Letters on Historical Materialism
Briefe über den historischen Materialismus
Five letters from Engels’s last years, written against young followers who reduced historical materialism to a formula: the economy is the “ultimately determining” factor, not the only one; politics, law, philosophy and religion react back on it; history is the resultant of innumerable wills; and “ideology” is thought that does not know its own driving forces. They became the standard reply to charges of economic determinism.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the German text of Marx-Engels-Werke, vols. 37 and 39 (Berlin: Dietz). Five letters: to Conrad Schmidt (5 August 1890), Joseph Bloch (21–22 September 1890), Conrad Schmidt (27 October 1890), Franz Mehring (14 July 1893) and W. Borgius (25 January 1894).
- Source
- Internet Archive (Marx-Engels-Werke)
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Contents
- 1 To Conrad Schmidt, 5 August 1890 9 min 11
Engels warns that “materialist” has become a label that young German writers stick on things instead of studying them. The materialist conception of history is “a guide to study”, not a scheme for construction: the whole of history must be studied afresh. Distribution in a future society cannot be fixed in advance, since it depends on how much there is to distribute. He reaffirms his confidence in the German workers.
- 2 To Joseph Bloch, 21–22 September 1890 10 min 14
After answering a question on the punaluan family and sibling marriage in Greece, Engels states the theory in its most guarded form: production and reproduction of real life is the “ultimately” determining factor, not the only one. Superstructural factors often decide the form of struggles. History results from the clash of countless wills, like a parallelogram of forces. He admits that he and Marx are partly to blame for overstressing economics.
- 3 To Conrad Schmidt, 27 October 1890 21 min 19
Each sphere that the division of labour makes independent (trade, money-dealing, the state, law, philosophy) follows laws of its own and reacts on production, though production prevails in the end. The state can speed, obstruct or redirect economic development; law must be consistent and so reflects economics inexactly; philosophy works on inherited material. Barth’s critics lack dialectics: they see only cause here and effect there, never interaction.
- 4 To Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893 12 min 14
Thanking Mehring for his Lessing Legend, Engels admits that he and Marx neglected the “form”, the way ideas arise, for their economic “content”. Ideology is thought with a false consciousness, unaware of its real motive forces, which creates the semblance of an independent history of ideas. But ideas once produced react on their causes. He then compares Germany’s fragmentation with the rise of the French national state.
- 5 To W. Borgius, 25 January 1894 8 min 12
Economic relations include technique, geography and inherited remnants of earlier stages; science depends more on technical needs than the reverse. Economics is decisive only ultimately, amid interaction of all spheres. Men make their history, but not yet by a collective plan, so necessity asserts itself through accident: if Napoleon had not existed another would have filled his place. The further a field is from economics, the more its course zigzags.