individuality, independence 
 and freedom”:

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of 
 production: free trade, free selling and free buying. But if haggling 
 disappears, free haggling disappears also. This talk about free 
 haggling, and all other braggadocio of our bourgeoisie about freedom in 
 general, has a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted 
 haggling, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but has no 
 meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of haggling, of the 
 bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. 
 
 The bourgeois calls it an “abolition of property” when private property 
 is abolished. But this property exists in the hands of his class only by 
 being cut off from the vast majority of society. From the moment when 
 labor can no more be transformed into capital, money, rent, in one word, 
 into a social power, capable of being monopolized, he complains that 
 “individuality is being destroyed.” He confesses, therefore, that by 
 “individuality” he means none other than that of the bourgeois, i.e., the 
 capitalistic owner of property. “This individuality must, indeed, be 
 destroyed.”
 In the same way, the bourgeoisie confuses the general concept of 
 work, and activity, with the specific bourgeois form of 
 wage-labor, the forced labor of the propertyless laborer for the 
 benefit of the non-laboring owners of capital. If the bourgeoisie is 
 afraid lest “with the abolition of private property all activity will 
 cease and universal laziness overtake us,” the Manifesto 
 rejoins:

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have been 
 wrecked through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work 
 acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole 
 of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can 
 no longer be any wage-labor where there is no longer any 
 capital.
 Next, the bourgeoisie laments the threatened loss of culture 
 through the advent of Communism. To this complaint also, Marx has a 
 specific reply:

Just as to the bourgeois the disappearance of class property is the 
 disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class 
 culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all 
 culture. That culture the loss of which he 
 laments is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a 
 machine.
 The same lack of discernment as in the case of individuality, freedom, 
 and culture, is shown in the sweeping indictment brought against communism 
 on account of its professed hostility to the State and the 
 law. The so-called “subversive tendencies” of the communists are, 
 in fact, not directed against those general functions of unifying the 
 elements of society into a living and developing whole, which, in the 
 past, have been fulfilled, though in an increasingly defective manner, by 
 State compulsion and coercive law. The real target of the communistic 
 attack is the present State which has dropped those historical 
 functions one after another until it has become a mere “executive 
 committee managing the common affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole” – 
 and the present law which, by a similar process, has become nothing 
 but “the will of the bourgeoisie made into a law for all” – a will whose 
 contents are determined by the material conditions of existence of the 
 bourgeois class.” 
 Abolition of the family! “Even the most radical,” says the 
 Communist Manifesto, “flare up at this infamous purpose of the 
 Communists.” Once more the Marxist replies specifically:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, 
 based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form it 
 exists only for the bourgeoisie. But it finds its complement in the 
 forcible absence of the family among the proletarians and in public 
 prostitution.
 The communists admit that they want to “abolish the exploitation of 
 children by their parents.”
 They retort to that ever-recurring, stupid assumption of the 
 professional red-baiter that “Communists want to introduce a community of 
 wives,” that, on the contrary, “the present system of bourgeois marriage 
 is in reality a system of wives in common.” Besides, it is obvious that 
 “the abolition of the present system of production must involve the 
 abolition of the community of women arising out of that system, that is, 
 of prostitution both official and unofficial.”
 To the further charge made by nationalists that communism is going to 
 “abolish the Fatherland,” the Manifesto replies that, in 
 present-day bourgeois society, “the workers have no Fatherland.” “One 
 cannot take from them what they do not have.”
 The attitude of the proletariat of each country regarding so-called 
 “national interests” depends on the specific stage reached by the workers’ 
 movement in its historical development on a national and an international 
 scale:

To the extent that exploitation of one individual by another is 
 abolished the exploitation of one nation by another is also 
 abolished. With the disappearance of the 
 antagonism between classes within the nation, the hostility of one 
 nation to another will disappear.
 In reply to “the indictment leveled against Communism from a 
 religious, philosophical and from an ideological standpoint generally,” 
 the Manifesto summarily points to the specific historical character 
 of all human ideas:

What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual 
 production changes its character as material production is changed? The 
 ruling ideas of an age have ever been only the ideas of the ruling 
 class. When the ancient world was in 
 decline, the ancient religions were conquered by Christianity. When 
 Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to the ideas of 
 enlightenment, feudal society fought its death battle with the then 
 revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of 
 conscience merely expressed the sway of free competition within the 
 domain of knowledge.
 This argument holds good also against that more enlightened fraction of 
 the bourgeoisie who concede that religious, moral, philosophical, 
 political, legal ideas, etc., have been modified in the course of 
 historical development but, at the same time, reproach Communism for 
 abolishing the eternal truths common to all historical epochs, such 
 as freedom, justice, etc.; or for abolishing religion and morality 
 altogether, instead of remolding them on a new basis. Marx replies 
 that, even in this most absolute form, the so-called “general ideas” must 
 always have a specific historical element. While they do not depend on the 
 definite form which class oppositions have assumed in any particular epoch 
 of social development, they do depend on the historical fact, continuing 
 through all those epochs, of the existence of class antagonism:

Whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past 
 ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No 
 wonder, then, that the social consciousness of all past ages, despite 
 the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common 
 forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish, except with the 
 total disappearance of class antagonism. The 
 communistic revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional 
 property relations. No wonder, then, that its development involves the 
 most radical rupture with traditional ideas. 
Chapter 4. The Principle of Change
Traditional theory of society, spread over several hundred years 
 and split into many schools and currents, does not present itself to the 
 present-day observer as a homogeneous entity. This is true even if we 
 disregard the fundamental divergence which has occurred within bourgeois 
 thought since the beginning of the 19th century, when a new and 
 predominantly historical current opposed itself – at first with a 
 monopolistic claim, later only as a supplementary second form – to the 
 hitherto prevailing theoretical approach.
 The classical phase of bourgeois social theory, continuing into the 
 first decades of the 19th century, is characterized by an unconscious 
 generalization of the new bourgeois principles. Later, in the hands of the 
 “vulgar” economists of the 19th century, that unsophisticated attitude 
 became a more or less conscious tendency to represent the economic 
 system of bourgeois society in contrast to its politics – or at least its 
 basic part, i.e., production as distinguished from distribution – 
 as a general and unchangeable form of all social life. Finally, the 
 founders of modern “Economics,” and the corresponding schools of “general” 
 or “formal” Sociology, have even raised the “unspecific” treatment of 
 their subject matter to the very principle and criterion of their new and 
 assumedly “disinterested” scientism. A more detailed analysis will be 
 necessary to point out the special manner in which the a priori of 
 definite premises evolving out of the historical and class-conditioned 
 position of all bourgeois science, penetrates into the methods and results 
 of each school and into the concepts and propositions set up by the single 
 investigator. 
 A further complication is added by the fact that, in dealing with 
 contemporary bourgeois social theory, we can often no longer exactly 
 determine how far it represents a reaction to the attack of the 
 proletarian class. Not a few among the most important of its later 
 developments can be directly traced to the Marxian theory. We mention 
 particularly, from the last two generations of German sociologists, 
 jurists, historians, and philosophers, Toennies and 
 Stammler, Max Weber and Troeltsch, Scheler and 
 Mannheim; and among the economists, as not the most important but, 
 perhaps, the most typical representative of this whole group – Werner 
 Sombart. The manifold broken and distorted forms assumed by the 
 controversy with Marxism under the particular conditions of German 
 academic science, appear most strikingly in the last-named savant, whose 
 many and extensive writings on modern capitalism and socialism testify by 
 their contents, even more clearly than by the apparent acknowledgment of 
 the author, to the fact that “all that is good in this work is due to the 
 spirit of Marx.”
 Werner Sombart began his career in the early 90’s as what he himself 
 recently, at a conference of the Sociological Society in Zurich, called a 
 “convinced Marxist;” but later, with the changing political and social 
 conditions leading up to the present regime of a so-called “National 
 Socialism” in Germany, he changed heart and from a disguised Marxist 
 became an altogether undisguised and outright anti-Marxist. 
 Notwithstanding all these subsequent disfigurations, the irresistible 
 influence originally exercised by Marx’s theory on all present-day 
 bourgeois social science is clearly evident even in the later career of 
 Sombart. As late as 1928, at the aforementioned Conference of the 
 Sociologists, he claimed to have been the first to enunciate the principle 
 of the so-called “non-evaluative character of a genuine sociological 
 science” and, incidentally, traced back that well-known doctrine of 
 contemporary social research to the “contradiction” which forty years 
 before had arisen within himself, that is, between his internal 
 “conviction” and his worldly position as a “Royal Prussian University 
 Professor.”
 For all these reasons, in confronting the general principles of the 
 Marxian theory with bourgeois science we shall not so much refer to the 
 more recent displays of contemporary social thought in which their 
 persisting difference has already been modified to a certain extent by 
 mutual interaction. We shall rather try to bring out the contrast in the 
 pure form in which it originally appeared in the classical and 
 post-classical bourgeois writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries on 
 the one hand, and in the writings of Marx and Engels on the other.
 Classical bourgeois economists concern themselves with existing 
 bourgeois society. They ingenuously regard society’s basic relationships 
 as having the immutable character of a genuine natural law, and are for 
 just this reason unable to become aware of any other than this actually 
 given form of society. 
 Even when bourgeois social theorists appear to speak of other social 
 forms, their real subject matter is the particular form of bourgeois 
 society whose main characteristics they find duplicated in all other 
 forms. When they speak of “society” in general, we can still, with only 
 slight variations, recognize in that so-called general society the 
 well-known features of present-day bourgeois society. This is most evident 
 in the writings of the great founders of bourgeois social science in the 
 17th and 18th centuries and their followers, the German idealistic 
 philosophers from Kant to Hegel, who naïvely used not only the term “society,” but 
 even the term “civil society” as a timeless concept.
 Even when bourgeois investigators speak of an historical “development” 
 of society, they do not step beyond the magic circle of bourgeois society. 
 They consider all the earlier forms as “preliminary stages” leading up to 
 its present fully developed form. They constantly apply to the preceding 
 historical epochs the concepts drawn from the social conditions existing 
 today. Right into the 19th century they described those phases of 
 primitive history which can by no means be represented by the categories 
 of modern bourgeois society, such as property, State, family, etc., as not 
 belonging to history proper, but merely “prehistoric.” Even Johann 
 Gottfried Herder, who stood in a much closer relation to real history than 
 most of his contemporaries, wrote in his “Diary”: “How many ages may have 
 passed by before we learned to know or think? The Phoenician? The 
 Ethiopian? Or none of these? Are we then, with our Moses, in the right 
 place?”
 Just as in their study of past conditions, so in their conception of 
 the future, bourgeois social theorists remain tied to the bourgeois 
 categories. They simply cannot conceive of any changes other than those 
 set forth in due sequence by a further unfolding of the fundamental 
 principles appearing in present-day bourgeois society. They regard all 
 social revolutions as pathological interferences with “normal” social 
 development. They expect, after the revolutionary “cycle” has run its full 
 course, pre-revolutionary social conditions to be reestablished as 
 unchanged, as, according to a similar theory held by the politicians, the 
 political conditions of the ancient régime are reestablished in 
 due course by the “Restoration.” They hold all tendencies of revolutionary 
 socialism and communism which aim at anything beyond, as mere 
 “disturbances of healthy social progress” and theoretically “unscientific” 
 fantasies.
 Marx’s social science is opposed to all those traditional concepts of 
 classical bourgeois theory. The contrast is, however, not so simple that 
 it can be reduced to the biblical formula “Let your speech be yea, yea – 
 nay, nay.” It would be altogether wrong, for instance, to imagine that 
 since the bourgeois theory is the doctrine of a “bourgeois society,” 
 Marx’s socialist theory must of necessity be the doctrine of a “socialist 
 society.” As a matter of fact, scientific socialism is not at all 
 concerned with the painting of a future state of society. Marx leaves that 
 to the sectarians of the old and new Utopias. According to his 
 materialistic principle, he deals with the real form of society which 
 exists today, i.e., bourgeois society. As against the bourgeois 
 “theorists” who continually tend to generalize in one way or another the 
 facts they “discover,” he more nearly approaches the method of the 
 bourgeois “historians,” from which, however, he keeps himself all the more 
 aloof in another direction through his insistence on a strictly 
 theoretical form of scientific knowledge.
 Nor is the bourgeois concept of developmental stages wholly repudiated 
 by Marx. He distinguishes the historical forms of “Asiatic,” “Antique” and 
 “Feudal Society,” and groups them, together with modern “Bourgeois 
 Society,” into a series of “progressive epochs of socio-economic 
 formation.” Although he no longer regards, as the bourgeois theorists 
 had done, all previous forms of society as mere preliminary steps to its 
 present and final formation, still he indulges in the statement that 
 bourgeois society is the last “antagonistic” form of society and as such 
 “concludes the prehistory of a really human society.” While he objects to 
 an arbitrary extension of concepts derived from the present bourgeois 
 state of society, he sets forth the principle that bourgeois society, as 
 the “most developed and most complex historical organization of 
 production,” furnishes a key to the understanding of earlier epochs of 
 social and economic formation. He even endorsed, in his early years, the 
 “correct idea” underlying that “common fiction of the 18th century which 
 regarded the primitive state of man as the true state of human nature.” As 
 we shall see in our further investigation, Marx and Engels adopted a 
 similar attitude in their dealing with the fresh impetus which that 
 Rousseauan slogan of the 18th century had in the meantime received through 
 the discovery of a so-called “primitive communism.” From their socialistic 
 point of view, they welcomed the assumption, supported by the leading 
 investigators of the time, of a classless, communistic form preceding all 
 hitherto known society. They did not, however, blindly accept the 
 speculative implications of the new theory, but rather used the historical 
 facts brought forth by Morgan and other explorers of ancient society as a 
 further critical challenge to the “eternal truths” of the more fundamental 
 aspects of the existing class-dominated society.
 There is, of course, a much greater difference between the Marxian and 
 the traditional bourgeois approach to the future developments arising from 
 the present state of society. While even the most progressive bourgeois 
 thinkers of the 19th century set their hopes on the slow and gradual 
 process of a so-called “evolution,” Marx insisted on the inevitability, in 
 a society based on class struggle, of a social revolution. Yet in a 
 broader sense the evolutionary concept is not completely wiped out in the 
 Marxian theory. Even the most violent and disruptive revolution remains, 
 according to Marx, a mere step within an historical process through which 
 the productive forces of man, and thus also the whole economic, political, 
 and ideologic structure of society, “evolve” in a solemn and gigantic 
 rhythm from revolution to revolution. Just as there is – in spite of all 
 the intervening revolutions, and, in fact, realized by those revolutions – 
 one progressive line of development leading up from the historic and 
 “prehistoric” past to the contemporary form of bourgeois society, so will 
 the socialist and communist society springing from the revolutionary 
 action of the proletarian class, in spite of its break with the 
 established bourgeois order, still remain a further outgrowth of the whole 
 past and present history of an identical “subject” (mankind) acting upon 
 and adapting itself to an identical “object” (nature).
 Apart from the revolutionary contents of the Marxian concept of 
 development, there is another fundamental difference between the 
 materialistic theory of the historical process and that metaphysical 
 concept of “evolution” which was later, chiefly under the influence of 
 Spencer, blindly accepted by such orthodox Marxists as Kautsky and as 
 blindly rejected by such heterodox Marxists as Georges Sorel, as a 
 principle of scientific sociology. Marx recognized from the outset the 
 delusive character of that so-called “historical evolution,” according to 
 which “the last stage regards the preceding stages as only preliminary to 
 itself and, therefore, can only look at them one-sidedly. While “orthodox 
 evolutionists” imagined, with Spencer, that they could explain the more 
 complex organization of the higher types both of animal species and social 
 forms by reference to the simpler organization of the lower, Marx 
 shattered that illusion by the paradoxical statement that “the anatomy 
 of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape.”
 This critical consciousness breaks the magic spell of the metaphysical 
 “law” of evolution. From an a priori valid axiom, it is reduced to 
 a working hypothesis which must be empirically verified in each case. Even 
 though bourgeois society does provide a “key” to earlier epochs, it does 
 not follow that such categories as commodity, money, State, law, etc., 
 must have the same meaning for ancient society and its mode of production 
 as they have for modern capitalist production and for the bourgeois 
 society which is based upon it. Thus, the path is made free for a strictly 
 empirical research. Bourgeois society may contain the conditions of 
 earlier societies in a further developed form. It may contain them as well 
 in degenerate, stunted, and travestied forms. Thus the communal property 
 of primitive times, according to Marx, was revived in a travestied form in 
 the Russian “Mir.” The present system of society likewise contains within 
 itself the germs of its future developments, though by no means their 
 complete determination. The false idealistic concept of evolution as 
 applied by bourgeois social theorists, is closed on both sides, and 
 in all past and future forms of society rediscovers only itself. The new, 
 critical and materialistic Marxian principle of development is, on the 
 contrary, open on both sides. Marx does not deal with Asiatic, 
 Antique, or Feudal Society, and still less with those primitive societies 
 which preceded all written history, merely as “preliminary stages” of 
 contemporary society. He regards them, in their totality, as so many 
 independent historical formations which are to be understood within their 
 own categories. In the same way he defines the socialist and communist 
 societies arising out of the proletarian revolution not only as further 
 developed forms of bourgeois society, but as a new type which is no longer 
 to be basically explained under any of the bourgeois categories. Marx’s 
 quarrel with the Utopian socialists is not, as many have imagined, 
 inspired by their idea of a future commonwealth totally different from the 
 present state of contemporary bourgeois society. On the contrary, the 
 weakness of the Utopian socialists lies in the fact that, in attempting to 
 portray a socialist future, they at bottom only idealized the existing 
 conditions of society, leaving out the shadows. All such Utopian schemes 
 will, when worked out in detail and put into practice, inevitably 
 reproduce only the same old bourgeois form of society we know so well. On 
 the other hand, Marxism, while carefully avoiding a detailed painting of 
 future stages, nevertheless endeavors to find, within contemporary 
 bourgeois society, the main tendencies of a further development leading 
 up, first to that transitional stage opened by the proletarian revolution, 
 and ultimately, to those further advanced stages which Marx called a 
 completely developed communistic society. Communistic society in 
 its “first phase,” just emerging from the womb of bourgeois society after 
 protracted labor pains, will still be determined in many ways in its 
 economic, political, legal, intellectual, and moral structure by bourgeois 
 principles. Communistic society in its “second phase,” where it has 
 already developed on its own basis, will be as far removed from the 
 principles of present-day bourgeois society as is, in the other direction, 
 the classless and Stateless “primitive Communism” of the earliest epochs 
 of human society. Communistic society, when it is fully developed, will 
 have left the narrow bourgeois horizon far behind and will ultimately 
 realize the principle which, in an abstract manner, was first enunciated 
 by the “Utopian” pioneers on the threshold of the 19th century: “From each 
 according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.”
 To the philosophical dialectic of Hegel, which he otherwise regarded as 
 the perfected instrument of a developmental investigation of society, Marx 
 raised the objection that, although fraught with deep insight into the 
 historical past, it did not genuinely accept the reality of historical 
 change. Hegel, who glorified existing institutions and moderate progress 
 within the narrow confines of the contemporary Prussian state, carefully 
 restricted the validity of his dialectical principle to the past 
 developments of society and consigned future progress in a purposely 
 irrational manner to the “mole burrowing below the surface.” Even in 
 criticizing the so-called “Pre-formation Hypothesis,” according to which 
 all future forms are already physically contained in those that precede 
 them, he emphasized at the same time the correctness of its main idea that 
 social development “remains with itself in its process and that by such a 
 development no new content is brought about, but only a change of form.” 
 Development is, therefore, according to Hegel, “only to be regarded as if 
 it were a play; the something else which is set by it, is in fact nothing 
 else.” It is evident that from this standpoint which, in its unyielding 
 Hegelian formula, amounts almost to an involuntary criticism of the 
 principle of evolution as used by the bourgeois social investigators, 
 there is no room for the conscious human-social act, which shall radically 
 transform and overthrow the present order of society. Hegel said, 
 concerning the real “purpose” of all historical action, that “it is 
 already fulfilled in truth, and need not wait for us.” Its actual 
 performance, then, serves only “to remove the semblance as if it were not 
 yet performed.” Hence, in contrast to some of his followers, who later on 
 actually tried to use his dialectical method as an instrument for 
 revolution, Hegel considered the only purpose of his philosophy to be to 
 “reestablish” the conviction from which “every unsophisticated 
 consciousness starts”: “What is rational is real, and what is real is 
 rational”; and thus to bring about a final “reconciliation” 
 between “reason as self-conscious mind” and “reason as a given 
 reality.”
 It is here that we face the most important consequence of the total 
 destruction of bourgeois evolutionary metaphysics which is implied in 
 Marx’s materialistic criticism of the Hegelian Idealist dialectic. Marx’s 
 study of society is based upon a full recognition of the reality of 
 historical change. Marx treats all conditions of existing bourgeois 
 society as changing or, more exactly, as conditions being 
 changed by human actions. At the same time, he regards all, even the 
 most general categories of social science, as categories changeable and 
 to be changed. He dismisses all the concepts applied by bourgeois 
 social theorists and historians, in which the present form of society is 
 in any way withdrawn from the constant flux of things, whether the writer 
 deals with present-day bourgeois conditions as “natural” and as having 
 always existed; or whether, on the contrary, he erects an impassable 
 barrier between past social conditions and the present-day bourgeois state 
 of society; or whether, again, he recognizes a real change only with 
 respect to previous history and closes the whole development of human 
 society with the bourgeois state reached in the present age. Bourgeois 
 society, then, is no longer in any sense a general entity which can be 
 justified by another than the historical title. It is a transitory stage 
 which has been reached in the present time, and is valid temporarily for 
 this particular epoch, yet to be replaced by another stage in an 
 historical movement. It is at the same time but the present result of an 
 earlier phase, and the starting point of a new phase, of the social class 
 struggle leading to social revolution. 
 Chapter 5. The Principle of Criticism
The description of existing bourgeois conditions as specific 
 conditions of a transitory phase in an historical process, assumes 
 a further importance as a theoretical basis for a critical examination of 
 the structure of present society as a particular historical type of 
 socio-economic formation.
 Just as in actual history every revolutionary movement of the 
 bourgeoisie bred, as an undercurrent, independent stirrings of that class 
 which was more or less the undeveloped predecessor of the modern 
 proletariat, there have been even in the infancy of bourgeois thought some 
 isolated thinkers who anticipated the criticism of the bourgeois 
 principles which had not as yet been put into practice. Apart from these 
 exceptional cases, a real theoretical understanding of the historical 
 process and the self-criticism bound up with it did not arise in bourgeois 
 thought until the very end of its classical epoch, when the revolutionary 
 fight of the bourgeoisie against feudal society had come to its end and a 
 new divergence of classes had begun to manifest itself within the hitherto 
 united industrial society.
 It was not a criticism, but in fact a glorification when, in the middle 
 of the 17th century, Hobbes described the existing state of bourgeois 
 society (or, as he imagined in conformity with the prevailing delusion of 
 contemporary thinkers, of “society” in general) as a “bellum omnium contra 
 omnes” or “a war of every man against every man,” which is only 
 effectively and finally brought to a close by “a common Power to keep them 
 all in awe,” i.e., by the iron dictatorship of the State. Again, it was a 
 glorification of bourgeois society when, 50 years later, Mandeville spoke 
 of its peculiar construction, purposely devised by an “all-cunning” 
 Providence, in his paradoxical equation “Private vices – public benefits.” 
 Once more, it was a glorification when, at the close of the 18th century, 
 Kant discovered the “antagonism of unsocial sociality” by which eventually 
 “the first true steps from uncouthness to culture, and the agreement to 
 live in a society, are pathologically thrust upon man.” “All culture and 
 art which adorn mankind, the most beautiful social order, are fruits of 
 that unsociality which by its own nature is compelled to discipline itself 
 and thus fully to develop the germs of nature through an art forced upon 
 it from without.”
 While the Darwinian formula of a “struggle for existence” along 
 with the older formula of Hobbes, had been misapplied by the eulogists of 
 capitalism as a cosmic substructure of a so-called universal law of “free 
 competition,” Darwin himself had conversely borrowed his general concept 
 from contemporary bourgeois economics. In the Introduction to the second 
 edition of his famous work he said: “This is the doctrine of Malthus as 
 applied to the whole realm of animal and plant life.” Indeed, the specific 
 historical form of the division of labor which results from the 
 competition of the isolated commodity producers within present bourgeois 
 society is so far from being an unchangeable law of human nature that it 
 can be best understood as a brute unconscious form of social 
 self-preservation in contrast to the conscious organization of the 
 division of labor within a really cooperative society. In that sense 
 “civil society” had already been characteristically described by Hegel as 
 a “geistiges Tierreich” (“the animal world reproduced in the world of the 
 mind”). The analogy was further developed by Marx in Capital when 
 he described the division of labor prevailing within present capitalistic 
 society, as an organization which “confronts independent commodity 
 producers one with another, who recognize no authority other than that of 
 competition, that is, the coercion exercised upon them by the pressure of 
 their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the ‘war all 
 against all’ maintains, more or less, the conditions of existence all 
 species.” It would be preferable, perhaps, in a strictly 
 socio-economic research, to avoid altogether such parallels which never 
 quite fit. However, the manner in which Darwin projects into nature, as an 
 absolute law, the Competitive Struggle in bourgeois society, and in 
 which Kropotkin equally unwarrantably transforms the opposite principle of 
 cooperation prevailing in communist society into an absolute Law of 
 Mutual Help in the Animal and Human World, are both quite different in 
 caliber from the recent attempt by a former orthodox Marxist to project a 
 self-invented pacifistic and evolutionary principle of a so-called 
 Natural Equilibrium from present-day society, where it does not 
 apply, to the whole animal and plant world, where it likewise does not 
 apply.
 The fundamental weakness of all the more significant interpretations of 
 society in this epoch (inclusive of Rousseau’s teaching, the bourgeois 
 novel of Robinson Crusoe, and the whole of the new bourgeois 
 science of Political Economy) consists in the unhistorical manner in which 
 they deal with the specific conditions of bourgeois society, its mode of 
 production, its State, and its law, as final; regarding them as a natural 
 and rational society at last attained and now in its main features 
 unchangeable or, what practically amounts to the same, as being capable of 
 unlimited perfection. When Marx (in the “Seventh and last Observation” of 
 his Anti-Proudhon) denounced this thoughtless procedure as applied 
 by the economists, he hit the whole school in the shrewd sentence, “Thus 
 there was history, but there is no more.”
 Thus bourgeois theorists have dealt with all earlier forms of society 
 as barbaric preliminary stages leading up to their own, ultimately 
 established civil society. This truly “barbaric” procedure was, according 
 to Marx, unavoidable so long as their principal task consisted in fighting 
 out their historical struggle with feudalism under the conditions of a 
 bourgeois society not yet finally constituted. It served as a weapon in 
 the battle for progress and did not need, as long as it still had a 
 revolutionary spark in it, any further justification. It appears, from a 
 historical viewpoint, as a last faint echo of those stronger, if more 
 naïve, forms in which during the Peasant War and the English Revolution 
 the “prehistory of humanity” pictured in the Bible and during the French 
 Revolution the natural state of man, were opposed as a true civil 
 state of society to the feudal and corrupted order of the Middle Ages. 
 Those were revolutionary slogans of the new bourgeois class against 
 feudalism.
 
 When Adam delved and Eve spanWhere was then the 
 gentleman?
 There was no such excuse for the further preservation of that 
 antiquated method at a time when the victory of the bourgeois principle 
 over feudalism had been finally won and the theorists of the triumphant 
 bourgeoisie awoke to find themselves transformed unawares from 
 revolutionary pioneers into the tedious panegyrists of an established 
 order of society. Compare, for instance, the characteristic phraseology of 
 the scientific founder of bourgeois “Ideology,” Destutt de Tracy, 
 who boasted that among the “Ancients” (i.e., in all epochs previous to the 
 present “French Era”) “social art” had not been sufficiently perfected “to 
 give their empire that state of higher civilization and that strong 
 organization which are necessary to secure the existence of nations 
 effectively policed.” Or, compare those bourgeois historians of the French 
 Restoration period in the 19th century who, like Guizot, Thiers, and 
 Thierry, expressly set themselves the task of rewriting world history as 
 the history of the bourgeois class.
 In this phase the real progress of social science no longer consisted 
 in the further development of bourgeois principles, but in their critique. 
 The genuine self-criticism now for the first time arising within bourgeois 
 science originated with the growth of classical political economy from 
 Adam Smith to Ricardo and found its complete expression in 
 the last phase of the development of classical German philosophy from 
 Kant to Hegel.
 Hegel’s philosophical system is, as the last system of classical German 
 philosophy, the sum and recapitulation not only of all the earlier phases 
 of bourgeois social theory, but also of its inherent contradictions. Like 
 Ricardo, the last classical writer in the field of economics, so Hegel in 
 his philosophy brought into sharper relief the striking contrasts within 
 the structure of civil society which had already been revealed to a 
 certain extent by Mandeville, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Kant, etc., but which 
 with them had been ultimately harmonized in some “higher” or “deeper” 
 unity. Even Hegel, in dealing with the material conditions of existing 
 society, nowhere passed beyond the range of bourgeois thought. Still this 
 new world of the bourgeoisie with its internal oppositions ranging 
 themselves like so many unbridgeable chasms, as it was now philosophically 
 exposed by Hegel under the direct influence of Ricardo, stood in a 
 striking contrast to that “best of all possible worlds” into which even 
 the most daring among the bourgeois thinkers of the preceding generation 
 had ideologically transfigured the hard facts of existing social life.
 In Ricardo’s economic system and in Hegel’s philosophy, bourgeois 
 society reached the highest grade of critical self-consciousness of which 
 it was capable without violating its own principles. This happened at a 
 time when, in the most developed capitalistic countries such as England 
 and France a “criticism from without” had opposed itself to bourgeois 
 society in the growing revolt of the proletarian class. Just as the last 
 classical economist (Ricardo) had already been faced by a consciously 
 socialist critic of all bourgeois economic science (Sismondi), so Hegel 
 reflected the tremors set up in his philosophical exposition of “civil 
 society” under the foundations of bourgeois society by the new class of 
 the hired laborers. He had realistically described this new “class” which 
 had been brought into being by the bourgeoisie itself, as one “bound to 
 the particular work of modern industry” and as one living “in need and 
 dependence” and “excluded from all the advantages of bourgeois society”; 
 as a “great mass” submerged below that “mode of subsistence” which is a 
 necessary premise to the enjoyment of social rights, and sinking, by an 
 inevitable law of bourgeois society itself, in the same proportion as the 
 “excess of wealth” is increased into an increasing “excess of 
poverty.”
 He furthermore accurately indicated that it is not a question here of 
 “misery” alone, such as had inevitably arisen in earlier times through the 
 parsimony of nature. It is a “social question” in the real sense of the 
 term, pertinent to modern society, and one which must be solved by 
 society. “No one can assert a right against nature, but, in the state of 
 society, the defect takes at once the form of an injustice inflicted on 
 one or the other class. The important question as to how poverty is to be 
 relieved is one which particularly agitates and annoys society.” He 
 described in characteristic language the “temper” of the great masses of 
 industrial workers which is inseparably bound up with the socially 
 inflicted poverty in which they are forced to live. “It is,” he says, “an 
 inner revolt against the rich, against society, against the government, 
 etc.”
 The impassable limit for Hegel, as for all other social scientists of 
 the bourgeoisie, consisted in the fact that he saw the new social class 
 only negatively as the “mob,” and did not realize at the same time its 
 positive revolutionary implications.
 Even more distinctly than in its contents, the critical element 
 inherent in Hegel’s philosophy manifests itself in his method. 
 Hegel, unlike Ricardo, had not contented himself with stating the 
 fundamental “principles” and letting the most glaring theoretical 
 discordances stand as so-called “modifications.” He endeavored to confine 
 within one philosophical system, both the given condition of the existing 
 bourgeois State and what he called its “idea.” The “dialectical method” is 
 the great instrument by which Hegel in his philosophy, complying with the 
 needs of a class pressing toward the termination of the revolutionary 
 movement and to a political and social “restoration,” performed the 
 remarkable task of reconciling within a so-called “unity of 
 contradictions,” the most irreconcilable oppositions resulting from the 
 historical development of bourgeois society itself, and from its later 
 confrontation with the rising class of the proletarian wage-laborers. 
 Whilst his basic description of the existing conditions of “civil 
 society,” though suffering from vagueness, abruptness, and arbitrary 
 judgments, still contains the deep insight of a genius fully aware of 
 bourgeois reality, the cloven foot of his philosophy unequivocally reveals 
 itself in the “speculative” superstructure of Hegel’s system, which, in an 
 apparent endeavor to establish a new idealistic creed corresponding to 
 the needs of the present time, actually restores the whole bulk of old 
 Medieval metaphysics – inclusive of the Christian dogma – which had been 
 so utterly refuted by the spokesmen of early bourgeois materialism in the 
 intervening centuries of progressive thought.
 This Hegelian method, which had proved so efficient in swallowing the 
 most powerful contradictions, offered no small temptation to the 
 generation of radical thinkers which arose in the period immediately 
 following Hegel’s death, when the unchallenged sway of Hegelian philosophy 
 preceded, during the 30’s and 40’s of the 19th century, the final decline 
 of the Hegelian and, indeed, all bourgeois philosophy. They thought that 
 the mighty instrument, forged by the last great philosopher of the 
 bourgeois class, could easily be made available for the more advanced 
 criticism raised against the very principle of the bourgeois status quo in 
 the name of the new revolutionary class. All that was needed was to 
 consider the “premature” termination of Hegel’s philosophy in the 
 glorification of the bourgeois society, its State, its philosophy, its 
 religion and art, to be only an “inconsistency,” on the part of the 
 conservative “systematizer,” in the application of his own revolutionary 
 “method.” In fact Lassalle – and Proudhon for a time – did assign this new 
 historical task to Hegel’s dialectical method. 
 Marx and Engels saw clearly that the old bottle could no longer hold 
 the new wine. It is true that they too, in the formation of their new 
 proletarian and materialistic criticism of bourgeois society, took their 
 departure from Hegel’s idealistic philosophy and even preserved the term 
 “Dialectic”as a comprehensive name for the several new principles which 
 they worked out and applied in the process of their scientific 
 investigation. But, as will be shown in the third part of this book, all 
 that apparent “Hegelianism” did not amount, in Marx, to more than what he 
 at one time most appropriately called an “occasional flirtation with 
 Hegel’s peculiar mode of expression.” In actual fact, he completely broke 
 with the whole of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. He transplanted the 
 dialectical method of Hegel from an idealistic to a materialistic basis, 
 and in the process of that materialistic “reversal” stripped from it all 
 those elements which he had already thoroughly exposed in an earlier phase 
 of his philosophical development as its underlying “mystification.” The 
 theory of the new revolutionary movement of the 19th century no longer 
 needed to exercise itself in the art of moving forward and backward at the 
 same time, and to represent its new aims as the “restoration” of the old. 
 It “left the dead to bury their dead” in order to come to its own 
 content.
 The principles of the Marxian critique of existing society, being 
 proletarian and no longer bourgeois, are opposed to the philosophical 
 system of Hegel not only in content, subject matter, and aim, but quite as 
 much in theoretical form. If Marx, indeed, took his start from a critical 
 and revolutionary reversal of the principles inherent in Hegel’s method, 
 he certainly went on to develop, in a strictly empirical manner, the 
 specific methods of his own materialistic criticism and research. 
 There is, aside from the theoretical self-criticism of bourgeois 
 society represented by the later classical writers, another, and entirely 
 different, criticism which flows from the latter of the two 
 above-mentioned currents of 19th century bourgeois thought and which, this 
 time, is directed against the very principle of theoretical analysis 
 itself. Marx, from his new standpoint, saw at once the 
 Historico-Romantic School which after the close of the great French 
 Revolution had joined, and even in part preceded, the socialists in the 
 attack upon the victorious bourgeois principles. He disclosed in his 
 article on The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of 
 Law, and in the analysis of the “Reactionary Socialism” embodied in 
 the Communist Manifesto, the essentially reactionary trend of that 
 apparently “anti-bourgeois” and “anti-capitalistic” current which – like 
 reactionary Fascism and Hitlerism today – “upbraided the bourgeoisie more 
 for having produced a revolutionary proletariat than for having 
 produced a proletariat at all.” He has also seen the theoretical loss 
 bound up with this sentimental regression from the only present and real 
 form of social life to medieval feudality and even further back to 
 archaic conditions of society – the so-called “origins” of culture, art, 
 economics, etc. “The Historical School,” jests Marx, “has so emphasized 
 its affection for ‘sources’, that it requires the sailor to sail, not on 
 the stream but on its source.”
 While thus refuting the entire theoretical and practical “philosophy” 
 of the Historical School, in agreement with all progressive spirits of the 
 age, Marx was at the time aware of the actual progress which had been made 
 by this new school of social research from a purely scientific point of 
 view. Moreover, he discovered the critical and forward tendency inherent 
 in the apparently backward turn. Writing to Engels on the 25th of March, 
 1868, he said: “The first reaction against the French Revolution and the 
 ‘enlightenment’ bound up with it was naturally, to see everything as 
 medieval and romantic. Even such writers as Grimm are not free from this. 
 The second reaction is to see beyond the Middle Ages back into the 
 primitive history of each people. That corresponds to the socialist view, 
 although the scholars have no idea of the connection. Thus they are 
 surprised to find the newest in the oldest, and even ‘Egalitarians,’ to a 
 degree which would scandalize Proudhon.” 
 From this sentence, to which a hundred similar ones might be added from 
 Marx’s and Engels’s writings, can be seen the main significance that the 
 study of primeval society, then passing through its first great period of 
 discovery, had at that time acquired for the revolutionary science of 
 Marx. The very fact that now, for the first time, those social forms of 
 existence which had hitherto been so far removed from present-day 
 conditions and had been accessible to the modern world at best in legend 
 and poetry were opened up to sober scientific research, was for Marx and 
 Engels a sign that bourgeois society in its present stage of development 
 already contained within itself the tendencies toward a change more 
 radical than any achieved by previous historical revolutions. The basic 
 importance of primitive history rests on this general assumption rather 
 than on the analogy which Marx, half in joke, draws between the 
 “egalitarian” conditions of primeval society and the communist society of 
 the future. 
 While the term “primeval communism,” created by the first discoverers, 
 has since been rather indiscriminately applied to the various types of 
 early society, there still remains a striking, and even somewhat 
 paradoxical, difference between the bourgeois and the Marxian use of the 
 underlying concept. The idea of an historical past repeating itself in the 
 future fits in very well with the bourgeois concept of development, with 
 its glorification of existing bourgeois conditions, and with its rejection 
 of “communism” as implying a general loss of culture and eventual relapse 
 from the present “all time high” of human achievement to primitive 
 barbarism and decay. On the other hand, the assumption that Marx and 
 Engels should have seen in the conditions prevailing in a distant past an 
 actual anticipation of conditions to be reached in an equally distant 
 future, and thus reduced the Communist program to a mere restoration of 
 that long bygone past, utterly contradicts the materialistic principle 
 underlying the whole of Marxian theory. Marx presents human society as an 
 historical development progressing from a lower to a higher organization 
 of the material productive forces. He sees in the modern capitalistic mode 
 of production, with its immense unfolding of productive powers far 
 exceeding all earlier epochs, an indispensable material foundation for 
 that more highly developed form of communal life which will be inaugurated 
 by the social revolution of the modern working class.
 Nevertheless, many bourgeois writers up to the present day, after a 
 perfunctory recital of the well-known theoretical unsoundness of the 
 assumption of a “Primeval Communism,” and after a scholarly refutation of 
 the historical mistakes allegedly committed in this respect by the 
 Marxists, quite naïvely go on to make 
 use of the term and its underlying assumption. On the contrary, the idea 
 of a primitive “Communism” preceding the various systems based on private 
 property is openly accepted from the outset by the Marxists but at the 
 same time is nowhere used by them as an argument for a positive historical 
 statement. It serves them rather as a starting point for a more thorough 
 and more critical investigation of the given conditions of existing 
 society including even its most far-reaching and, from a less 
 comprehensive viewpoint, remote developmental tendencies.
 There is then, from the very principle of Marxian materialistic 
 research, a great significance in the investigation of the primitive 
 conditions prevailing in the early history of mankind. Yet this 
 investigation is made by the Marxists, not for the purpose of acquiring a 
 direct knowledge of the really communistic forms and contents of a future, 
 post-capitalist society, but rather with the indirect aim of a more 
 comprehensive approach to the study of historical change. Marx and Engels 
 saw in the scientific unfolding of primeval history a necessary premise 
 for their materialistic investigation of present-day society, whose basic 
 forms can only be fully elucidated by an exact study of primitive society, 
 its development and dissolution, and the different forms of its transition 
 to the later systems based on private property and class opposition. For 
 example, in order to explain scientifically the surviving remains of 
 communal property and the various original types of private property in 
 the Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavonic social systems, it is 
 necessary to back to the various forms of primitive communal property and 
 the corresponding different forms of their dissolution. 
 Besides this main interest, there are some other advantages to be 
 gained from that source for a critical and revolutionary science. The 
 critical science of the proletarian class was the first to break loose 
 from the accepted single track idea of progress, and to show that those 
 apparently “wild” and “barbaric” conditions of the primeval past, in 
 spite of their material deficiencies, uncouthness, and benightedness, 
 still contained many qualities which compare most favorably with 
 present-day “civilized” conditions. Marx and Engels in that respect only 
 continued, in a more highly developed form, the “criticism of 
 civilization” which had been initiated before them by the first great 
 Utopian socialists, above all by Charles Fourier in his vital attack on 
 the self-complacent assurance of the bourgeois conception the world. It is 
 only with a knowledge of the totally non-bourgeois forms of a primitive 
 society that it becomes possible for the social revolutionary to imagine a 
 further development which will go beyond the bourgeois conditions of 
 present-day society not only by a gradual readjustment of its existing 
 pattern but by a fundamental change of the whole system. The communist 
 societies of the future will, in proportion to their increasing distance 
 from the present-day bourgeois status, “correspond,” no longer merely to 
 Medieval and Antique Society, but to a still further distant and entirely 
 non-bourgeois past. They will not conform, however, to those early 
 conditions commonly referred to as Primitive Communism in any other way 
 than in their analogous position “equally aloof from present-day society.” 
 There need be, in fact, as little structural likeness between those 
 primeval conditions of humanity (or for that matter the equally 
 “primitive” conditions of the so-called “savage” tribes today) and the 
 future conditions of a fully developed communist society, as there is at 
 the present time between the “unconscious” elements of the mental 
 structure of modern bourgeois man as recently disclosed by the 
 psychoanalysts on the one hand, and the “corresponding” states of either 
 primeval man or the free individuals of a no longer bourgeois society of 
 the future.
 The occurrence of a genuine critical impulse in the history of 
 bourgeois social thought, then, is restricted to a short and clearly 
 defined period. It emerged from the last phase of the revolutionary epoch 
 of the bourgeoisie, and it ended with the expiration of this, the 
 “classical” epoch of bourgeois social science. As we shall show in detail 
 in the second part of this book, none of the post-classical schools of 
 bourgeois economists has even approximated the critical detachment which, 
 for a strictly limited time, had been reached by such thinkers as Ricardo. 
 The same applies to the post-Hegelian developments of bourgeois philosophy 
 and, indeed, to all other branches of post-classical bourgeois thought, 
 even though more recently its hitherto prevailing tendency to accept 
 unconditionally or to defend and glorify existing conditions has been 
 overshadowed, in some cases, by the apparent counteraction of a directly 
 opposite tendency.
 The vehement protests raised from time to time by otherwise 
 well-disposed critics against some particularly disgraceful aspects of the 
 existing social order, the occasional lapses of an exceptionally 
 impressionable literatus into an entire negation of present society, and 
 the equivalent pessimistic, ironic, or skeptical currents in contemporary 
 bourgeois philosophy do not initiate a new phase in the development of 
 modern social thought. All apparent expressions of an enhanced bourgeois 
 “self-criticism,” varying from the Freudian scientific analysis of the 
 Civilization and its Discontents, to the inflation of such minor 
 “discontents” into a Decline of the West, or a final Breakdown 
 of Modern Civilization, rather serve the purpose of opening an 
 illusory outlet to the feelings aroused in the lower strata of the 
 bourgeoisie by their increasingly oppressed condition, or to the temporary 
 hangovers befalling the entire class under the impact of a defeat in war 
 or of a major economic depression. 
 Such ideological phenomena, while purporting to express an increasing 
 critical self-consciousness of bourgeois society, indicate only an 
 increasing unwillingness on the part of the hitherto ruling class to 
 understand its own social mode of existence as a specific entity.
 The essential futility of every attempt of contemporary bourgeois 
 self-criticism appears most strikingly in the ideological repercussions, 
 resulting from the periodic cycle through which modern industry runs. The 
 alternate occurrence of an absolute denial and an equally absolute 
 acceptance of the universal crisis, periodically repeating itself 
 in the theory of bourgeois economists, along with the periodical 
 recurrence of prosperity and depression, can best be regarded as being 
 itself a secondary phenomenon of a given phase of the industrial cycle. 
 The fact that bourgeois economists have not yet arrived at a “theory of 
 the crisis,” independent of the momentary fluctuations of the industrial 
 process, only emphasizes once more a definite incapacity of present-day 
 bourgeois society to grasp “specifically” the process of its own 
 destruction.
 A critical investigation of the existing conditions of mankind which 
 conceives of the imminent breakdown of existing bourgeois conditions not 
 as an absolute disintegration but as a transition from the 
 present historical phase to a higher form of society can only be 
 attempted and carried through in an unbiassed and consistent manner by the 
 new social class produced by the bourgeoisie itself.
 Chapter 6. A New Type of Generalization
Before we deal with the practical implications of Marx’s critical 
 investigation of existing bourgeois society, we shall discuss a strictly 
 theoretical problem arising from the statements made in the preceding 
 chapters with regard to the main methodological principles of Marxian 
 science. How does that emphasis on “specification,” which we have shown to 
 be the very foundation of Marx’s materialistic criticism and research, 
 conform to the equally fundamental demand for some degree of 
 generalization which is necessarily bound up with every attempt at a truly 
 scientific statement, and is certainly recognized by Marx. 
 As shown in the second and third chapters, Marx scornfully dismissed 
 the superficial and arbitrary procedure of the bourgeois social scientists 
 who described the various conditions of different historical stages in the 
 terms of the same general concepts and thus “by a sleight of hand 
 represented bourgeois conditions as unchangeable natural laws pertaining 
 to society in abstracto.” He was equally critical of that complete 
 abstention from all theoretical generalization which is the idea vaguely 
 aimed at by the Historical School and other irrationalists. As against 
 both, he worked out a new type of generalization.
 Here again, Marx took his departure from the work of the idealistic 
 philosopher Hegel. This latter too had rejected the abstractual procedure 
 commonly applied by the social theorists as well as what he called the 
 “conceptlessness” underlying the historical trends of the early 19th 
 century. In opposition to both, he had posed another principle: that of 
 the “truly general.” The “general” as it appears in the most developed 
 forms of philosophical thought is, according to Hegel’s terminology, 
 dialectically identical with the “particular” and, indeed, with 
 “individual existence.” Or, as this Hegelian principle has been most 
 succinctly recapitulated in a single sentence: “Truth is 
 concrete.”
 Of course, this highly paradoxical formula had not yet acquired with 
 the idealistic philosopher that unequivocally realistic connotation which 
 it was to assume later with Marx and such other dialectic materialists as 
 Engels, Antonio Labriola, Plechanov, and Lenin. The new emphasis laid by 
 Hegel on the subject matter of human thought as against its mere form was 
 not meant as a materialistic adherence to the given external facts, but 
 rather served as a starting point for a new and more refined form of the 
 most daring philosophical abstraction. Philosophical thought, according to 
 Hegel, is no more to be regarded as being a mere reflection, in the mind 
 of the philosopher, of the concrete facts of an external world. It is, on 
 the contrary, understood to be the most concrete existence itself, and to 
 comprise within itself both the abstract concepts formed as a first 
 approach to truth in ordinary practical and theoretical human thought, and 
 the equally “abstract” forms of externally given “concrete” realities.
 Hegel’s “concrete,” then, by no means coincides with the sensually 
 concrete of given experience and practical action. Factual knowledge was 
 for him a means rather than an end. A faithful acceptance of the empirical 
 data of nature and history was to prepare the ground for an idealistic 
 reconstruction of the universe and thus to testify once more to the 
 absolute precedence of the conceptual form over all external 
existence.
 Thus the real meaning of the Hegelian “concrete” was somewhat 
 one-sidedly interpreted by that remarkable series of theoretical and 
 practical leaders of the revolutionary proletarian movement beginning with 
 Lassalle and ending with Lenin who looked at Hegel’s philosophy as an 
 essentially empirical method of thought. The irremovable ambiguity 
 pervading the whole of the Hegelian philosophy affects also his apparently 
 realistic approach to “the concrete.” If on the one hand he conceived of 
 the philosophical idea as something other than an empty form and defined 
 it as “that which is the concrete itself,” he was equally ready to explain 
 that he did not understand by the concrete “what is commonly understood by 
 this term,” but merely the speculative “concrete” resulting from 
 idealistic philosophical thought.
 The theorists of abstraction proceeded to the formation of their 
 general concepts by starting from the concrete of common experience and 
 getting rid of its particular qualities by a method of successive 
 elimination. The irrationalists believed that they could get hold 
 of the concrete in an immediate manner. Hegel fancied that in his 
 philosophy he had reached the concrete truth of the idea by starting from 
 a first general concept and supplying the details by a successive adoption 
 of the particular results of scientific research and historical 
 development. Marx was the first to work out a rational type of 
 generalization, different from the traditional conceptual procedures 
 hitherto applied by the various schools of social, historical and 
 philosophical thought, and more akin to the constructive procedures 
 recently invented by the experimental scientists. With him, as shown by 
 the examples discussed in the second and third chapters of this book, the 
 “general” of the concept is no longer set up against concrete reality as 
 another realm; but every “general,” even in its conceptual form, 
 necessarily remains a specific aspect of a mentally dissected part of the 
 historical concrete of existing bourgeois society.
 Thus the unconscious and half-hearted self-criticism of bourgeois 
 social science which had previously made its appearance in the Historical 
 School and in Hegel, was finally transformed, by Marx, into an attack 
 against both the ideas and the existence of the bourgeois order. The fixed 
 abstractions of bourgeois science, which had long since ceased to serve as 
 tools of a truly progressive thought and had degenerated into fetters upon 
 the further advance of social knowledge, were now confronted with their 
 present concrete existence. Hence, the previously established 
 status of modern “civilized” society was deprived of its false halo; and 
 its underlying prose, the real conditions of life under capitalistic rule, 
 could be freely contrasted with the germs of a new proletarian mode of 
 existence. The “concrete,” i.e., the real, social, economic, and class 
 contents of existing society were confronted with their abstract 
 conceptual form, and the as yet unformed substance of a new 
 proletarian socialist and communist “becoming” was opposed to the fully 
 determined forms of existing bourgeois “being.” This is one of 
 the “materialistic” tendencies of the new, revolutionary science of 
 society.
 While bourgeois science defines the wealth of society as the 
 “wealth of nations” or a “general property,” and the State as a 
 form of unity necessary for society, Marx does not deny the “abstract” 
 truth of such statements. He simply adds that, under the prevailing 
 “concrete” conditions, the wealth of a nation is the capital of the 
 ruling bourgeois class and that, in the same way, the present bourgeois 
 State is the political form of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the 
 proletarian class. In the same way, Marx does not question the 
 “abstract” proposition that “all combined labor on a large scale, both in 
 capitalist and socialist production, requires a directing 
 authority, in order to secure the necessary harmony among the 
 individual activities and to perform the general functions arising from 
 the movement of the whole productive body as distinguished from the 
 movements of its independent organs.” He merely calls attention to the 
 exploitation and despotism which the capitalistic direction of the 
 social labor process inflicts upon the wage-laborers subordinated to 
 it, under the prevailing social conditions. While the bourgeois apologists 
 compare the function of modern capitalistic management with that of the 
 conductor of an orchestra, Marx compares the concrete forms in which, 
 under fully developed capitalistic conditions, the command over the mass 
 of workmen collaborating in a workshop is exercised in the name of the 
 absentee owner through a whole hierarchy of managers, foremen, 
 overlookers, etc., with the command of an army through its commissioned 
 and noncommissioned officers. In spite of the apparent “freedom” of the 
 labor contract there is, from a social point of view, no voluntary 
 self-subordination of the army of workers to a supreme leadership 
 necessary for the common good. “The capitalist is not a capitalist because 
 he is a leader of industry. He becomes a commander of industry because he 
 is a capitalist. Supreme command in industry is an attribute of capital, 
 just as, in feudal times, supreme command in war and in the courts of 
 justice was an attribute of the landed proprietor.” Moreover, such 
 uniformity of command exists in bourgeois society only for the single 
 workshop within a system of social production which as a whole, is neither 
 planned nor directed, and barely balanced subsequently only by the 
 competitive struggle of individual commodity producers. As a general rule, 
 there is even an inverse relation between the authority exercised within 
 the single workshop and the existence of a planned cooperation within the 
 whole of a given capitalistic society. It is precisely the people most 
 loudly extolling the wholesome results of an unconditional subordination 
 of individual workers to the capitalistic “organization of labor,” who 
 denounce equally loudly every kind of deliberate control and regulation of 
 the social process of production as an invasion of the inviolable property 
 rights, liberty, and self-determining “genius” of the individual 
 capitalist. “It is characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the 
 factory system can find nothing worse to say against every general 
 organization of cooperative work, than that it would transform the whole 
 of society into a factory.” This whole process of confronting the abstract 
 bourgeois concepts of State and Authority with the actual facts of the 
 master and servant relationship growing directly out of the present-day 
 form of capitalistic production, ultimately resolves itself into a 
 transition to the new form of socialist production just struggling into 
 being. While in bourgeois society the dead accumulated labor of the past 
 rules as “capital” over present living labor, in communist society 
 conversely, the accumulated labor of past generations will be but a means 
 to widen, to enrich, and to further the existence of the workers.
 While the bourgeois social theorists, with so-called “general” concepts 
 framed according to their usual abstractual procedure, ended by not 
 grasping any real historical stage of social development at all, Marx, by 
 his rational use of a new theoretical procedure conceived on the model of 
 the dialectical principle of Hegelian philosophy, arrived at the unique 
 form of generalization which is in keeping with the most fully 
 developed methods of modern experimental science. Bourgeois 
 “sociologists,” who apparently are concerned with society in general, 
 remain entwined in the particular categories of bourgeois society. Marx, 
 by analyzing the specific historical form of bourgeois society, attains a 
 general knowledge of a social development far transcending that particular 
 form. While the bourgeois theorists endeavor to proceed to an abstract 
 general concept of “society” by a successive elimination of more and more 
 empirically (i.e., historically) given data of bourgeois society, and thus 
 often unconsciously retain just those features which happen to be the most 
 singular ones, Marx is aware of the fact that the only possible way of 
 comprehending the general concept, or the “law,” of a particular 
 historical form of society is through its actual historical change. Modern 
 natural science no longer employs the old scholastic Aristotelian method. 
 It no longer bases its generalizations upon an arbitrarily chosen common 
 feature of a given number of objects which is thus constituted as a class 
 of such objects. For instance, it does not proceed from the observation of 
 falling stones to a general law of the fall of stones. It proceeds from 
 the analysis of a single case observed in all its particularity, or rather 
 from a single experiment carried out under exactly determined conditions, 
 to formulate the general law of gravity which now, under varying 
 conditions with correspondingly varying results, applies alike to falling 
 stones, to stones at rest, and also to such other things as balloons, 
 planets and comets. In the same manner an exact social science cannot form 
 its general concepts by the simple abstraction of certain more or 
 less arbitrarily chosen traits of the given historical form of bourgeois 
 society. It must secure the knowledge of the general contained in that 
 particular form of society by the exact investigation of all the 
 historical conditions underlying its emergence from another state of 
 society and by the actual modification of its present form under exactly 
 established conditions. Only thus can social research be transformed into 
 an exact science based upon observation and experiment.
 Just as in modern natural science the general law has no independent 
 existence outside the collection of the particular cases covered by its 
 application, so the social law exists only in the historical development 
 through which a particular form of society proceeds from its particular 
 state in the past to its particular state in the present and from that to 
 the social forms brought about by its further change. Thus the only 
 genuine laws in social science arc the laws of historical change. The 
 Russian reviewer of Capital, whose statements are quoted in part 
 and adopted by Marx in the Postscript to the second edition, has 
 most aptly brought out this realistic principle of the new Marxian 
 science. He shows that Marx, in spite of the outward form of his 
 presentation which, according to the reviewer, is “idealistic” in the 
 German, i.e., the bad, sense of the term, “is in actual fact enormously 
 more of a realist than any of his predecessors in the realm of economic 
 criticism.” Whereas in idealistic philosophical thought as well as in the 
 ordinary abstract way of scientific thinking, the facts of a particular 
 social state are compared with some “idea,” Marx’s criticism confronts a 
 given fact “not with the idea, but only with another fact,” and so, by the 
 most exact possible study of each fact, represents the facts themselves as 
 “different momenta of a development” confronting one another. While the 
 old economists set up abstract general laws of economic life which were 
 expected to apply equally to the past, the present, and the future, no 
 such general laws of economic life are conformable to the principle of 
 historical change, as established by Marx.
 In his opinion, on the contrary, every historical period has laws 
 peculiar to itself. ... As soon as life has gone through a 
 given period of development and is passing over from one given stage to 
 another, it begins also to be controlled by other laws. ... Nay, more, 
 one and the same phenomenon is subject to entirely different laws as a 
 result of the difference in the general structure of the social 
 organisms replacing each other in the historical process, of the 
 variation of their various organs, of the difference in the conditions 
 under which they function, etc. Marx denies, for example, that the law 
 of population is one and the same for all periods and all places. He 
 contends, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own 
 law of population. ... As productive powers move on in their 
 development, so do social conditions and the laws governing them change. 
 While Marx sets himself the task of investigating and explaining the 
 capitalistic economic order from this standpoint, he merely outlines in 
 strictly scientific terms the aim that every exact investigator of 
 economic conditions must have in view. ... The scientific 
 value of such research lies in the disclosure of the particular laws 
 which control the origin, existence, development, and death of a given 
 social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. Such, 
 indeed, is the value of Marx’s book.
 Chapter 7. Practical Implications
Connection with a practical social movement is not peculiar to the 
 Marxian theory. Bourgeois theory of society as well, in all its phases, 
 has served a definite practical purpose. In its classical period it served 
 the aims of the rising industrial class struggling for the theoretical and 
 practical supremacy of the new bourgeois principles over the obsolete 
 forms of feudal society. Later, after the victory of the bourgeois 
 principles, bourgeois social thought split into parts. Its main current 
 took to defending the established rule of the bourgeois class against the 
 now rising proletarian class, and for this purpose posed as a “pure” and 
 assumedly “unbiassed” science. Another current, following a tendency 
 already visible in Comte, elaborated a more or less consciously 
 counter-revolutionary set of ideas, foreshadowing the political programs 
 which were later to be adopted and put into practice by such movements as 
 Italian Fascism and German National Socialism.
 The only point which distinguishes the Marxist theory is that it 
 represents the interests of another class and that it is 
 conscious of its class character in a rational way, and not only in 
 the delusive manner of a fascist or national socialist “mythology.” “The 
 theoretical propositions of the Communists express merely, in general 
 terms, actual conditions of an existing class struggle, or of an 
 historical movement going on under our very eyes.” The representatives of 
 liberal and democratic bourgeois science who naïvely assumed that this statement of the 
 Communist Manifesto implied a surrender, on the part of the 
 Marxists, of the claim to the theoretical truth of their ideas, resemble 
 the theologians who regard every religion but theirs as the invention of 
 men and only their own as a divine revelation. Materialistic criticism, 
 which defines all theoretical truths as mere historical “forms of social 
 consciousness,” does in no way abandon the quest for theoretical truth, 
 but only replaces the traditional concept of an absolute truth by a less 
 ambitious and much more practical idea. Every truth, according to the 
 Marxists, applies only to a definite set of conditions; it is therefore 
 not absolute but relative, not independent and complete in itself, but 
 contingent upon external facts. today’s truth, then, depends upon the 
 existing mode of material production and the class struggle arising 
 therefrom. But this new definition of truth in no way lessens, nay, it 
 enhances, the strictness of the formal demands which must be fulfilled by 
 a “true” proposition from the standpoint of materialistic science.
 What goes on here is only a repetition of the same process by which in 
 the beginnings of bourgeois society, at first in the struggle of lay 
 thought against the theological and metaphysical system of the Middle 
 Ages, then in that of empiricism against all metaphysics, present-day 
 “bourgeois” science was created. On the very threshold of the new age, 
 Bacon, in his Novum Organum, which was to assist the 
 emerging bourgeois science in the assertion of its new methods of 
 empirical research, proclaimed the historical character of every science: 
 “Recte enim veritas temporis filia dictur non auctoritatis.” On 
 that authority of all authorities, Time, he based the superiority of the 
 finally emancipated new science as against the dogmatic tenets of 
 medieval authorities.
 This time, however, the proposed change of traditional historical form 
 of consciousness reaches further, and by an apparently reversionary 
 movement the very “freedom” and “independence” which was the boast of 
 bourgeois philosophy and science during the intervening epoch of its 
 almost unchallenged supremacy, is now called in question again. Not only 
 are the theological and metaphysical creeds which had been re-accepted by 
 the bourgeoisie in a remodeled form now utterly “debunked,” but also the 
 new philosophy of the bourgeois era, and the whole body of its new 
 historical and social truths, are finally stripped of their imaginary 
 independence and drawn into the flux of things and the torment of the 
 battle. Unconditional “this-sidedness,” and a distinct historical and 
 class character, become essential attributes not only of the 
 contents, but also of the form of knowledge. This applies 
 even to the revolutionary theory itself. The Marxian theory, which deals 
 with all ideas as being connected with a definite historical epoch and the 
 specific form of society pertaining to that epoch, recognizes itself as 
 being just as much an historical product as any other theory pertaining to 
 a definite stage of social development and to a definite social class. 
 Thus the new science of the proletariat breaks with the last “ideological” 
 limitations which had still hampered the critical self-consciousness of 
 social science, and by reason of which the bourgeois investigators had 
 imagined that, because their science had been freed from the specific 
 fetters of medieval dogma and metaphysics, it had become, once for all, a 
 “free science,” standing “above” the antagonisms of the new social order 
 and of the pressure of vested interests.
 The materialistic theory of the historical development of society is a 
 particular form of the social consciousness of the present epoch and thus 
 is itself a part of that historical development. The materialistic theory 
 of the class struggle is itself class struggle. The materialistic theory 
 of the social revolution of the proletarian class is at the same time a 
 powerful lever in that same social revolution.
 Thus amplified, all examples we have hitherto given to illustrate the 
 critical and revolutionary functions of the materialistic theory, gain a 
 new and enhanced significance.
 If the materialistic science of society treats such subjects of social 
 investigation as State and law (seemingly “above class”) in 
 their specific historical character, i.e., as a State for the bourgeoisie 
 and a law against the proletariat, it does not enunciate a pure 
 theoretical proposition which may incidentally furnish a suitable argument 
 for the practical attacks of the proletariat against existing bourgeois 
 institutions. There is a much closer connection between the theoretical 
 contents and the practical implications of the Marxian statement, for the 
 two are, in fact, but related aspects of one single whole. The same 
 applies to Marx’s specific description of social wealth as 
 “bourgeois wealth,” i.e., as a collection of “commodities,” which are not 
 produced because they are useful, but because of the value and surplus 
 value they contain; or again, as the wealth of the capitalist class from 
 which the proletariat is excluded; or as capitalistic plenty and 
 proletarian poverty; or, finally, as the capitalist’s own property 
 ( “Eigentum”) which for the proletariat (to use an apt expression of 
 Lassalle’s) is for ever but “the other man’s property” 
 ( “Fremdtum”). It also applies to material production, now 
 considered in its specific character as a “capitalistic commodity 
 production,” i.e., as an apparent activity of capital “breeding surplus 
 value,” behind which is hidden the real exploitation of the actual 
 producers by the monopolistic owners of the social means of production: 
 and so on, through the whole series of economic, political, legal, 
 cultural, and other bourgeois categories.
 It is also much more than a mere progress of theoretical knowledge when 
 the materialistic theory, by its consistent application of the 
 principle of change, immerses each and every social entity in the 
 flux of an historical transition and thus reinterprets all static concepts 
 of things in terms of so many dynamic processes and of an historical 
 struggle between the social classes.
 By this process of an historical specification of all bourgeois 
 institutions, and by insistence on the constant working of change, 
 materialistic science achieves in a theoretical way what is achieved in 
 practice by the real historical movement of the proletariat. Thus Marx’s 
 materialistic social research though not for a moment abandoning its 
 character of a strictly theoretical science, yet consciously assumes its 
 particular function within the whole of a movement striving to transform 
 existing society, and thus constitutes itself as a necessary part of the 
 revolutionary action of the modern working class.
 The ruling classes deny the scientific character of Marxism because 
 of its class limitations. Marxism bases the wider and deeper truth of its 
 propositions on its proletarian class character.
 Marxian theory, viewed in its general character, is a new science of 
 bourgeois society. It appears at a time when within bourgeois society 
 itself, an independent movement of a new social class is opposing the 
 ruling bourgeois class. In opposition to the bourgeois principles it 
 represents the new views and claims of the class oppressed in bourgeois 
 society. It is, so far, not a positive but a critical science. It 
 “specifies” bourgeois society and investigates the tendencies visible in 
 the present development of society, and the way to its imminent practical 
 transformation. Thus it is not only a theory of bourgeois society but, at 
 the same time, a theory of the proletarian revolution.


     From : Marxists.org

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