Ideology of socialism

Contents Analysis of the theory of historical materialism. The idea of the predominant importance in social life of material productive forces Historical materialism and materialist dialectics Historical materialism as a social theory Class struggle Evolution of theory The ideology of socialism includes: economic doctrine, historical and philosophical doctrine and the doctrine of religion and morality. Of these parts of the socialist worldview, the ideology of socialism mainly consists of historical and philosophical doctrine and the doctrine of religion and morality. It is these teachings of Marxism that we examine here. Marx's economic teaching was discussed in the Theological Bulletin for 1912 (in a separate publication: Socialism, first issue: Scientific socialism, its economic teaching). The theory of historical materialism. Marx's historical and philosophical teaching is given in his notorious theory of historical materialism, which forms the main premise of so-called scientific socialism. Presentation of the theory. The theory of historical materialism (materialistische Geschichtsauffassung) embraces two ideas: the idea of ​​the predominant importance in social life of material productive forces and the idea of ​​class struggle as the main factor of historical development. Neither Marx nor Engels left a complete and systematic disclosure of the theory they created. We have only fragmentary thoughts from them. Let us cite the most important passages from their works. Marx’s preface to his work “Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie” is rightly considered the most expressive. “In the social production of their lives,” writes Marx, “people enter into certain, inevitable, relations independent of their will—relations of production that correspond to a certain stage of development of material productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. (Es ist nicht das Bewusstsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt). At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or, which serves only as their legal expression, with the property relations among which they have hitherto moved. From forms of development of productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. As economic fundamentals change, the entire enormous superstructure is transformed faster or slower. (Mit der Veränderung der ökonomischen Grundsätze wälzt sich der ganze ungeheure Ueberbau langsamer oder rascher um). When considering such revolutions, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material revolution in the economic conditions of production, which can be stated with natural scientific precision, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short, ideological forms in which people are aware of this conflict and resolve it. Just as one cannot judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge such an era of revolution by its consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between social productive forces and production relations. Not a single social formation dies before all the productive forces for which it is spacious enough have developed, and new, higher productive forces do not take its place before the material conditions of their existence in the bowels of the old society have matured. Therefore, humanity always sets itself only such tasks that it can solve, because, upon closer examination, it will always turn out that the task itself arises only where the material conditions for its solution are already present or, at least, are in the process of arising 1 . In large outlines, one can note, as successive eras of economic development of society, Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production. Bourgeois relations of production constitute the last antagonistic form of the social production process, antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but in the sense of antagonism that grows out of the conditions of social existence of individuals. But the productive forces developing in the depths of bourgeois society at the same time create the material conditions for the resolution of this antagonism. The prehistoric era of human society (die Vorgeschichte der menschlichen Gesellschaft) therefore ends with this social formation. The following passages from Marx’s book “The Poverty of Philosophy” are also expressive. “Social relations have a very close connection with the state of the productive forces. By acquiring new productive forces, people change the method of production, and by changing the method of production, the method of obtaining the means of subsistence, they change all their social relations. A hand mill creates a society with an overlord, while a steam mill creates a society with an industrial capitalist. But the same people who establish their social relations in accordance with material production also create principles, ideas and categories in accordance with their social relations. Thus, these ideas and categories are as little eternal as the relationships of which they serve as an expression. They are changeable products of historical development." “From the very beginning of civilization, the basis of production was the antagonism of caste estates, classes, and finally, the antagonism of accumulated and direct labor. Without antagonism there is no progress: this is the law that civilization has followed up to the present day. Until now, the development of the productive forces has been achieved thanks to this antagonism of classes.” The theory of historical materialism in both of its basic ideas is clearly outlined already in the Communist Manifesto. “The entire history of every society has hitherto been the history of class struggle... The characteristic difference of our era, the era of the bourgeoisie, is that the antagonism of classes has now been simplified. Today society is more and more divided into two vast enemy camps, into two warring classes - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.” “Do you need great wisdom to understand that the views, concepts and ideas, in a word, the consciousness of people changes along with the change in their social relations, their social existence? What does the entire history of thought teach, if not that intellectual production undergoes changes in parallel with changes in material production? The dominant ideas of a given era have always been the ideas of the ruling class. When they talk about ideas that revolutionize the entire society, they only point to the fact that in the depths of the old society elements of a new one have already formed, and that the decomposition of old ideas occurs in parallel with the decomposition of old social relations. As the ancient world declined, the old religions were defeated by Christianity; when Christian ideas gave way to the ideas of educational philosophy in the 18th century, feudal society gave the last battle to the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of revolutionary freedom and freedom of conscience only proclaimed the dominance of free competition in the field of knowledge.” The following is a possible objection. “Of course,” they will tell us, “religious, moral, philosophical, political and legal concepts changed in the course of historical development, but religion, morality, philosophy have always been preserved, despite all these changes. Then, there are eternal truths, such as: freedom, justice and others, inherent in people under any social system. And communism destroys eternal truths; he destroys religion and morality, instead of reviving them on a new basis, which contradicts the entire experience of previous historical development.” This objection has no force in the eyes of the authors of the theory of historical materialism. “The history of any society comes down to the development of class antagonism, an antagonism that took different forms in different eras. But whatever the form that this antagonism took, the exploitation of one part of society by another is a fact common to all previous centuries. Therefore, it is not surprising that social consciousness, despite all its differences and diversity, has always revolved around certain general forms; these forms of consciousness will disappear completely only with the complete disappearance of class antagonism. Collectivist transformation signifies the most radical break with traditional property relations, and it is not surprising that, in the course of its development, it breaks most decisively with the old traditional ideas.” Engels N. E.’s book “Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft” was written with the direct purpose of justifying the basic principles of Marxism. Here the author, in the following words, formulates the theory of historical materialism. “The materialist view of history (die materialistische Anschauung der Geschichte) proceeds from the thesis that production, and along with production and the exchange of its products, form the basis of any social system (die Grundlage aller Gesellschaftsordnung); that in every society appearing on the historical stage, the division of products, and with it the social division into classes and estates, occurs in accordance with what and how is produced and how what is produced is exchanged (distributed). As a result of this, the main reasons for any social changes and political upheavals must be sought not in the heads of people, not in their growing understanding of eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the method of production and exchange; they must be sought not in philosophy, but in the economics of a given era (sie sind zu suchen nicht, in der Philosophie, sondern in der Oekonomie der betreffenden Epoche). The emerging understanding that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that what was once reasonable has become meaningless and what was once beneficent has turned into torment, is only a sign that changes have imperceptibly occurred in the methods of production and in the forms of exchange to which the social order based on the old economic conditions no longer corresponds. Thus, it is said that the means for eliminating the discovered imbalances must, in a more or less developed form, also be evident in the changed production relations themselves. There is no need to invent these means out of the head; they need to be discovered through the head in the existing material facts of production.” And further: “New facts forced a re-examination of all previous history, and it was discovered that all previous history was the history of class struggle, that these social classes hostile to each other are always products of certain relations of production and exchange, in a word, the economic relations of their era, that, consequently, this or that economic structure of society forms the real basis from which, in the final analysis, the entire superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as religious, philosophical and other ideas, must be explained (der religiösen, philosophischen und sonstigen Vorsteilungsweise) of each historical period. Thus, idealism was expelled from its last refuge, from historical science (aus der Geschichtsauffassung), the materialist understanding of history was substantiated (eine materialistische Geschichtsauffassung) and the way was paved for explaining the consciousness of people from their being, instead of, as was hitherto, explaining their being from their consciousness.” Engels also speaks out on the issue of historical materialism in his book about L. Feuerbach. “There is no doubt that, at least in modern history, economic liberation has been the center around which every class struggle and all liberation movements revolve, which inevitably take a political form, since every class struggle is a political struggle. There is no doubt that, at least in modern history, the state, the political system, is a subordinate, and civil society, the kingdom of economic relations, is the main element... Everything that motivates an individual to act inevitably passes through his head, influencing his will. In the same way, all the needs of civil society, regardless of which class is dominant at a given time, must necessarily pass through the will of the state in order to achieve legislative recognition. This is the formal side of the matter, which goes without saying. But the question is, what is the content of the formal will of an individual or an entire state, where does it come from, and why is the will directed in one direction and not the other? Looking for an answer to this question, we find that in modern history the state will has been determined by the changing needs of civil society, the predominance of one or another class, and, ultimately, the development of productive forces and conditions of exchange. But if even in our modern times, with its powerful means of production and communication, the state does not constitute an independent area and does not develop independently, but ultimately depends in its existence and development on the economic conditions of social life, then this is all the more certain in relation to previous times, when there were not yet such rich auxiliary means for the production of the material life of people, and when, therefore, this production must necessarily have had a much stronger influence on humanity. If even now, in the era of large-scale industry and railways, the state, generally speaking, is only a more or less complex reflection (der Reflex) of the economic needs of the class dominant in the field of production, then such a role was even more inevitable for it at a time when any given generation of people had to spend a much larger part of its life time in satisfying its material needs, and when it, therefore, depended on them much, more than we now depend... The state and state law are determined by economic relations. It goes without saying that the same must be said about civil law, the role of which essentially comes down to the legislative sanctification of the normal economic relations existing under given circumstances between individuals... The state is the first ideological force that subjugates people. Society creates a body to protect its interests from internal and external attacks. This body is state power. As soon as it has arisen, it tries to establish an independent relationship with society and the more successful it is in this, the more it is an organ of one class and the more it supports the dominance of this class. The struggle of the oppressed class against the oppressor class inevitably becomes first and foremost a political struggle, a struggle against the political domination of the oppressors. The awareness of the connection between this political struggle and its economic basis weakens and sometimes disappears completely... But having become a force independent of society, the state immediately gives rise to a new ideology. Among politicians by profession, theorists of state law, and lawyers involved in civil law, economic relations completely disappear from sight... Even more elevated ideologies, that is, even further removed from the economic basis, take the form of philosophy and religion. Here the connection between ideas and the material conditions of human life becomes even more confused, even more obscured by intermediate links. But still it exists." The theory of historical materialism is, perhaps, the only teaching in the world that combines extremes in it. In it, a grain of truth is associated with an abyss of lies. It is completely undeveloped in its basic essence, and is complicated by many secondary teachings. It does not in the least serve the purpose for which it was developed, the substantiation of socialism, and, on the contrary, along the way it illuminates thousands of subjects, in that which is neglected in it, it has power. It can be refuted, all the way down, in a nutshell, great meaning can be put into it. After an easily achieved defeat, she again triumphs as untouched; and what is true in it is contrary to the purposes for which it was erected. Whoever treats it with disdain assists those who abuse it; whoever looks for the truth in it finds himself their enemy. It is painted not with a brush, but with a brush, which smears the paint with a violation of the lines, obscuring the main drawing, which is of all value; its creators rush about like a squirrel in a wheel, constantly jumping from one extreme to another, as if every effort is made to take the reader’s eyes away from the main picture. Under such conditions, the best criticism of the theory of historical materialism is its analysis, the continuous restoration of its true boundaries, refraining from hasty victories over it, demolishing it at all points with the border areas of science and philosophy, persistently searching for the most solid position from which it is overcome. Analysis of the theory of historical materialism. The idea of ​​the predominant importance in social life of material productive forces We have cited from the writings of the founders of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, the most important passages in which the theory of historical materialism is revealed. It has been pointed out more than once that the basic concepts of this theory and, above all, the concept of productive forces and the concept of class are not systematically clarified anywhere in Marx and Engels. Even these terms are used unsteadily and inconsistently. Nevertheless, the general meaning of the materialist theory of society can be established with sufficient certainty. In the words of Dietzgen, this theory is that “economics serves as the basis of all spiritual adjustment.” Professor Tugan-Baranovsky gives the following definition of the theory of historical materialism: “The mysterious material productive forces that, in Marx’s opinion, dominate the life of society are nothing more than a set of material factors, the material conditions of economic labor. The concept of productive forces does not include everything that influences the economy in one way or another, but only part of this broader concept, namely the material, material conditions of this economy. That is why Engels had every right to call this theory a materialist understanding of history.” Historical materialism is a monistic theory of society, and, precisely, a materialist one: a mono-materialist theory of socio-historical life. In it, all phenomena of socio-historical life are explained from one material beginning. Marx was not the first to teach about the materialist basis of the socio-historical development and spiritual life of mankind. And we don’t just believe that Marx owes a lot to his immediate predecessor S. Simon: there were other attempts at a materialist interpretation of history. G. Vico (“Prineipü di una seienza nuova d’intorno alle commune nature delle nazioni” 1725), whom Marx recalls in Montesquieu’s Capital (De. l’esprit des lois 1749) and Herder (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte, der Menschheit 1784) expressed the idea that the spiritual history of mankind depends on physical and geographical conditions of existence. It is necessary to name some of Kant's early articles (Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht 1784, Rezensionen von 1. G. Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit 1785, Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte 1786, Ueber den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie 1788), and most of all Buckle's History of civilization in England 1857, in which human history is explained by the influences of climate, food, soil and the impressions of nature. Later, Ratzel took this path of explaining socio-historical life (Anthropogeographie oder Grundzuge der Anicendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte 1882–1891). Equally and even more decisively rejecting the historical role of ideological factors, Marx, in contrast to the undoubted benefit of his theory - from these representatives of the materialist view of history, makes historical development dependent not directly on the physical and geographical conditions of life, but on the socio-economic environment mediating between the physical world and the human spirit (ideology): he explains the social system and historical development by the production and distribution of products. Not what, but how material life is considered by Marx and Engels to be the basis of human society. “Economic eras, according to Marx in Capital, differ from one another not in what was done during these eras, but in the way it was done, with the help of what instruments of labor this or that goal was achieved at different times 2 . Tools of labor represent not only a measure of the development of human labor power, but also an index of the social relations under whose dominance labor is performed 3... Technology exposes man's active relationship to nature, the direct process of production by which he maintains his existence, and at the same time the way in which his social relations are formed and the mental ideas that flow from them. Even any history of religion that does not pay sufficient attention to this material basis is devoid of a critical attitude. Of course, it is much easier to find the earthly principle through the analysis of vague religious ideas than to follow the opposite path, that is, from the actual life relations existing in one case or another, to develop the heavenly forms corresponding to them. The last method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific method 4 ". Bearing in mind this feature of historical materialism, Bard finds the name “materialist understanding of history” given by Engels to Marx’s view of the history of mankind to be an unfortunate term that does not express the specific essence of this view. “After all, any non-ideological theory is materialistic if it considers material, sensory elements more powerful than everything else. With the same right, one can call the anthropogeographical, ethnological, and cultural-historical understanding of history a materialistic understanding. The views of Marx and Engels can be directly subsumed under the concept of economic understanding, and in order to distinguish them from other subdivisions of the same trend, they should be designated the technical-economic understanding of history.” As Krause puts it, historically, materialism is a mono-economic sociology. Obviously, the term “materialist” (understanding of history) denotes a generic concept, and “mono-economic”, or technical-economic, a specific one, and Marxism can be called a materialistic-economic theory of society. At first glance, in its general form, the theory of historical materialism may seem, firstly, extremely terrible, radically negative, and secondly, amazingly untenable, palpably meaningless. The terrible radicalism of this theory is striking: it declares the entire ideology of legal consciousness, political system, morality, religion, philosophy and even science as a superstructure over the economic base, a subjective reflex of economic relations, economic development, i.e., it declares the entire ideology to be an area without objective value, conditional, relative, changeable, dependent. The entire spiritual sphere is swept away from the face of the earth, all spiritual values ​​are rejected. The inconsistency of such radical denial seems no less obvious. All ideology, including science, is a superstructure over the economic base. Not only philosophy, theology, ethics, jurisprudence, even the most basic, from the point of view of Marxism, science - political economy - is a product of historical movement, a shadow of objective development, as Marx explains in “Mesere de la Philosophie”. All political economy is divided into schools: the main schools are the fatalist school, the school of economists, and the socialist and communist school. The first is the political economy of the bourgeoisie. It contains classics and romantics. The classics, Adam Smith, Ricardo, are representatives of that bourgeoisie that has not yet managed to finish the struggle against the remnants of feudal social relations and strives only to cleanse economic relations from the feudal raid and to increase the productive forces. Romantics appear in our era, when the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are in direct opposition to each other, and poverty is created in the same abundance as wealth. Economists at this time turn into insensitive fatalists, casting proud glances at the man-machine fabricating wealth. The humanities school takes to heart the bad side of existing industrial relations and tries, to assuage its conscience, to somewhat soften the real contrasts. The philanthropic school is an improved humanitarian school. Just as all economists are scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so socialists and communists are theoreticians of the proletariat class... If so, then in the theory of historical materialism we have absolute skepticism, which undermines the significance of the theory itself. “It is amazing,” exclaims Stammler, “how the materialist understanding of history could see that the unconditional dependence it establishes of all mental forms of expression of human life on the mode of social production itself destroys the objective significance of science, and, consequently, itself.” This weak side of historical materialism is also noted by other critics 5 6 . The theory of historical materialism denies everything and, at the same time, undermines itself. But does she have the right to deny everything 7 and is self-destruction inevitable for her? It makes a big difference whether the denial is expressed as a simple conviction or whether it is based on known grounds. Only in the latter case must science take it into account. The theory of historical materialism takes an extreme form of negation, first of all, as a consequence of its union with philosophical materialism, and we have the task of considering how strong this union is. Historical materialism and philosophical materialism. In its central part, Marxism is a materialistic-economic theory of society. But, in its full form, it seems to provide a system of an entire philosophy that solves questions about the relationship of thinking to being, the origin of knowledge and the problem of reality. Marxism solves all these questions materialistically, so that it is not only social materialism (as Stammler calls it), but also philosophical materialism - epistemological and metaphysical. The general course of the philosophical development of Marx and Engels was their path from Hegelian idealism through Feuerbach to materialism, how to talk about it, driven by a “debt of honor” in relation to Feuerbach, Engels in his book dedicated to the latter “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie”. “Feuerbach proclaimed the triumph of materialism. Nature exists independently of any philosophy; it is the foundation on which we, humans, grow, being ourselves a product of nature. Nothing exists outside of nature and man: the higher beings created by our religious fantasy are only fantastic reflections of our own essence... The material, sensory world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality; our consciousness and thinking, no matter how supersensible it may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. It is not matter that is the product of spirit, but spirit itself is the highest product of matter (die Materie ist nicht die Erzeugniss des Geistes sondern der Geist ist selbst das höchste Produkt der Materie).” Marx and Engels adopted Feuerbach’s materialism, and in the materialist direction Engels solves “the great fundamental question of any and especially new philosophy - the question of the relationship between thinking and being.” They speak the traditional metaphysical language of the epistemological theory of mapping (die Bildertheorie 8). “How do our thoughts about the world around us relate to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of cognizing the real world? Can we, in our ideas and concepts about the real world, generate a correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of the identity of thinking and being.” A positive answer to this question in idealistic philosophy does not satisfy the successors of Feuerbach, but they do not return to the “skepticism” of Hume and Kant. “The most decisive objections to their view that could be made from an idealistic point of view were made by Hegel; The materialist objections added here by Feuerbach are more witty than profound. The most decisive refutation of these, as well as any other philosophical fabrications, is practice, that is, experience and industry. If we can prove the correctness of our understanding of any natural phenomenon by reproducing it ourselves, generating it from its conditions and forcing it to serve our purposes, then Kant’s obscure idea of ​​the “thing in itself (Ding an sich)” comes to an end. In N. E. “Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft” Engels sets out the theory of the materialist origin of consciousness and thinking, materialist ontology. “If we ask what thinking and consciousness are and how they occur, we will find that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, which develops in a certain environment and with it, from which it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, which in the final instance are themselves a product of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature, but correspond to it.” True existence belongs to matter and its movements. “The real unity of the world lies in its materiality... The basic forms of all existence are space and time, and being outside of time is just as great an absurdity as being outside of space... Movement is a form of existence of matter. Never and nowhere has there been and could not be matter without movement... Life is a form of existence of protein bodies, and this form of existence actually consists in the constant self-renewal of the chemical components of these bodies” 9. Consciousness, which reflects reality, is nothing more than a reflection of material reality. “Returning to the materialist point of view, we saw in human concepts reflections of real things, instead of seeing in real things reflections of one or another stage of an absolute concept. Dialectics was thus reduced to the science of the general laws of motion in the external world and in human thought - two series of laws that are essentially identical, but apparently different, since the human head can apply them consciously, while in nature, and for the time being, even more often in human history, they manifest themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the form of an endless series of apparent accidents” (“Ludw. Feuerbach und der Ausgang” etc.). Thirdly, empiricism, which limits all our knowledge to the limits of scientific experience, is added to the epistemological theory of mapping and to materialist metaphysics. “Thought cannot create forms of existence, the external world, from itself, but can only derive them from the external world... Principles are not the starting point of research, but its end result; they are not applied to the nature and history of mankind, but are abstracted from both; It is not nature and the human kingdom that are guided by principles, but principles are correct only insofar as they are consistent with nature and history. This is the only materialistic worldview” (N. U. Dühring’s Umwälzunff der Wissenschaft). Finally, Engels placed the theory of historical materialism in direct connection with philosophical materialism. In his opinion, Feuerbach’s weak side was that for him materialism was exhausted by the vulgar natural-scientific materialism of the 18th century, that the historical view of nature and the dialectical view of history were alien to him. The step that Feuerbach did not take was taken by Marx: he not only complemented Hegel’s dialectical method with materialist content, but also applied materialism, through the dialectical method, to the explanation of history. “Feuerbach was absolutely right that natural scientific materialism constitutes the basis in the building of human knowledge, but not the building itself. We are surrounded not only by nature, but also by human society, which, like nature, has its own history of development and its own science. The point, therefore, was to harmonize the science of society with the materialist basis and to build on it anew, that is, the totality of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences... A break with Hegel’s philosophy also occurred here through a return to the materialist point of view. This means that we decided to look at the real world: at nature and history as it appears to everyone who approaches it without preconceived idealistic views; decided, without any regret, to sacrifice idealistic views that could not be reconciled with the facts, taken in their own, and not fantastic, connection. And this is what materialism consists of. Only in this direction did a seriously materialistic worldview first appear, and only here, at least in general, was it consistently applied to all related branches of knowledge” (Ludw. Feuerb.). And in history, as in nature, “it was necessary to eliminate the fictitious, artificial connection of phenomena by indicating their real connection, and this task boiled down exclusively to the discovery of the general laws of motion that dominate the history of human society” (ib.). Marxists of the orthodox camp, Kautsky, Bebel, Mehring 10 , Plekhanov... frank materialists. So, the creators of the theory of historical materialism and their orthodox students associate it with the materialist worldview. This connection makes the position of scientific socialism extremely weak. We can safely repeat Birman’s words: “if Marxism stands on the basis of natural-scientific materialism, then it will be refuted 11.” Materialistic epistemology and metaphysics are considered in modern philosophy to be the definitively surpassed stage in the history of worldviews. In view of this, it is unnecessary for us to enter into a close examination of the philosophical premises of historical materialism, ein angenehmes, weil überaus einfaches Geschäft, as one of the critics of Marxism puts it, especially since Marx and Engels profess materialist philosophy, assimilate its theses in the vulgar form in which they were floating in the air, without introducing an original presentation into the history of materialism and not even having thought through its dogmas 12. However, one cannot, following Kathrein, say that “at the same time, there is no need to consider the theory of historical materialism,” one cannot agree with him that “historical materialism rests on a materialist worldview” not only “according to the expressive confessions of its founders and leaders,” but also “by its very essence.” The truth is just the opposite. In the history of philosophy, it is a common phenomenon that new ideas are born in the close psychological environment of contemporary views and beliefs that are not essentially connected with them: the task of criticism turns out to be, first of all, to free the idea from its psychological associations, to establish its pure form, its true content. This is how it is with the theory of historical materialism. It was born in a strong psychological unity with materialist metaphysics, but here we are dealing only with a psychological association, and not with a systematic, not with a logical unity 13. That the theory of historical materialism is not conditioned logically by materialist metaphysics is confirmed by the existence of supporters of historical materialism who are completely alien to materialist philosophy, such as, for example, Kelles-Krause, the Novo-Kantians and revisionists, who will be discussed later. Drawing a line between historical materialism and materialist epistemology is a necessary condition for a correct understanding and proper assessment of historical materialism. Historical materialism is in no way logically connected with philosophical materialism precisely as a theory of society, a theory of socio-historical development. In this capacity, the theory of historical materialism lies in a different area than the one to which the epistemological problem belongs, in a different area for which it is indifferent how the epistemological problem is solved 14 . That historical materialism is a theory of society means that it is a theory of historical development, that it speaks not about the origin of ideas, but about their change. This was clearly stated by Kautsky in his article “The Materialist Understanding of History and the Psychological Factor.” “It would be,” he writes in response to B. Bax, “absurd to assert that a given work of art or a given philosophical system, considered in itself, is simply a product of social, and ultimately economic, relations. But no historical theory sets out to explain artistic or philosophical creativity; it deals only with explaining the changes that this creativity experiences in different periods. Of course, without thinking ability there are no ideas. But can this deep truth move us even one step in exploring the question of why the ideas of the 19th century differ from the ideas of the 13th century, which in turn differ from the ideas of the ancient world? One must suffer from a complete lack of intelligence in order to admit that the will and thinking of people “are determined entirely and exclusively by external, physical reasons.” It goes without saying that in the process of developing ideas, not only the external world plays a role, but also the human body. But has the human body, its ability to think, to create art, etc., changed any noticeably throughout history? Of course not. The thinking ability of any Aristotle is unlikely to be surpassed, just as the artistic abilities of the ancient Greeks are not surpassed. On the other hand, what has changed in the outside world? Nature? Not either: the same blue sky shines over Greece as in the era of Pericles. Only society has changed, that is, ultimately, economic relations, and since changes have occurred in nature and people, they have occurred under the influence of changes in economic relations.” Philosophical criticism, in contrast to myopic apologetics, must, regardless of its positive or negative attitude towards historical materialism, recognize its irrelevance to the question of the character, physical or psychological, of historical objects. There is no need to dwell on this idea for a long time only because it has already received a solid basis in the literature on the issue 15. I will quote Rickert’s words: “In fact, the materialist understanding of history has nothing to do with the question of whether historical objects are physical or mental. Even if it were true that all historical movements are determined by “material interests,” that is, by the desire for those things thanks to which bodily existence is preserved and maintained, then, nevertheless, aspirations aimed at material wealth are themselves always volitional acts, therefore, mental processes, and materialist historiography will have to treat them.” Historical materialism and materialist dialectics The founders of Marxism not only tried to unite their theory with philosophical materialism, but also ascribed to themselves a special method - materialist dialectics. Marx sharply criticizes Hegel's idealism. “Hegel makes man a product of self-consciousness, instead of making self-consciousness a product of man, a real man, that is, living in a real, objective world and conditioned by it. He puts the world on its head and for this reason destroys all limits in his head, which, however, does not in the least prevent them from being perceived by the vulgar and sensual perception of the real person. All phenomenology has as its goal to show that self-consciousness is the only and universal reality.” Marx contrasted this extreme idealism with radical materialism, but he wanted to retain Hegel’s dialectical method as a theory of universal development - and on this side he contrasted his materialism with the “mechanical” materialism of Feuerbach. “Feuerbach reduces the essence of religion to the essence of man. But the essence of a person is not at all an abstract characteristic of an individual. In reality, it is a set of social relations. Feuerbach did not go so far as to criticize this actual essence, so he was forced to renounce historical development, consider religious feeling as existing independently, and proceed from the assumption of an abstract, isolated, human individual. Therefore, the human essence could only appear to him as a “genus,” as an internal, silent community that establishes only a natural connection between individuals. Therefore, Feuerbach does not see that “religious feeling” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual he analyzes actually belongs to a certain form of society.” Having mastered the materialism of Feuerbach, Marx remains a student of Hegel in the dialectical method, but this is no longer an idealist dialectic, but a materialist one, so Hegel’s method turns out to be overturned and set on its feet. “I,” Marx writes about himself in the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital, “openly admitted that I was a student of this great thinker and flirted even in some places in the chapter on the theory of value, resorting to a peculiar Hegelian manner of expression. The mystification that dialectics experiences in the hands of Hegel does not in the least eliminate the fact that he was the first to comprehensively and consciously reveal the general forms of its movement. It stands upside down for him. We need to turn it over to find the rational grain in the mystical shell.” In its materialist tendency, Marx's dialectical method turns out to be the opposite of Hegel's method, a materialist dialectic. “My dialectical method in its basis not only differs from Hegel’s, but even constitutes its direct opposite. For Hegel, the process of thought, which he, under the name of idea, even turns into something independent, is the demiurge of reality, which represents only its external manifestation. For me, the ideal beginning is, on the contrary, only a material beginning that has passed through the human brain.” Engels in Ludw. Feuerbaeh stops at Marx's method. In contrast to the mechanical materialism of Feuerbach, Marx was one of those materialists who took advantage of the “revolutionary side” of Hegel’s philosophy, his dialectical method. “But this method of reality is not applicable in the form that it had in Hegel. For him, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept not only exists - no one knows where - from eternity, but also constitutes the true life-giving soul of the entire existing world. It develops into itself, passing through all those stages that are discussed in detail in the Logic and which are all contained within itself; then it alienates itself from itself, turning into nature, where it develops again, now unconsciously, taking the form of natural necessity, but in man it again leads to self-consciousness: in history, this self-consciousness is developed again from lower levels, until finally the absolute concept finally returns to itself in Hegelian philosophy. In Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development found in nature and history, that is, the causal connection of that forward movement which, despite all deviations to the side and backward steps, makes its way from the lower to the higher - this development is for him a simple snapshot of the forward movement of the concept, which takes place from eternity and arbitrarily, no one knows where and in any case, independently of the human brain. It was necessary to eliminate this ideological perversion. Returning to the materialist point of view, we saw in human concepts reflections of real things, instead of seeing in real things reflections of one or another stage of an absolute concept. Dialectics was thus reduced to the science of the general laws of motion in the external world and in human thought - two series of laws that are essentially identical, but apparently different, since the human head can apply them consciously, while in nature, and for the time being, even more often in human history, they manifest themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the form of an endless series of apparent accidents. But as a consequence of this, the dialectic of concepts itself became only a conscious reflection of the dialectical movement of the real world, and thus, Hegelian dialectics was turned on its head, or better yet, on its feet, since it had stood on its head before. But at the same time, the revolutionary side of Hegel’s philosophy appeared again and, at the same time, was freed from the ideological garb that made it difficult for Hegel to carry it out consistently. The great fundamental idea that the world must be understood not as a collection of complete objects, but as a collection of processes in which objects, seemingly unchangeable, are, like their mental representations in the head, concepts, in continuous change, now arising, now being destroyed, and, despite all the apparent randomness and all the backward steps, in the end progressive development is achieved - this great fundamental idea since the time of Hegel has entered the general consciousness to such an extent that it has barely Will anyone challenge it in its general form? So Marx and Engels themselves call their method materialist dialectics. And yet, it can be resolutely argued that their claims to such a method were groundless. Even such a combination of concepts as materialist dialectics is an obvious absurdity. For Hegel, dialectics means the immanent law of the development of ideas. To this he adds metaphysical idealism: he understands all reality as the self-discovery of an absolute idea. He identifies the foundations of being with the foundations of thinking. And yet, for him, dialectics is nothing more than an immanent rule for the development of ideas. He limited development only to the idea; he believed in the development of the concept and the development of nature; he did not recognize the real development of nature in space and time. Hegel clearly speaks about this in § 249 of the Encyclopedia. Therefore, dialectics cannot be an immanent law of the real development of nature. And if Engels in “Anti-Dühring” tries to prove the opposite, if he tries to prove that dialectics - the negation of the negation - is “the most general and, precisely because of this, the most widely valid and important law of the development of nature, history and thinking, a law that manifests itself in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history, in philosophy, then he reveals by this “a confusion of dialectics with the doctrine of natural development” 16. Already the author of a review of “Capital”, published in the “Bulletin of Europe” in 1872 and approved by Marx in the preface to the second edition of 1 volume of “Capital”, correctly notes: “In appearance, judging by the external form of the presentation, Marx is a great idealist philosopher and, moreover, in the “German”, i.e. in the bad meaning of the word. In fact, he is infinitely more realist than all his predecessors in the field of economic criticism... For him, only one thing is important: to find the law of the phenomena that he studies... For him, what is also important is the law of their changeability, their development, that is, the transition from one form to another, from one order of relationships to another.” Having cited extensive excerpts from this review, Marx unexpectedly declares: “after all, this is nothing other than the dialectical method,” but immediately further makes a distinction between the method of research and the method of presentation. “True, the method of presentation should be formally different from the method of research. Research must grasp the subject in detail, analyze the various forms of its development and find their internal connection. Only when this work is completed can the actual movement be properly depicted. If this succeeds and if the construction ideally reflects the life of the object, then it may seem that we have before us an a priori construction.” Marx had a realistic research method 17 , and only in his presentation did he flirt with dialectics 18 . Marx considered his method an inverted method of Hegel only because he confused method with content and by contrast meant the opposition of materialism to idealism. In recent literature there is no disagreement on the question of the relationship of the theory of historical materialism to the dialectical method. Professor Wipper makes correct remarks 19 “It would be very difficult to agree that Marx needed the artificial light of an abstract dialectical scheme in order to understand reality. One can be sure that his own role is much more original, that from the very beginning he read in the book of reality and abstracted his formula from it, which only later he compared and brought closer to Hegel’s. We are convinced of this by familiarity with the historical material contained in Capital. It consists entirely of examples relating to the history of England... And we must say, contrary to Marx’s own admission, that it was not Hegel’s schemes that he translated into real language, but, on the contrary, the real reality of England was translated into the language of abstractions, which closely coincided with the abstract language of Hegel 20.” The theory of historical materialism does not rely on Hegelian dialectics and does not fall along with the latter, but flirting with dialectics cost Marx dearly: many conclusions in his teaching with the general character of introducing absoluteness into conventional sociological theses are due to the abuse of the dialectical game 21 . Here we can also mention the relationship of the theory of historical materialism to Darwinism, which can also be included among the associations that complicated the genesis of historical materialism. There is reason to consider this question in the hotel on materialist dialectics. It is necessary to distinguish between Marx’s attitude towards Darwinism itself and his own evolutionism. When the biological theory of Darwin (and Spencer) appeared, Marx and Engels hastened to establish their teaching on it; however, the sociological theory of Marx and Engels appeared before the biological theory of Darwin, who, moreover, did not apply his theory to social life 22. And their position in relation to Darwinism, expressed in two or three fragmentary references, remained extremely unclear, for it is not even clear whether they considered Darwinism suitable only for explaining historical development, mainly its dark sides, or found it possible to build a program of social organization in its spirit. Woltmann’s words are quite true that Marx “did not fully think through the problem of the relationship of animal development to human development.” These references deserve mention only because they begin the vast literature on the question of the relationship of socialism to Darwinism 23 . Marx's evolutionism must be explained not by the influence of Darwin, but by the influence of Hegel. That he introduced the idea of ​​evolution into his research must be attributed to his own realistic thinking, although Hegel's philosophy probably also played a significant role in this case; but that he did not stop at the idea of ​​evolution, but transformed it into evolutionism, is to blame for this, undoubtedly a flirtation with Hegelian dialectics. This was successfully formulated by B. A. Kistyakovsky in the book “Social Sciences and Law”. “One cannot blame everything on the dialectical method, which most Marxists now do not even understand or recognize. Much more important is the whole trend in thinking, which Hegelianism at one time paved the way for in the empirical sciences, and which has now completely supplanted it. For the contradictions of orthodox Marxism, Hegelian dialectics is as much to blame as the modern theory of evolutionism. The unrestricted application of the evolutionary principle allows supporters of orthodox Marxism to quietly bypass all the contradictions contained in their theories. The mistake of Marxists is that, having arrived at evolutionism through the dialectical method, they believe that evolutionism is also a method. Adhering to evolutionism, i.e. By following the development of things and phenomena, Marxists want to explain the entire social process with this, in their opinion, methodological principle, while the theory of evolution in general and development in particular cannot explain anything on its own.” Historical materialism as a social theory They usually do not pay enough attention to the fact that historical materialism is nothing more than a social theory, a theory of society in the strictest sense of the word, that only within these limits can an economic explanation of law, politics, religion, morality, and ideology in general be legitimately revealed. As soon as one carelessly or intentionally exceeds these limits, hopeless confusion inevitably arises. Let us carefully read the above passages from the works of Marx and Engels, revealing the idea of ​​historical materialism. “The totality of production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond.” And further: “the dominant idea of ​​a given era,” “ideas that revolutionize the entire society,” “social consciousness has always revolved in certain general forms.” This is what the theory of historical materialism is about - about the forms of social consciousness, about social ideology: this must be remembered once and for all. This is the main idea of ​​historical materialism. In support of this position, one can point to other passages from the works of Marx and Engels. Thus, in “Der 18 Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte 1852” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), Marx writes: “Above the various forms of property, above the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is always erected of diverse and peculiar feelings, illusions, doctrines and worldviews. The whole class, in its entirety, creates and shapes this entire system of ideas from the elements of its material basis and from the corresponding social relations. An individual person, to whom all these illusions, feelings, worldviews and others come due to tradition and upbringing, can, of course, imagine that they constitute the real motive and starting point of his actions.” The same can be read in “Lohnarbeit und Kapital” (Wage Labor and Capital). “The social relations within which individuals produce, i.e., the social relations of production, change, transform together with the change and development of the material means of production, i.e., the forces of production. The relations of production together constitute what is called social relations, society, and form a society standing at a certain historical stage of development and with a unique individual character.” Ancient, feudal, and bourgeois society represent a set of production relations, each of which marks a special stage of development in history.” Marx knows how to make a clear distinction between the social side of personal life and its intimate side. In the preface to the first edition of volume 1 of Capital, he writes: “In my presentation, the matter concerns individuals only insofar as they are the personification of economic categories, bearers of certain class relations and interests. My point of view, which considers the development of socio-economic formations as a natural-historical process, can less than any other make an individual responsible for the relations of which he is a social creature, no matter how subjectively he rises above these relations.” Woltmann in “Historical Materialism” correctly notes: “according to Marx, people can be considered from two sides: as the personification of economic categories and as individuals independent of their economic class position. If in the social sense a person is a product of class position, then subjectively he can still rise above it. So, if we consider the whole person, then in some actions he can rise above the economic motives of both personal and class interests, while in his economic functions he continues to be guided exclusively by economic relations and interests 24." Engels also expresses the main idea of historical materialism in a fairly definite form. So in “Ludw. Feuerbach” he writes: “When it comes to the study of driving forces (die treibenden Mächte) from which - consciously or, as happens most often; unconsciously depended on the motives of historical figures and which were, therefore, the true, final causes (Triebkräfte) of historical events, then we mean not so much the motives of individuals, even the most remarkable, as those motives that set in motion large masses, entire nations or entire classes of a given people (welche grosse Massen, ganze Völker und in jedem Volk wieder ganze Volksklassen in Bewegung setzen"). Plekhanov, who understands “something” in Marxism and knows how to be consistent, gives an excellent formula of historical materialism: “it is not social consciousness that determines social being, but vice versa: social being determines social consciousness.” Also: “It is not the psyche of a social person that determines the disposition of his life, but the disposition of his life that determines his psyche.” “Marxists believe that the development of the morality of a social person is determined by the development of social relations, which, in turn, is determined by the development of productive forces.” “The development of consciousness is determined by the needs of existence. Apply this remark to an explanation of the development of social thought, and you get the theory of historical materialism 25 ". This is what the theory of historical materialism says: about the dependence of social consciousness on socio-economic relations - and only 26. Marxism is not alien to the idea that individuals can free themselves from the pressure of dominant ideas, push away from the class to which they belong. This idea is already visible in the statement of the “Communist Manifesto” that “bourgeois ideologists who managed to reach a theoretical understanding of the general course of historical development join the proletariat 27.” Kautsky in “Bernstein und das socialdemokratische Programm” writes: “The intelligentsia is the social stratum that most easily comes to rise above class and estate limitations, to be imbued with idealistic impulses and to be an exponent not of temporary and isolated interests, but of permanent interests.” the whole society in its totality 28.” Sombart does not argue against the fact that individuals can be humane, compassionate, can rise above class interests - and in general, according to him, one cannot argue about the motives of an individual, there is no place for scientific evidence, since “the final reasons for the decisions of an individual person are hidden in the depths of his personal conviction.” But the class will never give up its privileges for altruistic reasons. “Let me be shown at least the only fact worthy of attention in history when a social class, contrary to its own interests, from altruistic motives would be inclined to make fundamentally important concessions. The only outstanding personalities are undoubtedly. Why not? We see this every day; but the whole class is never 29". Thus, the theory of economic materialism, taken within its strict limits and in strict consistency, gives every reason to distinguish two sides in human life: personal-intimate and social, and it lays claim to an economic explanation of only the second side, only social relations. In its true form, the theory of historical materialism must be recognized as a rather innocent theory. It does not embrace all the intimate, internal, and most importantly religious and ethical content of personal life and intimate relationships between individuals. It is only a theory of society in the rough sense of the word. Society, according to Marx, is social relations based on the antagonism of classes, that is, not the relations of one person to another person, but the relations of a worker to a capitalist, a tenant to a landowner, etc. It is necessary to strictly distinguish between social relationships, which form the mechanism of social life, and personal-intimate relationships, which form a completely special fabric along with the social mechanism 30. To confuse these two orders means to close the path to understanding the true nature of social life. The personal-intimate order reaches its culminating point in the religious and ethical sphere. In religion and morality, as well as in the philosophical understanding of life, it is also necessary to distinguish between two orders: personal, spiritual religion and morality, and social, folk, dominant religion and morality. The uncrossable line between these two orders is drawn by the difference that personal religion and morality are characterized by the sign of absoluteness, freedom, spirituality, and, due to the same character, religion inevitably happens to be personal, ethical, spiritual, and morality is religious, while social morality and folk religion do not have this sign; on the contrary, they are characterized by historical and conditional features. According to the meaning of the theory, religion and morality depend on the socio-economic basis, not personal, but national-social, not personal, but the social side of religion and morality, their social manifestations. The dependence of law, state, and politics on the socio-economic system is easy to understand. Law is a conditional balance of power in relations between individuals and groups, and every power is ultimately economic power. Any other force, having revealed itself, becomes economic, and vice versa. Law always covers economic power, economic interest. One cannot argue with Engels when he calls “economic liberation the center around which every class struggle and all liberation movements that inevitably take a political form revolved.” According to our famous late historian, V. O. Klyuchevsky, “the political order in its final form always reflects the totality and general nature of private human interests and relationships that it supports and on which it rests. Likewise, the connection between folk beliefs and prevailing moral values ​​in society with the social system and economic relations can be almost tactilely demonstrated. Professor Klyuchevsky, calling political and economic facts the main historical facts, writes, for example, about the first period of Russian history: “all other phenomena of this time, institutions, social relations, customs, advances in knowledge and art, even moral and religious life, were direct or remote consequences of the combined action of two (mentioned) factors, the volost trading city and foreign trade.” Professor Kareev observes the same thing in modern European history 31 . “The material needs of man have always made themselves felt in historical movements, and modern science has discovered the economic basis (of course, next to the spiritual) of such purely ideological movements at first glance, such as, for example, religious movements. The theory of historical materialism, in its true grain, stands beyond the boundaries of socialism and, in particular, Marxism. The dependence of social ideology on economic relations is observed and recognized by scientists who stand outside of any connections with Marx and socialism, as we have already partially seen. Rogers 32 , Lippert 33 , Lamprecht 34 , Lacombe 35 , Durkheim 36 and others 37 came, partly later and partly earlier than Marx, to the basic idea of ​​an economic explanation of history in their own way, regardless of the extreme conclusions with which the theory of historical materialism is associated with Marx 38 . According to the basic meaning of the theory of historical materialism, the influence of the socio-economic factor does not extend to the individual in its intimate, predominantly religious and ethical content. Authoritative science asserts with all certainty that social regularity, in particular the statistical stability of mass phenomena, does not in any way capture the individual uniqueness and intimate life of the individual. According to the conclusions of A. A. Chuprov, the author of a solid study “Essays on the Theory of Statistics,” “neither probability nor the law of large numbers deal with a single case. If we, having measured the height of a thousand recruits, find that the average height is equal to a centimeters, then the number a will not tell us anything about one or another of the measured recruits: it can only be used as a characteristic of their entire mass.” It is also good to say Worms 39: “While giving useful indications of the general phenomena of social life, the statistical method does not penetrate into the intimate life of an individual, does not reveal the specific basis of individual activity 40.” Researchers who are mindful of the limits of the social method, no matter how highly they value the collective side of life, will always leave room for the intimate content of personal consciousness and action 41 . It is necessary, however, to know that the independence of personal-intimate consciousness from social existence presupposes the reverse independence of social existence from personal ideas, personal ideals 42 . This not only puts the theory of personal consciousness beyond objections from theorists of social regularity, but eliminates the need to defend it against the idea of ​​​​the continuous development of social consciousness; but in essence these two independences are inextricably linked. One is related to the other in the same way as 5> 3 is to 3 <5. One cannot exist without the other, one cannot be understood without understanding the other. Independent of social existence, personal and intimate consciousness, a religious and ethical idea cannot influence society and has no social power. A person may be in intimate relationships with other individuals, but this realm of intimate relationships is not society as an object of social science. A personal idea becomes a social force, a historical fact, only to the extent that it loses the features of unconditionality and acquires the character of relativity. This is how it appears to the historian. There are ideas, says V. O. Klyuchevsky, which retained the character of personal property, but did not receive a public character; these ideas are manifested in monuments of science and literature, in the works of an artist’s solitary studio, or in feats of personal selfless activity in favor of one’s neighbor. On the contrary, others become public property, become dominant in society, enter into the general consciousness, into morals, into law, become rules, mandatory for those who do not share them, that is, they become social facts. In order for a personal idea to acquire the meaning of a generally recognized rule or belief, a whole device of means is needed that supports its mandatory action, public opinion, the requirement of law or decency, the oppression of police force, it becomes a historical factor when it takes possession of any practical force, power, the masses or capital, a force that transforms it into a law, into an institution, into an industrial or other enterprise, into a custom. What from the entire stock of personal thoughts and feelings enters into everyday circulation, becomes the property of society, a cultural and historical stock, is embodied in an institution, in a legal or economic relationship, in a social demand; an idea that has achieved public recognition becomes the leader of politics, legislation and economic turnover. Not every idea ends up in this process, but when it does, does it retain its original appearance? This question is tantamount to a question about the historical nature of institutions, customs, laws, and therefore there can only be a negative answer to it 43. The idea of ​​personal spiritual life is most important for a correct understanding of the theory of historical materialism. It is of fundamental importance for criticizing the use that is made in Marxism of the theory of historical materialism. In this regard, the significance of the idea of ​​a spiritual personality is immeasurable and can be called fatal. We will return to this later. Here we are establishing the true nature of the theory of historical materialism as a social theory. This character of the theory is not only forgotten by apologetics, but also by Marxism itself, which does not remain true to its own foundations. Marxism is known as absolute economism, as absolute objectivism and precisely sociologism: it derives from economic relations any and all ideology 44, that is, it does not recognize religion and morality at all, does not accept any ideals, and it considers the collective to be the only reality, and does not see anything ontological, sacred in the individual, declaring it a simple point of intersection of social influences, the transmission of social movements 45. We see that Marxism, as absolute economism and absolute objectivism, has no support for itself in the theory of historical materialism 46 . Freedom and necessity. From absolute economism, from the absolute determinism of man, Marxism jumps, in a dialectical game, to absolute freedom, which, upon closer examination, turns out to be no more justified than economism. The social consciousness of people is determined in its forms by their social existence. What is this order of life based on, in which “the process of production controls man, and not man rules over them”? Marxism gives a definite answer to this question: the subordination of people to the economic structure is based on the unconsciousness of those who submit, on their spiritual blindness. In the words of Marx (Capital), “in the system of society that we are now studying, the actions of people in the social process of production are purely atomistic. As a result of this, their relations one to another in production take on a material character, independent of their control and conscious individual activity.” This is what Marx calls fetishism. In particular, he calls goods a fetish. “A certain social relationship between people takes on in their eyes a fantastic form of relationships between objects. To find an analogy for such relationships, one must turn to the lowland region of popular beliefs, where the products of the human mind seem to be independent beings, gifted with life and entering into relationships with each other and with people. The same thing happens in the commodity world with human-made products. This I call the fetishism inherent in the products of labor, since they are produced in the form of commodities, and therefore inseparable from commodity production.” Unconsciousness, obviously, is a historical, transitory feature of economic relations, and, obviously, the very moment of indicating the unconsciousness of the social process serves as the beginning of the establishment of new orders. Marx predicts the advent of the reign of economic freedom. Marx considers the main sign of this freedom to be the disappearance of beliefs. “The reflection of the real world in beliefs can disappear only when the conditions of work and practical life present a person with clear and reasonable relations to his fellow men and to nature. Social life, the basis of which is material production and the relationships they presuppose, will only be freed from the mysterious fog that envelops it, when it becomes the product of people freely united in society, acting consciously and in accordance with a definite plan 47." Marx compares the onset of future freedom to awakening from a dream. He calls the entire previous history of mankind, including the present stage, the prehistoric era of human society. Engels also speaks about the dominance of unconsciousness in the modern economic system and the coming reign of freedom. In his early Outlines for a Critique of National Economy, he writes about the law of competition, confirmed by the validity of commercial crises: “What opinion should we have of a law which can only be realized by periodic revolutions? Such a law is a law of nature, resting on the unconsciousness of those participating in the exchange. Fluctuations in competition and its tendency to crises would become impossible if producers themselves knew how much consumers needed, if they organized production and distributed it among themselves. Produce, therefore, as people, and not as atoms isolated from each other, devoid of tribal consciousness, and you will overcome these artificial and untenable contradictions. But as long as you continue to produce as before, unconsciously, meaninglessly, leaving everything to the mercy of fate, trade crises will not disappear.” The same theme is explored in Anti-Dühring. “Every society based on commodity production has the peculiarity that in it the producers have lost power over their own social relations. Each one produces with his own means, which befalls him, and for his own personal needs. No one knows how many of his products will reach the market, how many of them will be consumed at all, no one knows whether there is a real need for his individual product, whether the costs of the product will be covered and whether it will be sold at all. Anarchy of social production reigns. But commodity production, like any other form of production, has its own laws inherent in it, inseparable from it, and these laws operate, despite anarchy, in it and through it. They manifest themselves in the only surviving form of social connection, in exchange, and reveal their effect in relation to individual producers as coercive laws of competition. At first they are even unknown to these manufacturers and are only gradually understood through long experience. They appear, therefore, without the participation of producers and against their will, as blindly acting natural laws of the form of their production. The product dominates the producers. In any society with naturally developing production, and modern society is such, it is not the producers who dominate the means of production, but the means of production who dominate the producers. In such a society, each new lever of production necessarily turns into a new instrument of slavery of producers to the means of production. This applies, first of all, to that lever of production that, until the emergence of large-scale industry, was the most powerful, the division of labor. In what way is it possible for humanity to free itself from this enslavement to the means of production, from the senseless slavery to economic relations? This will happen by recognizing the social nature of modern productive forces and by harmonizing modes of production, appropriation and exchange with the social character of the means of production. In this way, the social character of the means of production and products, which now turns against the producers themselves, which periodically violates the methods of production and exchange and manifests itself only violently and destructively as a blindly acting natural law (sich nur als blindwirkendes Naturgesetz gewaltthatig und zerstörend durchsetzt), is carried out by the producers with full consciousness and is transformed from a cause of hindrance and periodic failures into a powerful lever of production itself. The forces that manifest themselves in social life (die gesellschaftlich wirksamen Krafte) act in exactly the same way as natural forces: blindly, violently, destructively, until we recognize them and take them into account. But if we have somehow come to know them, if we have comprehended their action, their direction, their consequences, then it is up to us alone to subordinate them more or less to our will and achieve our goals through them. This especially needs to be said about modern powerful productive forces. As long as we stubbornly refuse to understand their nature and their character, and the capitalist mode of production resists such understanding and its defenders resist, as long as these forces act in spite of us, against us, as long as they dominate us. But once we comprehend their nature, they can turn into obedient slaves in the hands of united producers from demonic rulers. Just as the forces of electricity and fire have been conquered by man, so the productive forces will be conquered with the socially planned regulation of production. When society takes possession of the means of production, then the production of goods will cease, and at the same time the dominance of the product over the producers will cease. Anarchy in the field of social production will be replaced by planned, conscious organization. The struggle for existence between disparate individuals will cease. As a result of this, for the first time, man, in the strict sense, will finally separate himself from the animal kingdom, move from the sphere of animal conditions of existence into the truly human realm. The environment of living conditions surrounding man, which until now dominated people, will come under the power and control of people, who will now for the first time become conscious, actual masters of nature, becoming masters of their own social life. The laws of their own social activity, which until now opposed them as alien natural laws dominating them, will then be applied by people with full knowledge of the matter and, as a result of this, will be in obedience to them. People's own social life, which hitherto opposed them as dependent on nature and history, will now be their own free affair. Objective, alien forces that hitherto possessed history will come under the control of the people themselves. Only from that time will people themselves, with full consciousness, make their own history, only from that time will the social causes they set in motion will, in most cases and to an ever-increasing degree, bring the results they desire. This will be the leap of humanity from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom - es ist der Sprung der Menschheit aus dem Reiche der Nothwendigkeit in das Reich der Freiheit.” How should we understand this “promised” kingdom of freedom? Apparently, the entire analysis of the Marxist theory of society comes down to this question. If in the sphere of socio-historical development there are two phases, of which in one the natural-social necessity is complicated by the darkness of unconsciousness, giving the whole process the character of meaninglessness and artificiality, while in the second the process unfolds in full open space, in natural conditions, in natural light, then, of course, the process can be fully comprehended only in the second phase. It is interesting for us to observe how until now there were differences between the motives that guided human consciousness and the real reasons that forced people to adopt certain forms of social order: we are curious, looking back at the past history, to observe how people were deceived in their thoughts about themselves, how they played the role of puppets dancing under the influence of material productive forces while they considered themselves the creators of their lives and believed in a providence that governed everything. However, all this happened before, all this dependence must cease with the dawn of consciousness. The laws that have governed the past history of mankind have only historical interest. It is important for science and philosophy to study processes in a state of freedom. How should one imagine the coming kingdom of freedom? It turns out that in this kingdom necessity will not disappear, that all the freedom that socialism so loudly proclaims consists only in the social organization of labor and the distribution of products. This is how Marx decisively explains freedom in a passage from the third volume of Capital, which has already been quoted earlier. “The kingdom of freedom comes in reality only when labor, forced by need and external expediency, ceases; therefore, in essence it is outside the sphere of material production proper. Just as a savage, in order to satisfy his needs, to maintain his existence and reproduction, has to fight with nature, civilized man has to do the same, and this has to be done under all kinds of social forms and under all kinds of methods of production. With its development, this area of ​​natural necessities expands, since its needs increase, but at the same time the productive forces that satisfy them also increase. Freedom in this area can only consist in the fact that man, who has become a social being, that the united producers regulate their exchange of substances with nature intelligently, subordinate it to their general control, instead of letting it rule over them as a blind force, so that this is done with the least waste of force and under conditions most worthy of their human nature and most corresponding to it. But it still remains the realm of necessity. Behind it begins the development of human powers, which serves as its own end, a real kingdom of freedom, which, however, can only flourish if it has such a kingdom of necessity as its foundation.” Engels, following Hegel, speaks even more directly about the relationship of freedom to necessity in the sense of the latter’s irremovability in Anti-Dühring. “Hegel was the first to correctly present the relationship between freedom and necessity. For him, freedom is an understanding of necessity. The need to pour is blind insofar as it is not understood (blind ist die Nothwendigkeit nur insofern dieselbe nicht begriffen wird). Freedom does not lie in imaginary independence from the laws of nature, nor in the knowledge of these laws and the associated ability to systematically use them for certain purposes. This applies as much to the laws of external nature as to those that govern the physical and spiritual existence of man himself: two series of laws that we can separate only in thought, and not in reality. Therefore, freedom of will means nothing more than the ability of a person to be able to decide with knowledge of the matter. The freer, therefore, a person's decision in relation to a known question, the more necessarily the content of this decision will be determined, while uncertainty, resting on knowledge, which, apparently, arbitrarily chooses between many different and mutually contradictory possible solutions, thereby proves its unfreedom, its subordination to the object over which it was supposed to dominate. Freedom, therefore, consists in that mastery over oneself and over external nature, which is based on the knowledge of natural necessity.” Once again we find in Marx the same idea about the irreducible necessity of the natural process in the preface to the first edition of the first volume of Capital. “Even if society has fallen on the trail of the natural law of its movement, and the ultimate goal of this work was to discover the economic law of movement of modern society, then it can neither skip the natural phases of its development nor eliminate them through decrees.” Marx claims very little. “But,” he adds, it can shorten and lessen the pain of childbirth”—and that’s all. Freedom, neither in the form of knowledge, nor in the form of social organization of labor, does not replace necessity 48. The final solution to the socio-historical problem is hidden in the nature of the socio-historical pattern. We have already “previously seen how socialist theory constantly moves from the thought of the naturalness of the historical process to the thought of the consciousness of aspirations, which, when colliding, form a sphere of apparent chance, and from the thought of chance dominating the surface of the historical sea, again to the thought of the lawfulness of historical development; we have seen how Marxism tries to discover the laws of social development, and precisely the laws that define the modern economic era. Now we are not talking about the laws that scientific socialism discovers, but about the general nature of the socio-historical process. For this is the difference between the tasks of the theory of historical materialism and the tasks of Marx’s economic teaching 49 . Socio-historical process. Marx gives a fairly definite answer to the question about the nature of the socio-historical process. Recognizing the automaticity, spontaneity and independence of personal foresight of the socio-economic process, Marx at the same time rejects the idea of ​​general laws of economic life. "... From such forms, he writes in Capital, the categories of bourgeois political economy consist. These forms of thinking are objectively true insofar as they reflect actual social relations, but these relations are valid only for a certain, given historical era in which commodity production is a social mode of production.” In particular, about the law of population, or reproduction, he writes: “the working population, while accumulating capital, produces at the same time an increasing relative surplus of itself. This is the law of population growth inherent in the capitalist mode of production; in general, each historically specific mode of production corresponds to its own law of population growth, which is valid only within its limits. The abstract law of reproduction exists only for plants and animals, as long as they are not subject to the historical influence of man.” And also: “the more significant the social wealth, the functioning capital, the size and energy of its accumulation, therefore, the greater the absolute size of the working population and the productivity of its labor, the greater the relative surplus of population and the reserve industrial army... But the larger this reserve army in comparison with the active army, the greater the constant surplus of population or those layers of workers whose poverty is in inverse relation to the burden of their labor. Finally, the greater the layer of working class infirmities and the reserve industrial army, the greater the official pauperism. This is an absolutely general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other general laws, in its manifestation it is modified by the influence of numerous conditions.” In the preface to the second edition, Marx writes out a description of his methodology from the above-mentioned review of the “Bulletin of Europe”. This reviewer wrote: “There are no general laws for Marx. (From his writings, one must conclude that direct study of economic phenomena belonging to various stages of the history of economic development led him to the denial of economic laws common to all stages of development. In his opinion, on the contrary, each (major) historical period has its own laws (to which life obeys only as long as it survives this period). But as soon as life has survived a given period of development, left a given stage and entered another, it begins to be governed by other laws 50 "51 etc. Likewise, Engels writes in Anti-Dühring: “The conditions under which people produce and exchange commodities change from country to country, and in each country from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and all historical periods. A huge gulf between the bow and arrow, the stone knife and the exchange relations of savages that appear only in exceptional cases, on the one hand, and steam-powered machines of enormous power, the mechanical loom, railways and the English Bank on the other. The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego did not reach mass production and world trade, as well as bill speculation and stock market crashes. Therefore, whoever wants to apply the same laws to the political economy of Tierra del Fuego and to the political economy of modern England will obviously not bring to the light of God anything except the most banal commonplaces. Thus, political economy is a highly historical science. It deals with historical, i.e., constantly changing material; it first of all examines the special laws of each individual stage in the evolution of production and exchange, and only at the end of this study can it establish a few completely universal laws that have application to production and exchange 52. Based on the idea of ​​the individuality of the historical process, Marx joins the ranks of representatives of the later trend in the theory of historical knowledge, whose task is the most decisive overcoming of naturalism in social philosophy. Here a problem is put on a principled basis and solved, which turned out to be beyond the capabilities of the historical school. As the most prominent representatives of this trend, we can name Dilthey, Wundt, Münsterberg, who divide the entire volume of scientific knowledge into two groups of sciences (according to content): the sciences of nature (Naturwissenschaften) and the sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften), Windelband and Rickert, who distinguish two groups of sciences: the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture (Kulturwissenschaften) - in methodological terms. Especially The theory of Windelband and Rickert became widely known. Windelband distinguishes between nomothetic thinking, which is used in the natural sciences, and ideographic thinking, the use of which creates the historical sciences. Natural science looks for laws, history - individual phenomena. In the first case, thinking strives to move from establishing the particular to understanding the general connection, in the second, it stops at carefully clarifying the particular. A natural scientist needs a given object of his observation only as a special case of a generic concept; he is interested only in those features that are important for understanding the general pattern: the historian has his task of ideally recreating any product of the past with all its individual features. Likewise, Rickert 53 adopts a generalizing method (generalisierende Auffassung) for natural science, and an individualizing method (individualisierende Auflassung) for history. He divides all sciences into natural sciences or those operating with general concepts (naturwissenschaftlichen oder allgemeinbegrifflichen) sciences of nature and sciences of culture operating with individual concepts (individuellbegrifflichen). What we call nature is the result of a special angle of view in knowledge, a special understanding of reality: abstracted from any concept of individual value (wertfrei), knowledge of the general in things, the compilation of general concepts or laws that are useful in practical application. On the contrary, the individualizing view of reality is the point of view of a person as feeling, wanting and acting, as wanting to navigate among individual reality everywhere, as making an assessment, as paying attention to the unique and, by virtue of uniqueness, a single, indivisible, integral, individual unity. History does not need general laws: where reality must be comprehended in its individuality and concreteness, it makes no sense to subsume it under general laws, or to establish historical laws. Since the concept of law includes only that which can always be considered in such a way as if it were repeated any number of times, then the concept of historical development and the concept of law are mutually exclusive. Historically, law is a contradictio in adjecto. However, the logical opposition between nature and history has nothing in common with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an individual understanding of history does not at all affirm individual freedom. Rickert recognizes historical causation, he only refuses to call it a causal law. According to him, every real connection between cause and effect must be characterized as a historical causal connection in the broadest sense of the word, since every cause and every effect are different from every other cause and from every other effect. The concept of a causal law is applicable when individual causal connections are considered in relation to what they have in common with other causal connections, or if an unconditionally general concept is formed that contains only what is repeated in any number of causal connections. Historical causality differs from natural science, so the concept of causality, as such, is not identical with the concept of natural regularity. On the contrary, the concept of a single and individual causal series excludes the possibility of expressing it through the concepts of natural laws. Individual causation, or, as one might say, individual law, has the meaning of “in general necessity,” as Klyuchevsky puts it, the power of things. “Human affairs have their own internal regularity, which is not subject to the discretion of the people who do them, and is usually called the power of things.” The idea of ​​individual causality and historical necessity rejects two extreme ideas about the historical process, firstly, the idea of ​​it as a kingdom of freedom, and secondly, the concept of historical regularity. An individual understanding of history does not abolish the application of general laws to cultural and historical material. From a purely formal-logical point of view, this entire reality could become the object of both natural science and historical presentation. And the natural scientific method is applicable to the field of culture: it cannot be argued that there are only historical sciences about culture. In principle, spiritual life fully admits of a natural-scientific interpretation; no one, therefore, can prevent natural science from inheriting the objects with which history deals in the ordinary sense of the word. Not only is a natural scientific interpretation of culture possible next to the historical sciences of culture, but for the historian it is important to know causal laws, so that within the historical science itself, the individualizing method can be most closely connected with the generalizing one. According to Windelband, the idiographic sciences at every step need general principles, the correct justification of which they can only borrow from the nomothetic disciplines. Any causal explanation of any historical process presupposes general ideas about the course of things in general; and if we reduce historical evidence to its purely logical form, then its main premises will be the natural laws of what is happening, especially the laws of mental processes. Anyone who has no idea of ​​how people generally think, feel and desire will not only not be able to unite individual events for a general knowledge of what is happening, but will not even be able to critically establish the facts. And Rickert considers the help of natural laws necessary for history. The fact that the expression of historical causal connections is possible only with the help of concepts containing some general causal concept or some law of nature indicates that historical science also deals with general concepts formed through natural science. But the fact is that these laws, on which historical research is based, are developed by psychology and sociology not historically, but in a natural scientific, abstract way; these are abstract laws of psychology and sociology that underlie historical necessity, but are not the laws of history and do not create historical patterns. There is a sociological pattern, but the historical course is unplanned 54 . This is, in its developed form, the theory of the historical process that Marx envisions. It finds wide acceptance both among historians and theorists of social philosophy, who critically develop it from one side or another. This theory, as we see, does not allow the application of natural scientific analogies to the historical process, which, however, find a place in the socio-economic teachings of Marx. He takes a naturally scientific point of view when in the preface to the first edition he writes: “In essence, we are not talking about a higher or lower degree of development of social antagonisms arising from the natural laws of capitalist production. We are talking about these laws themselves, about tendencies that operate and manifest themselves with iron necessity. A more industrialized country only shows less developed countries a picture of their own future 55.” And the general structure of his economic teaching with its main thesis about the possibility of historical foresight and the resulting scientific construction of a social ideal has a natural-scientific appearance. The theory of historical materialism, to which Marx’s economic accounting refers us, this naturalism in the view of the historical process is not only not confirmed, but is also fundamentally eliminated. The historical process is not the kingdom of freedom, but the rationality of the natural process cannot be attributed to it. Here, in considering the nature of historical regularity, we come to the most decisive point in the criticism of the theory of historical materialism. We will return to it below: before it is finally formulated, several preliminary issues still need to be discussed. In the nature of the historical process, in the fact that it does not have the rationality of a natural process for a person, nothing changes the possibility of social organization of the economic life of society. A social organization cannot be the bearer of absolute ethical ideals: its driving idea-force is not ethics, but law 56 . The conditional, relative nature of social ideals corresponds in the practical area to the indicated nature of the historical process in the theoretical: neither in theory nor in practice is a complete rationalization of socio-historical life carried out. And a consideration of the class struggle will most likely convince us of this. The second half of the theory of economic materialism is the doctrine of class struggle. Marx does not give an accurate and stable definition of both the concept of productive force and the concept of class. From a comparison of everything he said on this issue, the economically antagonistic nature of the class is clear: a social class is a social group united by the same economic interests, i.e., the same attitude of its members to social production and distribution, - which has common antagonists in social process, that is, connected by a common struggle with hostile classes. General economic interest and social hostility are the main points in Marx's teaching on class struggle 57. The doctrine of social classes is necessary in the theory of historical materialism, for only class interest and enmity make an economically abstract law a real force. If social revolutions have their root not in the heads of people, not in ideas, if the formal will expressed in politics and other ideology must have a certain content, then the economic interest that gives this content carries within itself the final explanation of the historical process. It is in no way possible to imagine the matter in such a way that the social laws of economic life fatally and by themselves, without passing through the heads of people and without acting on their will, move the historical process; It is impossible to imagine the matter in such a way that the historical law is only ideally reflected in the heads of people, only through an idea or understanding it moves their will: economically, the law is reflected in the material interest of people and in this way forces them to act. “Without interest, the will is zero,” says Marx. In the concept of economic class, apparently, lies the final solution to the Marxist problem: the coincidence of objective law with activity. Ideas can be powerless and unstable. Not that interested. It inevitably contains a material element, which is subject to objective regularity; it constitutes a real force that steadily determines the human will: due to material interests, due to the fact that people first of all “must drink, eat, dress, have a home,” they act naturally. Marxism applies the theory of class struggle both to the past and to the future. With the idea of ​​class struggle, he illuminates the entire past of human history. “From the very beginning of civilization, the basis of production was the antagonism of castes, estates, classes, the antagonism of accumulated and direct labor. Without antagonism there is no progress: this is the law that civilization has followed to this day. The entire history of every society has hitherto been the history of class struggle.” But consciousness also matters for the struggle; it can also be discussed in relation to the future. Each class comes to at least two phases in its development, in its social struggle: the phase of unconscious struggle and the phase of conscious struggle. In the first, it is a class in relation to other classes, an unformed class; in the second, it is a class for itself, a formed class. This is how it was with the bourgeoisie. “In the process of development of the bourgeoisie, we must distinguish between two stages: the one during which it formed into a class under the rule of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and the one when it, having already formed into a class, overthrew absolutism and monarchy in order to transform society into a bourgeois society.” The same thing is observed in the history of the proletariat, in the history of its struggle with the bourgeoisie. This struggle began even before it was felt by both sides, noticed by them, appreciated, understood, recognized and openly proclaimed; At first it manifested itself in the form of private, sudden conflicts, accompanied by destructive acts. “While the proletariat has not yet developed enough to take shape as a class, so far, therefore, the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is not yet of a political nature, and the productive forces are still have not developed enough in the depths of the bourgeoisie itself to make it possible to provide for the material conditions necessary for the liberation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society - until then the theoreticians of the proletarian class are only utopians.” “Economic conditions first turned the mass of the population into workers. The dominance of capital created for this mass a common position, common interests. Thus, this mass has already become a class in relation to capital, but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, several phases of which we have outlined, this mass unites and forms a class for itself. The interests it protects become mass interests. But the class struggle is a political struggle.” This is all taken from The Poverty of Philosophy. Previously, the same thing was stated in the Communist Manifesto. The unplanned struggle of the proletariat is gradually being comprehended. “With the development of industry, the proletariat not only grows numerically, but also concentrates in larger masses; The strength of the proletarians is growing and they are beginning to recognize this strength. Individual clashes between worker and bourgeois are increasingly taking on the character of a clash between two classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.” Marx and Engels considered their own calling to be the formation of the proletariat into a class, the organization of the proletarian class. It is quite clear what significance consciousness has in the history of a class: it strengthens the unification of a social group, united by a community of interests, and intensifies its struggle with social opponents to the extreme, giving it a political form. There is nothing radical in such an action of consciousness on the historical process. Marx and Engels not only thought that the proletariat, with the assistance of scientific socialism, was reaching the last phase of its class development, as had previously happened with other classes, for example, the bourgeoisie: but they also believed that the proletariat was now achieving such clarity of class consciousness as no class had ever achieved before, so that the proletariat was called upon to take an exceptional place in the world history of class interests and class struggles. “The characteristic feature of our era - the era of the bourgeoisie, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, is that the antagonism of classes has now been simplified.” And this is not enough. The proletarian struggle strives for goals that no social class has ever set itself before: its final goal is the destruction of classes. His immediate program is the achievement of political power, political dominance, to which a struggle to the death leads: “fight or death, bloody war or non-existence.” But having achieved political dominance through a bloody struggle, the proletariat will destroy the very possibility of political power, the very existence of class rule. “All previous social classes, having achieved dominance, tried to strengthen their position by extending their method of appropriation to the entire society. Proletarians can master the social productive forces only when they destroy their own method of appropriation, and thereby, in general, the method of appropriation that dominates modern society. The proletarians have nothing to strengthen; they must, on the contrary, destroy all established methods of private enrichment and private provision. When the antagonism of classes is destroyed with the further course of development and all production is concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, then the political character of social power will disappear. Political power is, strictly speaking, power organized by one class to oppress others. If the proletariat, in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, organizes itself into a class, achieves class domination and, as the ruling class, destroys the old relations of production, then along with these relations of production it also destroys the conditions for the existence of class antagonism, destroys the classes themselves, and thereby its own class domination.” The same is proclaimed in “La misère de la philosophie”. “The condition for the liberation of the working class is the destruction of all classes, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, the bourgeoisie, was the destruction of all classes and all ranks. The working class, in the course of its development, will replace the old civil society with an association in which there will be no place for either classes or their antagonism, and in which there will no longer be political power in the proper sense of the word, since it is political power that is the official expression of the antagonism of classes within civil society.” The idea of ​​liberating the future society from class division is included in the concept of that “leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” which both Marx and Engels talk about. And this idea is just as groundless and utopian, just as contrary to the realistic method of research. This idea is not the fruit of observation of real life, but an invention of a dreamy head. The proletariat, of course, strives for equality with the ruling class, but this desire is only an inevitable, but completely conditional and transitory moment through which the thoughts and desires of the oppressed must pass. It is no less relative, as is the desire of the ruling class to retain its own. We have traces of the main origin of the idea of ​​​​the abolition of class division by the proletariat in a future society in Marx’s early article “On the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Marx discusses here the social condition of Germany and France. In Germany all classes are oppressed by an extremely limited outlook. All individual classes in Germany lack, above all, consistency, sharpness, courage, and steadfastness in order to play the role of a negative representative of society. The classes of Germany lack to the same extent that breadth of soul which is capable of identifying itself at least for one moment with the soul of the people, that genius which inspires material force and transforms it into political power, that courage which boldly challenges the enemy: “I am nothing, and I must be everything.” On the contrary, at the basis of German morality and honesty, not only individual but also class, lies that humble egoism which everywhere defends its own limitations and which allows others to defend their limitations. Hence the failures of the social struggle. Every sphere of civil society in Germany suffers defeats even before it has celebrated its victory; it begins to set its own limits even before it has overthrown those that limit it; she shows her heartlessness even before she has had the opportunity to show her generosity. Thus the opportunity to play a major role is already over before it is born, and each class has no sooner begun to struggle with the class above it than it is already involved in the struggle with the class below it. In France it is the opposite (antithesis). Every class there is a political idealist; they feel, first of all, not as a special class, but as a representative of social needs in general. The role of liberator passed, therefore, in turn in a series of dramatic actions to the various classes of the French people. What is salvation (synthesis)? What is the positive possibility of German emancipation? The answer is given according to the method of Hegelian dialectics: in the formation of a class with radical goals, a class of bourgeois society, which is not a class of bourgeois society at all, an estate, which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere that has a universal character due to its universal suffering, which does not lay claim to any special right, since it does not tolerate any special injustice, but injustice in general, which lays claim not to some historical title, but to a human title, which is not in some one-sided contradiction with the consequences of the German political system, but in an all-round contradiction with its premises, which, finally, cannot liberate itself without liberating itself from all other spheres of society and, therefore, without liberating all other spheres of society, in a word, a sphere that is the complete loss of man and which, therefore, cannot find itself without man regaining himself entirely. This disintegration of society, embodied in a special class, is the proletariat... Thus, Marx outlined the ideal of the proletariat in advance, developed a formula into which the historical development of this class should fit, and he developed this formula according to all the rules of the Hegelian method. The role of the proletariat as the liberator of the future society from class division in its main genesis is inextricably linked with such ghosts of German dialectics as “injustice in general”, “man in general” and the like: with the disappearance of these ghosts, the castle in the air of the proletarian ideal disappears. Marx seems to cite a historical basis when he writes: “the condition for the liberation of the working class is the destruction of all classes, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, the bourgeoisie, was the destruction of all classes.” But it is precisely this historical example that suggests otherwise. We agree that the proletariat cannot be called the fourth estate and that the bourgeoisie destroyed all classes: but with the destruction of classes, the “kingdom of freedom” did not come, the kingdom of an absolutely rational organization, but the time of class struggle came: estates were replaced by classes. The replacement of estates with classes from the point of view of the “leap into the kingdom of freedom” does not have any significance - serfdom is no more distant from this ideal than the economic slavery of the proletariat. If the kingdom of freedom did not come with the abolition of classes, then why should we expect that this kingdom will immediately come with the destruction of classes? Is there no more reason to think that just as classes have replaced estates, so classes will be replaced by something homogeneous, some social division, just as far from the ideal of social freedom? Will the class struggle be replaced by the struggle of professional groups or local corporations, as A. Menger claims 58? Isn't there less hope 59 for the coming of a rational organization, since social antagonisms 60 are not exhausted by the class struggle? What remains of the theory of class struggle, minus assumptions about the past as losing value with the onset of class consciousness, and dreams about the future as utopian, is an empirical idea of ​​​​the power of class interests, which, it is true, is not completely meaningless, but also not completely rational, that is, having neither the rationality of a natural process nor the absolute rationality of an ethical organization. Conscious class interest is a self-sufficient quantity that is not determined by an unconditional law. He is never less than himself, that is, natural, and can never be above himself, that is, ethically reasonable. Borrowing a comparison from the Communist Manifesto, we can say that the class interest of the proletariat for Marxism is like those underground forces that it can call up, but which it cannot control. And the constituted class, in the further process, is guided by lively interest, and does not follow a predetermined path. The later history of the proletariat is the history of social democracy's tactical retreats from the orthodox path to the path of revisionist compromises 61 . And we must evaluate the fact of class struggle and class interests according to a realistic criterion, and not according to a preconceived theory. This is a fact that has to be taken into account and in the face of which any sermon is powerless. Class struggle brings relative social utility: social life, and not vegetation, consists of nothing more than the continuous restoration of harmony of interests, and there is no other way to this social harmony except the struggle of interests 62. The principle of class struggle, however, is never absolute, always tempered by social solidarity: it should not be absolute since its usefulness is relative: class struggle is useful only to the extent that it leads to social harmony. Here, more than anywhere else, it is justified that life has its own meaning, which seems madness to the human mind. This is a truly realistic worldview. Economic materialism is revealed in a long series of limitations and additions with which it is surrounded by the authors of the theory, its supporters and critics. The very attempt of Marx and Engels to establish their teaching on the later biological theory of Darwin and Spencer shows that they felt the incompleteness of the theory of historical materialism. In the third volume of Capital, Marx made a change to the formula of historical materialism that recognized the importance of the nation as a socio-historical factor. “The same economic basis, identical in its most important conditions, thanks to various empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial characteristics, historical influences acting from the outside, can manifest itself in countless modifications and transitions, which can only be comprehended by the analysis of such empirically given circumstances.” Engels further contributed to the modification of the theory. Having become familiar with Morgan’s works on the history of the family (“Systems of consanguinity and affinity” 1871 and “Ancient Society” 1877), Engels found himself forced to add a new factor to the factor of material production - the family - to explain historical life. He did this in the book “Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats” 1884. Even more important are his four letters on historical materialism: the first dated September 21, 1890, the second dated October 27 of the same year, the third dated July 14, 1893, and the fourth dated January 25, 1894 63 . Here historical materialism is limited in two respects: firstly, economics is not called the only determining principle in history, but only determining historical development in the last analysis; secondly, the interaction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure is recognized. “According to the materialist understanding of history,” Engels writes here, “the determining moment in history is ultimately (in letzter Instanz) the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I asserted more than this (mehr hat weder Marx noch ich je behauptet). If someone turns this thought in the direction that the economic moment is the only determining factor (das einzig bestimmende), then he turns this thesis into an abstract, absurd phrase that says nothing. The economic situation constitutes the basis, but various aspects of the superstructure - the political forms of the class struggle and its result, the social system that is established after a won battle by the victorious class, etc., legal forms, even the reflection of all these actual conflicts in the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, all this influences the course of the historical struggle and, in many cases, primarily determines their form. It is in the interaction of all these moments that, in the end, the entire infinite number of contingencies flows through, like necessity, the economic drive.” “Since religious people, philosophers, etc., form an independent group among the social division of labor, the products of their activity, including their errors, have a reverse effect (einen rückwirkenden Einfluss) on all social development, even economic.” Engels directly adds: “But still they themselves are under the powerful influence of economic development.” More. “Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic development, etc. are based on economic development. But they all react to each other and to the economic base. It is not necessary to imagine the matter in such a way that only one economic situation serves as a cause, is the only active one, and everything else is just a passive effect. But interaction occurs on the basis of economic necessity, which always manifests itself in the final analysis... Consequently, there is no, as it would sometimes seem convenient to assume, an automatic action of the economic situation, but people themselves make their history, however, in the given environment that determines it, on the basis of established factual relations, of which economic, no matter how influenced they are by other political and ideological relations, are ultimately decisive and form a guiding thread that alone leads to understanding.” E. Bernstein in “Die Voraussetzungen des Socialismus und die Aufgabe der Socialdemokratie,” attaches great importance to the idea expressed by Engels about the interaction of ideological and economic factors. But Plekhanov, Kautsky, Mehring persistently protest against the idealistic claims associated with it. Engels did not say anything new compared to Marx, who never forgot about the mediating role of the mental factor, but the fact is that, according to Marx, human activity itself is not free, but necessary. It is clear that, without leaving the limits of economic materialism, all sorts of idealistic attempts revolve in a vicious circle. It is equally obvious that the idea of ​​​​the mutual dependence of economic and ideological factors does not gain any more weight from the fact that it is presented as an objection to the theory of historical materialism, as Xenopolus 64, Wagner 65 and others 66 do. This idea contains the thought that limits this theory about the dependence of economic relations on the spiritual sphere, but it also includes the thought that confirms the theory about the dependence of the spiritual sphere on the economy, no matter what the degree or form of this dependence. Weisengrün 67 recognizes three phases in the evolution of humanity: the first, when the predominant importance belonged to family conditions (Epoche der Familienbedingungen), the second, when economic interests played a dominant role, in the third era, the ideological superstructure renounces its economic basis and becomes independent. However, later 68 the author himself stated that this interpretation of historical evolution does not overcome the socialist tendency of the theory of historical materialism. Bernstein leans more strongly towards idealism. In the article “The Realistic and Ideological Moment in Socialism 69,” he argues that historical materialism must inevitably recognize “ideal forces.” This is, first of all, an interest when it is conscious and mediocre and not a purely personal interest, that is, the interest of the entire class, requiring sacrifice of personal benefits. In this case, interest is closely associated with the social or ethical element and is not only an intellectual, but also a moral, in short, an ideal force. The second “ideal force” of idealism is knowledge, without which the proletariat cannot do without. Proletarian ideas, i.e. the socialist understanding of the state, society, history, ideology, being realistic in their direction, since primary attention is paid to the material factors of development, still represent mental reflections, conclusions based on the connection of facts revealed with the help of thought, and therefore are necessarily colored by ideology. This is, thirdly, moral consciousness, or legal outlook. Justice is a very strong motive for the socialist movement, and in general no lasting movement of the masses exists without a moral motivation. There is no need to idealize this impulse; envy often also serves as a source of desire for justice, but whether this desire is rooted in sublime or base motives, it always remains an ideological factor. And yet, Bernstein only wants to complement the theory of historical materialism, and not to reject it (... verzichte ich keineswegs auf die ökonomische Begründung der sozialistischen Forderungen, noch leugne ich dm engen Zusammenhang der sozialistischen Bewegung mit der ökonomischen Hut Wicklung der Gesellschaft). Jaurès, in his article “The Idealist Understanding of History” (Neue Zeit 1896), argues that the materialist explanation of history, which sees the essential basis and ultimate driving force of historical development in economic relations, and the idealist explanation, according to which the idea of law and justice is inherent in humanity from the beginning and its historical movement is determined not by a mechanical and automatic change in the method of production, but by the influence of an a priori given ideal of justice, are not mutually exclusive, just as, according to the explanation Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, determinism and freedom are reconciled. The materialistic and idealistic concepts must penetrate each other in the same way as in the organic life of man the mechanics of the brain and free consciousness penetrate each other. Our life is both physiological and conscious life, mechanical and spontaneous. There is not a single thought that does not correspond to a movement of the brain, and there is not a single movement in the brain that does not correspond to at least the germ of a thought. The same thing happens in history. All historical phenomena and events can be explained by economic evolution, but at the same time, the driving force of development can be seen in the constant movement of humanity towards a higher form of existence. One can agree with Marx that the entire development of human intellectual, moral and religious life is a reflection of economic relations in the brain; but at the same time, there exists, as a certain precondition, the human brain with all its abilities. Among these abilities, especially noteworthy are the ability for unselfish feelings and the desire for unity. Historical development is not a mechanical change from one form of production to another, but in the change of economic forms the ideal of humanity is realized, and each of these forms contradicts the concept of humanity less and less. The history of mankind is not just a necessary process of development, but a progressive development that has reasonable meaning. The desire of mankind for justice has manifested itself over many centuries in the constant struggle for a social system that would contain less sharp contradictions than the existing one. Despite all the differences in the environment, the conditions of time, economic demands, we hear the same cry of despair, the same cry of joyful hope from the lips of a slave, serf, proletarian. And this never-dying aspiration of the human spirit constitutes the very soul of so-called law. Consequently, the materialistic and idealistic understanding of history cannot be opposed to each other: both of them merge into a single inseparable concept. If it is impossible to separate a person from the economic relations in which he lives, then it is equally impossible to separate economic relations from a person. Historical development is at the same time both a process taking place according to purely mechanical laws and the aspiration of the human spirit, obeying the laws of the ideal. Lafargue answered Jaurès (ib.). The difference between Jaurès and the Marxists comes down to the study of the emergence and development of ideas. The idea of ​​justice, which, according to Jaurès, lies unconscious in the head of the savage, was formed in the human brain only after the emergence of private property. Savages have no concept of justice. They don't even have words for this idea. Jaurès argues that the contradiction between the ideas of brotherhood and justice, on the one hand, and the social environment, on the other, determines the development of humanity. If this were so, then there could be no talk of historical evolution at all. In this case, a person would not have crossed the primitive, communist stage, at which the idea of ​​justice did not and could not exist, and fraternal feelings could manifest themselves more freely than at any other stage of social development. In fact, the idea of ​​justice, instead of coming into conflict with the phenomena of a given social environment, on the contrary, adapts to them. Against these objections, Jaurès, who himself “stands on the basis of a materialistic and positive understanding of history,” is helpless. Belfort Bax spoke out against the idea of ​​historical materialism in his article “The Materialistic Understanding of History.” The desire to reduce all human life to one element, to explain all history on the basis of economics, does not take into account the fact that every concrete reality necessarily has two sides, material and formal, and, therefore, at least two basic elements; for, in contrast to abstraction, reality lies in synthesis. The speculative, aesthetic and ethical faculties of man have existed in human society from the very beginning, although in an undeveloped state, and are not a simple product of the material factors of human existence, although their manifestations in each of the past periods have been subject to an increasingly weakening, but often still significant, influence of these factors. The whole development of society as a whole depended much more on its material basis than on any speculative, ethical or aesthetic reason; but this does not mean that every such “ideological” reason can be reduced to a purely material condition. Society has a certain economic development, but it also has a certain spiritual development, and only the interaction of both results in social evolution in its concrete forms. The extreme direction of the materialist understanding of history is just as one-sided as the opposite, idealistic, explanation of history. However, according to Bax, the first direction comes closer to the truth. Baksu was answered by K. Kautsky in the article “The materialistic understanding of history and the psychological factor.” Bax’s opinion that morality, religion, art, and science are not created exclusively by economic conditions, for it is also necessary that these conditions influence people gifted with certain ethical, aesthetic, and speculative abilities—Kautsky considers this opinion to be a true expression of the idea of ​​historical materialism. Not a single historical theory sets out to explain artistic or philosophical creativity: it is only concerned with explaining the changes that this creativity experiences in different periods. Economic relations are not the only factor that determines “all human activity,” “all human life as a whole,” but among the factors influencing human life, they constitute the only variable factor. Bax's entire polemic is a fight against windmills. The exchange of polemical articles between Bax and Kautsky continued: the first wrote: “Synthetic or neo-Marxist understanding of history” and “The limits of a materialist explanation of history”, the second - “What the materialist understanding of history wants and can give” and “Utopian and materialist Marxism”. Kautsky agreed to admit that “individuals can give a lot to their era,” that “the human spirit sets society in motion,” but with the caveat: “the human spirit sets society in motion not as a master of economic conditions, but as a servant.” Bax was content with this concession, declaring: “Kautsky is taking a big step towards me here.” But for its part, Bucks is going to peace. “No one has emphasized more strongly than” Bax himself, “the fact that hitherto throughout human history economic conditions, to use Kautsky’s expression, have been the master and the spirit the servant.” It is clear that the “discussion” between Bax and Kautsky remained completely fruitless. Wed. Hegel's Phänomenologie. “No matter how little written history has to date paid attention to the development of material production, which forms the basis of all social life, nevertheless, prehistoric time is divided not according to so-called historical observation, but according to natural scientific methods of research: it is precisely it that is divided according to the material from which tools and weapons were made, into the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.” “Among the instruments of labor themselves, those of greatest importance for characterizing social eras of production are mechanical instruments of labor, which, taken as a whole, can be called the skeleton and muscular system of production: they are in this sense much more important than those instruments of labor that serve only as receivers and storage facilities for objects of labor and which, considered as a whole, can be called the vascular system of production, such as pipes, barrels, baskets, pots and others. And only in chemical fabrication do they begin to play a more significant role.” But “in a broader sense, the labor process includes among its tools not only those things through which labor acts on its object and which, therefore, in one way or another, serve as conductors of human activity, but also all the material conditions required in general so that the whole process can be carried out as it should. They do not enter directly into the labor process, but without the existence of these conditions, the labor process either cannot occur at all, or can only occur in an imperfect way. The common instrument of labor of this kind is the earth itself.” Wed. G. Gatti “The Agrarian Question and Socialism”: “Public good or public evil” does not depend “on the will of the people.” “In order to make all economic well-being and future spiritual progress dependent on the will of people, it is necessary to consider only the agents, and not the forces that force them to act. These forces are: from the economic point of view, the irresistible currents of interest which push certain classes or social categories in certain directions and which fatally collide with opposing currents of interest; from the biological point of view, the omnipotent influence of climate and race on the nature of individual forces and on their specialization.” However, this influence is permanent, and it cannot explain the change in the history of the economy. “Technological progress is now the main force causing the transformation of the economic environment on which the social, political and administrative system, as well as intellectual life, is built. The evolution of the tools of labor, constantly causing changes in the economic environment necessary for its use, creates new currents of interests and, consequently, new relationships within various social classes and between these classes. In this way, little by little, it transforms political, administrative and intellectual life, the whole of society.” Hammacher “Das philosophisch-ökonomische System des Marxismus”: Ist der ökonomische aterialismus richtig, dann ist er ebendeswegen falsch. This weakness is characteristic of the generally one-sided historical construction of political economy, as pointed out by Knies in “Die politische Oekonomie rom geschichtlichen Slandpuncte”; Im Gegensatz zu dem Absolutismus der Theorie beruht die historische Auffassung der politischen Oekonomie auf dem Grundsatze, dass wie die wirtschaftlichen Lebenszu- stände, so auch die Theorie der politischen Oekonomie, in welcher Form und Gestalt, mit welchen Argumenten und Resultaten wir sie auch finden, ein Ergebnis der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ist etc. Apologetics should also pose this question if it does not want to be short-sighted, which it usually turns out to be, limiting itself to defending the objective meaning of religion, morality, and law. See W. Erdmann “Die philosophischen Voraussetzungen der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung” in “Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im D. R. von G. Schmoller” (1907 H. 3). Wed. Marx in Misere de la philosophie: Tout ce qui existe, tout its qui vit sur terre et sous l'eau, n'existe, ne vit que par im mouvement quelconque. Ainsi, le mouvement de l'histoire produit les rapports sociaux, le mouvement industriel nous donne les produits industrieis etc. On historical materialism: “Historical materialism includes natural scientific materialism.” Die Weltanschauung des Marxismus. Erdmann Die philosophischen Voraussetzungen der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung. Struve: “The genetic connection between economic materialism and materialist metaphysics is indisputably proven by the chapter on French materialism in Marx’s Heilige Familie. In Engels' worldview, the materialist understanding of history and materialist metaphysics constituted a strong psychological unity. But neither the genetic connection nor the psychological unity of these teachings of Marx and Engels determines their systematic or logical unity” (“On Various” Topics). Erdmann: “Und selbst wenn die ökonomische Geschichtsauffassung zutreffender wäre, als sie hiernach erscheinen muss, würde nach den vorstehenden Erwägungen sicher sein, dass ihr “Einklang mit der materialistischen Voraussetzung” nicht in dein Sinne hergestellt ist, den Marx und Engels erstrebten. Diese Voraussetzung ist nicht die sachliche Grundlage, aus der die ökonomische Auffassung als Konsequenz abgeleitet werden könnte, als auch nicht das Fundament, auf dem die neue, Geschichtsauffassung “rekonstruiert” worden ist. Es ist, logisch gesprochen, keine objektive Zusammengehörigkeit, sondern ein subjektives Zusammengehören, das beide Lehren zu einem Inbegriff vereinigt; kein innrer Zusammenhang von Grund und Folge, sondern ein äussrer des Nebeneinanderbestehens. Psychologisch könnten wir sagen: es ist ein assoziativer Zusammenhang... Similar observations and conclusions are given in Kareev “Etudes on Historical Materialism”, Lappo-Danilevsky “Methodology of History”, Stern “Economic and Natural Philosophical Materialism”, L. Hartmann “Ueber historische Entwickelung” (On Historical Development), M. Adler “Marx als Denker”, Kampfmeyer “Zur Kritik der philosophischen Grundlagen des Marxismus” (Sozial. Monatsh.), Stampfer and many others. To remember that philosophy in the field of the highest problem, the spiritual, is not predetermined by solutions in the elementary epistemological sphere, that everything there is revised anew, this constitutes the conditio sine qua non of higher philosophy. A completely comprehensive question can be called Art. Max Zetterbaum "Towards a materialistic understanding of history." According to him, in reality there is no logical connection between historical materialism and philosophical materialism. Research here deals with completely heterogeneous elements, which are often difficult to place in any formal relationship to each other, even in a relationship of opposition. Naturally, philosophical materialism belongs to the field of philosophy, and philosophy, if you like: pure philosophy, is that type of knowledge that seeks to explore what ultimately constitutes the essence of the world (even if the answer to this question is in the spirit of agnosticism) and how human experience is realized. On the contrary, historically materialism belongs to the field of empirical science. Empirical science, or simply science, is that type of knowledge that, in its research, takes the experienced world as given and explores only its relationships, dependencies and changes. This is exactly what historical materialism does, which speaks only about the nature of the dependence between existing historical phenomena. It is an empirical theory that has the same methodological significance for the social sciences as, for example, the Lamarck-Darwin theory has for biology, or the theory of gravity for physics and astronomy - and, like these theories, it is abstracted only from a special field of study. He says as little about the essence of being as these theories, like any empirical scientific theory in general. Both theories are considered monistic. This monism is often seen as a support point for the assertion made about the existence of an internal connection between both theories. In reality, however, the monism of historical materialism differs sharply from the monism of natural philosophical materialism, as well as from any kind of philosophical monism in general. Namely: naturally philosophical materialism asserts that two different groups phenomena, two specificities, represent in essence something unified. Historical materialism has nothing to do with the asserted identity of the physical and the mental: it always takes only the experimental presence, and what is different in experience remains different. He takes precisely the dualistic point of view of ordinary experience, since he does not care about philosophical definitions, he speaks in terms of experience about “consciousness” as opposed to “being,” he considers any ideology as an independent, although historically dependent, formation, and he wants to explain the development of various historical phenomena only from a single principle. His monism, therefore, means only the recognition of the basic pattern in the entire field history, the heterogeneous elements of which are recognized as different, while the monism of natural philosophical materialism recognizes different groups of phenomena in experience as identical. The decisive point of the question is that Zetterbaum recognizes the difference between both theories in objects. The subject of philosophical materialism is “matter”: for it the mental is only a property of matter, fundamentally identical with material movement. The subject of the theory of historical materialism is human society. In the latter we distinguish between economics, forms of organization, what are the state, family, etc., and, finally, ideologies, what are morality, religion, etc. The essence of society in economic as well as ideological terms lies in a certain joint activity of people. Society, therefore, is constituted from the relationships into which people enter among themselves through volitional actions. People enter into these relationships as a whole, “with soul and body,” and their activity is as much “material” as it is “spiritual.” And in economics, just as in ideologies, so-called “material” activity is under the guidance of so-called “spiritual” activity. But the relation, after all, is in no way “matter” in the sense of philosophical materialism, which equates matter with inanimate matter. In general, it is difficult to put the “economic structure”, the “material basis” of historical materialism in any relation to the “matter” of philosophical materialism, no matter how it is understood. And just as little as living, spiritually active people can be considered as “matter,” those various relationships in which people act, for example, the system of serfdom or wage labor—these “basic material” facts of our theory. And this applies not only to what produces an action, but also to what is created by these actions. Means of production, like machines, etc., then consumer goods, are rather products of the human “spirit,” and, on the other hand, all ideological products, like statues, churches, etc., should, from the point of view of natural philosophical materialism, be considered as material. Thus it is clear that there is no general measure by which it would be at all possible to compare the objects of both theories. It is absolutely clear that we are talking here about radically different objects, methods, considerations and tasks of cognition. Finally, there is a difference between both theories in the nature of causality. Naturally, philosophical materialism recognizes that the brain, the “material,” creates the activity of consciousness, which in itself is devoid of content, receiving it only from the external world. Historical materialism asserts that economics determines the ideological superstructure that makes up the historical content of consciousness. At the same time, as already noted, both in the sphere of economics and in the sphere of ideology, the supposed activity of the brain, the psyche, is taken for granted as a natural psychological fact, the existence of people gifted with consciousness and consciously acting... See also “What is Economic Materialism” by Kelles-Krause. Objections to the theory of historical materialism based on the psychological nature of the economic factor (see, for example, Miliukov, “Essays on the History of Russian Culture”) turn out to be simply a misunderstanding. Woltmann, also J. Berman “Dialectics in the light of modern theory of knowledge.” “Reflection on the forms of human life, which means also their scientific analysis, follows a path directly opposite to their actual development. It begins post festum, having, therefore, before it the ready-made results of the developed process” (“Capital”). “The physicist either observes the processes of nature where they appear in the most clearly expressed form and are least obscured by extraneous influences, or makes experiments under such conditions that ensure the course of the process in its pure form. In this essay, I set out to inherit the capitalist mode of production and the corresponding relations of production and exchange. Its classic country is still England. That is why I mainly take illustrations for my theoretical propositions from England.” (Preface to 1st ed. 1st volume of “Capital”). In the same review: “The reader may be misled by the method of presentation (and not research) of Marx. This is a dialectical presentation, which supposedly strictly follows from one idea, but in fact must always return to phenomena.” "Essays on the theory of historical knowledge." Similar reviews are given by Weisengrün Verschiedene Geschichtsauffas sungen, Bernstein Die Voraussetzungen des Socialismus und die Aufgabe der Socialdemokratie, (Was Marx und Engels Grosses geleistet haben, haben sie nicht vermöge der Hegelschen Dialektik, sondern trotz ihrer geleistet), Mackenzie An introduction to social philosophy (How little would the doctrines of Proudhon or of Karl Marx be affected by the withdrawal of the Hegelian dialectic), Masaryk Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus (“Materialist dialectics is a contradictio in adjecto”), Bulgakov “Two Cities” (“Marx has no special dialectical method at all, which he himself assumes, moreover, different from Hegel”), F. Adler “Dialectical materialism and empirio-criticism” and others. “Concerning teleological and fatalistic misunderstandings, it should be noted that some of the responsibility falls on Marx himself, who, as he himself declares, loved to flirt with Hegelian terminology: a dangerous tool with which it would be better not to joke” (Croce). The most striking application to sociology of the principle of the struggle for existence was found in Gumilovich: “Fundamentals of Sociology” and his other works. Special literature on the question of the relationship of socialism to Darwinism falls into three directions: a) Darwinists who do not accept socialism, b) socialists who reject the principle of Darwinism in sociology and c) authors seeking to combine Darwinism and socialism. Of the latter, the most famous is Woltmann, who in his book “The System of Moral Consciousness in Connection with the Relation of Critical Philosophy to Darwinism and Socialism” reconciles Kantianism with socialism and Darwinism. He also owns “Darwin’s Theory and Socialism,” which reviews the literature on the issue. For our part, we will name: L. Buchner “Darwinism and Socialism, or the Struggle for Existence and Human Society”, Loria “Socialism and Social Darwinism”, Aveling “Darwin and K. Marx (parallel)”, Ferri Enrico “Collectivism and Positive Science. Darwin, Spencer, Marx", Headley "Darvinism and modern socialism". Wed. Comte in “Cours de philosophie positive” t. IV: Chacun de modes fondamentaux de l'existence sociale détermiue un certain Systeme de moeurs co-rélatives, dont la physionomie commune se trouve aisément chez tous les individus, au milieu différences charaktéristiques. "From defense to attack." Wed. See also “On the development of a monistic view of history.” And yet, while defending philosophical materialism, Plekhanov, like other Marxists, speaks in a different language (“it is not consciousness that determines being, but being consciousness”) also in the preface to Deborin’s book “Introduction to the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism.” This is not at all like Feuerbach’s materialist thesis. Although in his notes on Feuerbach, cited in Engels’ book, Marx speaks out against “the division of society into two parts, one of which stands above society.” See his “Die Klassengegensätze von 1789”. Tocqueville, “The Old Order and the Revolution,” pointing out the bad sides of the “nobles,” whom people wittily called “sparrowhawks,” writes: “Without a doubt, they can point out individuals to me, but I’m talking about entire classes, history is open to them alone. That at that time there were many rich owners who, without external coercion, took care of the welfare of the peasants, no one denies this.” The same idea is expressed in Bastia’s “Cobden et la ligae” and Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy.” R. Guiraud “Etudes économiques sur l'antiqute” Poria “Les bases économiques de la constitution social” (La teoria economy della sonstituzione politica), etc. The personal-intimate fabric of mutual relations between people is described by Dilthey “Einleitung in die Geistesirissenschaften”. Versuch einer (Grund¬legung für das Studium der Gesellshafl und der Geschichte. and other works, Münsterberg in “Philosophie der Werte.” “Two friends are talking among themselves (we read from the latter) about personal successes and failures, about what has been experienced and expected, about a hot political issue. At every moment of the conversation, each of the friends feels the real existence of the other and takes full part in his joys and sufferings. Now one agrees with the other, then a dispute arises; here one gives advice to the other, but here he expresses doubt: and with every change of topic they understand the meaning of the words and gestures, understand the motive of the other. Not for a single moment do they look at each other as objects, do not imagine what is happening in the other’s brain, but their inner participation, joy, compassion, sympathy for the hopes and fears of the other - stands aside from the material content of human life, but directly concerns the volitional being. person. Understanding and doubt, questions and answers, agreement and objection, surprise and indignation, love and hatred, compassion, envy, gloating, respect - all this passes from whole subject to whole subject in living experience. The psychologist would listen carefully to them and observe them as objects, without taking any part in their hopes and doubts and breaking down their mental contents into simpler sensations. And each of the friends can carry out the same decomposing work on the mental content of the other, but the whole content will never become a perceptible, object for him, each part of this content of the mental life of the other has for him that subjective character that can only be understood, comprehended, about which the objectifying psychologist cannot know anything. Only for the willing subject there are friends and enemies, models and imitators, collaborators and opponents, well-wishers and envious people... So, we can consider it firmly established that between willing beings there are real, experienced relationships that have nothing to do with the causal connection of objects.” The order of intimate relationships and connections and the order of socio-mechanical organization do not coincide with each other, and the development of one may be accompanied by regression of the other. J. Hobson states such a discrepancy in modern life. In his words (“Evolution of modern capitalism”), “despite the mechanism of political, religious, social, industrial organizations in large cities, it seems probable that the true spiritual cohesion between individual members (in modern life) is weaker than in any other form of society. If it is true that as the larger village grows into a town, and the city into a larger industrial center, there is a progressive weakening of the bonds of moral cohesion between individuals, then we find ourselves face to face with the heaviest condemnation that can be pronounced on the modern industrial process, and the forces driving an ever-increasing proportion of our population into the cities bring with them a decline in morality, which is the necessary counterbalance to the deterioration of the physical qualities of the people.” We see an understanding of the characteristics of social life in Leslie Steven, who expresses (Science of ethics) the idea that a social organism can develop and improve regardless of changes in individuals. Social mechanism is taught vigorously by Lester Ward, discussed below. Philosophy of cultural and social history of modern times. L'interprétation e'copomique de l'histoire. Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit. Alte und neue Richtungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft und Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft. L'histoire consideree comme science. De la division du trarail social, etc. The importance of economic relations, in particular, for law and public life, was clarified by L. Stein in Dir Volkswirth-schuptslehre and Gegenwart und Zukunft des Rechts und Staatsicissenschart Deutschlands, Dankwardt and others. We have prof. Yanzhul “Basic principles of financial science”: “The forms of government themselves are to a certain extent determined by the financial organization and the financial needs of the state.” The opposite view on the mutual relationship between law and forms of economic life is held by: Cairn, Dühring “Course of National and Social Economy” “Method of scientific analysis in social science” (collection “Social Morality”). The question of the relation of the law of large numbers to the individual is usually posed as a question of free will, which is resolved in a positive sense by the latest statistical theorists. Let us cite the words of the same A. A. Chuprov: “In his fascination with the picture of patterns that mass observation reveals in the phenomena of social life, Quetelet and, in particular, his admirers from the materialist camp tended to see in the stability of statistical numbers the decisive argument in favor of the hypothesis of the determinism of human actions. Statistics irrefutably prove, they argued, that everything in human life is subject to laws as immutable as the movement of the heavenly bodies. Such an attempt to transfer a metaphysical dispute to empirical soil was, of course, fundamentally hopeless... In order for a certain correctness to be established in the mass results of human actions, the movements of the will should by no means be mechanically connected with the causally determined processes of the external world... Freedom, even the most unlimited, is perfectly reconciled with the fact of the stability of the numbers of moral statistics." Also Mayr, “Regularity in Social Life”: “We must remember that when it comes to a statistical law, it is necessary to abandon the idea of ​​this or that individual. In this case, a person is considered only as a particle of the race.” Many other authors can be named: Rümelin, Simmel, Grotenfelt, Kareev and others. Grotenfelt “Die Wertschatzung in der Geschichte und Wertmassstabe in der Geschichtsphilosophie bei Historikern und in Volksbeusstsein.” Baldwing “Social and ethical interpretations in mental development.” Even Durkheim and Bourdo leave room for personal-spiritual life. Professor Chicherin “Philosophy of Law”: “The moral law is completely independent of economic relations and, in turn, economic laws are independent of the moral law.” Wed. Baldwin “Social and ethical interpretations in mental development”: In all the spheres of human activity and knowledge, new ideas come from those most capable, from endowment and education in the normal resources when society already offers, of making real advances in the understanding of nature, in the application of their knowledge in useful ways, and in the achievement of the highest and most ideal forms of poetic, artistic, and sentimental insight. These are: society’s normal teachers. What society then does is to generate the particular though or value. A new scheme of legislation is thought out by one man. It must be made a general though in the group of fellow-citizens or fellow-legistators. This is one form of generalization of the thought. It does not retain just the form in each mind that it originally had. The essence of the thought is its general, workable part. Then in order that it may be made effective for the good of society only what is thus found general is actually carried out. So the form in which such a thought is realized in law or in other cases, in institution, ceremony or custom – is rarely just which the originator conceived. The idea or essential contrivance remains the same; but it is given a form which fits to the thought of many thinkers and to the practical needs which they bring to it... The result is that the new thought is pared down, so to speak: it's boldest and most novel outline and its form of final illustration is that general form in which it can be most widely appreciated and applied. Engels “That the material conditions of life of the people in whose heads a given (i.e., religious) process of thinking takes place determines it, these people, of course, are not aware of this, because otherwise the end of all ideology would come - denn sonst wäre esmit der ganzen ideologie am Ende (“Ludw. Feuerb.”). The relationship of Marxism, as absolute economism and absolute objectivism, to the theory of historical materialism is the same as the relationship of evolutionism to the theory of evolution and the relationship of ethical sociologism to the theory of social morality: evolutionism from the theory of “evolution makes the only principle” of explanation of life, and sociologism from the theory of “evolution”, the only principle of morality, elevates social morality. Marxism, however, is not only similar in method to evolutionism and sociologism, but also coincides with them in content. Apologetics usually tries to argue directly against economism. This technique should be called hopeless, because from an objective point of view, any action can be explained by calculation, interest - all the more hopeless because apologetics, without distinguishing personal-spiritual life from social morality, always asserts, more than scientifically permissible, and thus complicates its task to the extreme. Is Marx right in considering the disappearance of religions as a sign of future social organization and economic planning? He is wrong because for him the entire area of ​​religion is exhausted by social beliefs, he forgets about personal spiritual life. He himself, in the article “On the Jewish Question,” which will be discussed below, considers the separation of church and state and the political liberation of religion insufficient for the dominance of atheism, since it is in this case that religion, as a free matter of the individual, flourishes most brightly. In Engels, regarding morality in the future kingdom of freedom, we find a more thoughtful, albeit accidentally thrown, phrase. Arguing that today morality can only be class, and people, consciously or unconsciously, draw their moral views, ultimately, from those practical relations on which their class position is based, from those economic relations in which they carry out production and exchange, Engels believes that with the abolition of classes, morality would not disappear altogether, but truly human morality would appear: Eine über den Klassengegensätzen und über der Erinnerung an sie stehende, wirklich menschliche Moral wird erst möglich auf einer Gesellschaftsstufe, die den Klassengegensatz nicht nur überwunden, sondern auch für die Praxis des Lebens vergessen hat (H/ E. Duhrings Umuâlzung der Wissenchaft). According to Xenopol “La theorie de l'historie”: “It should be noted that man, although he can realize the desire of evolution, does not in the least master him. It always takes place independently of human will, produces new and unforeseen formations, crushes everything that stands in its way, often covers its path with ruins and corpses, does not heed the tears and lamentations that accompany its chariot, it majestically marches along the path that fate has outlined for it. All history testifies that evolution, i.e., the progress or regression of societies, occurs against the will of the individuals within them, and that the facts to which development leads are almost always unforeseen and not foreseeable. They arise, it is unknown how and why, from the depths of the unknown, in order to combine into a chain of successive phenomena and form a series of events, the beginning of which can sometimes be seen, but the end cannot be predicted. Evolution can become conscious only post factum, and it should even be noted that the meaning and direction of the historical flow enters consciousness only when it has become powerful enough to be noticed, but at the same time powerful enough to suppress any effort of will. Only genius, and not reflection, can foresee the development and penetrate the mystery of future events. There should be more note that this independence of the evolutionary movement from the will occurs not only in primitive times, when evolution is not realized in the slightest degree, but even in those eras when reflection penetrates into development and when the course of things is noticed by consciousness. In this latter case, development also occurs independently of the will. A person sees where he is going, but he cannot resist the flow that carries him away. He is well aware of the direction in which he is rushing, but his efforts to hold on are powerless even when he is quickly approaching the abyss. Of course, the social changes that constitute historical facts are the general product of individual activities. Every social enterprise begins with an individual, then it spreads to the group and becomes common. An individual act may be conscious and desired: the common cause resulting from the activity will be different from what is done by each, and the signal result will be completely different from what the individuals strived for,” etc. Although, nevertheless, the fundamental criticism of economic Marxism in content refers to the philosophical part of the study. Those parts of the review that Marx omits are placed in brackets. Here we also need to recall what was said earlier about Marx’s historicism. W. Sombart “Ihr moderne Kapitalismus” (“Modern capitalism”) makes the ordering principle of social science dependent on the temporal differences of economic phenomena, that is, depending on one or another character of historical economic eras and, therefore, calls the discovery of the ordering principle in social science a historical problem. According to him, in social science we must abandon the hope of achieving the establishment of a pattern that has the character of unconditional universality and necessity. While the essence of natural historical research is to imagine the phenomena subject to it and their relationships as constant, social science must take into account the elementary fact that it confronts new phenomena at every given moment thanks to the constant change of conditions that determine individual phenomena... Sombart recognizes the highest task of political economy: to formulate different theories for each specific historically limited economic period. The same with Goering “The Logic of Economy. Basic economic concepts from an energy point of view”, Loria “Sociology”. Münsterberg successfully expresses himself in the “Grundzuge der Psychologie”: Die sogenannte Geschichtsphilosophie, welche Gesetze, sucht, ist notwendig Sozialphysiologie und Sozialpsychologie und diese bestehen zu Recht, so lange sie nicht beanspruchen, Geschichte oder gar Philosophie zu sein. The relationship between history, philosophy of history and sociology, in addition to Bernheim’s previously mentioned “Lehrbuch der Historischen, Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie” and Grotenfelt’s “Die Wertschätzung in der Geschichte”, is clearly presented by Professor Kartsev in “Basic Questions of the Philosophy of Soft Science”. “Here is a simple and understandable difference between the philosophy of history and sociology. A philosophical consideration of the complex phenomenon of world history, imbued with a unifying and guiding idea, die denkende Betrachtung der Weltgeschichte, as Hegel would say, is the task of the first science, the task of the second is the study of the general laws of social life, the changeability of which constitutes the content of the historical process. Taken from a phenomenological point of view, history is a highly complex succession of the most varied phenomena in the life of mankind; taken from a nomological point of view, it represents a complex combination of simple processes, each of which is subject to a special law. Mechanical, physical, chemical processes participated in the formation of successive states of inorganic nature, as in the formation of successive states of human societies - sociological and psychological processes. The scientific explanation of geology falls to the lot of mechanics, physics, and chemistry; the scientific explanation of history is a matter of psychology and sociology. In geology and history we study the results of a certain combination of heterogeneous processes; in mechanics, physics, chemistry, psychology, we isolate each elementary process and study it in its simplest form... In the aggregate activity of members of society, such diverse and complex combinations of actions occur that it is not possible to subsume these combinations under uniform and simple formulas, not to mention the impossibility of giving such formulas for all societies, so diverse in composition. It is clear that the movement of society will take place according to the resultant, summing up the behavior of its members, but this resultant will have to change again in the most irregular way, since the combinations of actions will be one or the other. The study of the history of a people can give a general formula for this resultant, but science cannot find the rule to which this resultant is subordinated... The world-historical process is unplanned.” See his “Introduction to the Study of Sociology.” The abstract nature of sociological laws is shown most clearly in Menger (K) “Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere.” For details that I cannot go into, and for further literary references, see N. D. Kondratiev’s article “Basic teachings on the laws of development of social life” (New Ideas in Economics No. 5 Patterns of Social Development). Engels takes a completely mechanical point of view in the following passage in Ludwig Feuerbach: “Here (in the science of society) it was necessary, in exactly the same way as in the field of nature, to eliminate the fictitious, artificial connection of phenomena by indicating their true connection. And this task, in the end, boiled down to the discovery of those general laws of motion that operate in history human society. But the history of the development of human society differs significantly from the history of development in nature... But no matter how important this difference is for historical research, especially of individual eras and events, it does not in the least change the fact that the course of history is determined by general laws,” etc. Ward "Dynamic sociology": The "pure morals" of Kant and the "absolute ethics" of Spencer can never be fully realized, and can only be approximately realized through a complete organization of human action. Also Baldwin, “Social and ethical interpretations in mental decelopment.” Sombart “Der moderne Kapitalismus” (Modern capitalism): “Social ideals are only capable of exerting a decisive influence on the economic system when and insofar as they are condensed into the maxims of economic policy and thus determine the external regulation of economic life. In any case, they reach the maximum of their significance when they manage to bring to life a system of norms of practical politics or a system of economic law... Politics, generated by ideal motives, has always suffered a fiasco, since it contradicted the economic interests of the strongest class, or came onto the scene without any correspondence with economic interests.” The relativity of social practice is recognized by B. A. Kistyakovsky “Social Sciences and Law” and L. Frank “Philosophy and Life” (article “Philosophical Prerequisites of Despotism”). Delevsky “Social antagonisms and class struggle in history”: “A class is a collection of individuals united by a common economic characteristic and a corresponding common economic interest, regardless of the existence of other non-economic characteristics and interests. Large landowners, capitalists, proletarians, peasants, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, traders, industrialists, military men, officials, people in the liberal professions, all these are classes as groups that have a common economic characteristic and, accordingly, a common economic interest.” "Socialism and Ethics". See also: Otto Bauer “Marxism and Ethics”, Schmoller “Grundriss der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre”. On the question of the inextricability of social antagonisms, much insight has been said in Simmel’s “Social Differentiation”, Kidd’s “Social Evolution”, Zenker’s “Gesellschaft”. See Delevsky “Social Antagonisms”, L. Hartmann “Ueber historische Entwickelung”. E. Milho “Tactics of Socialism”, Stalinsky “Tactical Crisis of Socialism”. Reprinted in "Dokumente des Sozialismus" Band II, 13. Heft. La theory de l'histoire. Grundlegung der politischen Oekonanile. Die Entwicklungtigesetze der Menschheit. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Socialismus. You might be interested in: