Letters on Historical Materialism
5. To W. Borgius, 25 January 1894
Section summary
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.
1. By the economic relations which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society we understand the way in which the people of a definite society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the manner of exchange, further, of the distribution of products and with it, after the dissolution of gentile society, also the division into classes, and hence the relations of lordship and servitude, and hence the state, politics, law, etc. Further included in economic relations are the geographical basis on which they operate, and the remnants of earlier stages of economic development that have actually been handed down and have survived, often only through tradition or vis inertiae; and also, of course, the external milieu that surrounds this form of society.
If, as you say, technique depends for the most part on the state of science, science depends far more still on the state and the requirements of technique. If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was called forth by the need to regulate the mountain rivers of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We have known anything rational about electricity only since its technical applicability was discovered. But unfortunately it has become the custom in Germany to write the history of the sciences as if they had fallen from the skies.
2. We regard economic conditions as what ultimately conditions historical development. But race is itself an economic factor. Here, however, two points must not be overlooked:
a) Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development rests on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself. The state, for instance, exerts an influence through protective tariffs, free trade, good or bad fiscal policy; and even the deadly exhaustion and impotence of the German philistine, arising from the miserable economic condition of Germany from 1648 to 1830 and expressing itself first in pietism, then in sentimentality and in crawling servility to princes and nobility, was not without economic effect. It was one of the greatest obstacles to recovery and was shaken only when the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the chronic misery acute. So it is not, as people here and there conveniently imagine, an automatic effect of the economic situation; men make their history themselves, but in a given milieu that conditions it, on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other, political and ideological, ones, are still ultimately the decisive ones, forming the red thread that runs through them and alone leads to understanding.
b) Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan, or even in a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, whose complement and form of appearance is accident. The necessity which here asserts itself amidst all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. This is where the so-called great men come in. That such and such a man, and precisely this man, arises at a particular time in a particular country is of course pure chance. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, tant bien que mal, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just this Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own warfare, had rendered necessary, was chance; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. If Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot and all the English historians up to 1850 are evidence that it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that it simply had to be discovered.
So with all the other accidents, and apparent accidents, of history. The further the particular sphere we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more we shall find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zigzag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve, you will find that the longer the period considered and the wider the field treated, the more nearly this axis will run parallel to the axis of economic development.
In Germany the greatest obstacle to correct understanding is the irresponsible neglect of economic history in the literature. It is so hard not only to unlearn the ideas of history drummed into one at school, but still more to rake together the material needed for doing so. Who, for example, has even read old G. von Gülich, whose dry collection of material nevertheless contains so much matter for the clarification of innumerable political facts!
For the rest, the fine example Marx gave in the Eighteenth Brumaire should, I think, give you fairly full information on your questions, just because it is a practical example. I believe, too, that I have already touched on most of the points in Anti-Dühring, I, chapters 9–11, and II, 2–4, as well as III, 1, or the introduction, and then in the last section of Feuerbach.
Please do not weigh each word in the above on the goldsmith’s scales, but keep the connection in view; I regret not having the time to work out what I am writing to you as exactly as I should have to for publication.
Please give my regards to Herr …, and thank him in my name for sending the …, which amused me greatly.