Summary of the Materialist Conception of History

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production.

It starts from the material production of life itself.

The basis of all history is then the intercourse with the production of life and the mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages).

History shows it in its action as State. It explains all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc.

It trace their origins and growth from that basis so that the whole thing can be depicted in its totality.

The idealistic view of history looks for a category in every period.

Instead, our history remains constantly on the real ground of history.

• It does not explain practice from the idea.
• It explains the formation of ideas from material practice.

It concludes that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by:

• mental criticism
• resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc.

It can only be resolved by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug.

Revolution, not criticism, is the driving force of history, religion, philosophy and all other types of theory.

History does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit”. Instead, in each stage of history, there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces.

This sum is:

• a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor
• a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character.

It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have deified and attacked; a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the “Unique.”

These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system.

The material elements of a complete revolution are:

• the existing productive forces
• the formation of a revolutionary mass

That revolutionary mass must revolt against:

• the separate conditions of society up till then and
• the very “production of life” till then, which is the basis of its “total activity”

The history of communism proves that if these elements are missing, then it is practically useless even if the idea of this revolution has been expressed 100 times.

8. The Inconsistency of the Idealist Conception of History in General, and of German Post-Hegelian Philosophy in Particular

The real basis of history has either been totally neglected or considered as an irrelevant matter.

History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard.

The real production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created.

The exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch.

For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious” motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion.

The “idea,” the “conception” of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their practice.

When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this crude social form.

While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the “pure spirit,” and make religious illusion the driving force of history.

The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence. It is reduced to its “finest expression,” of all this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of “thoughts” that devour one another and are finally swallowed up in “self-consciousness.” —

Marginal note by Marx: So-called objective historiography [23] consisted precisely, in treating the historical relations separately from activity. Reactionary character.

— and even more consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere “tale of knights, robbers and ghosts,”[24] from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by “unholiness”.

This conception is truly religious. It postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of history. It puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself.

This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for instance the important question which has been under discussion in recent times: how exactly one “passes from the realm of God to the realm of Man” [Ludwig Feuerbach, Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums] – as if this “realm of God” had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the “realm of Man” to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense they find into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances.

The purely national character of these questions and solutions is moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like “the God-Man,” “Man,” etc., have presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that only “criticism and critics have made history,” [Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs] and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from “Mongolism” [Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] to history “with meaningful content,” that is to say, to the history, of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher and the dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of “criticism,” [Bruno Bauer] “man,” [Ludwig Feuerbach] and “the unique”. [Max Stirner] If for once these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century.

[Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts]

These pompous and arrogant hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany 1281 and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song [25] into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany.