Letters on Historical Materialism
1. To Conrad Schmidt, 5 August 1890
Section summary
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.
Your letter has travelled in my pocket all the way to the North Cape and through half a dozen Norwegian fjords; I meant to answer it on the journey, but the facilities for writing on the ship on which Schorlemmer and I made the whole trip were too wretched. So I am catching up now.
Many thanks for your news of your doings, which always interest me very much. You really should try to write the article on Knapp; the point is too important. It is a matter of destroying the Prussian tradition in one of its central points and of reducing the old boasting to the humbug it comes down to.
Working up the English Blue Books for the Archiv can hardly be done by anyone who does not live in London and is thereby put in a position to judge for himself the theoretical or practical significance of the individual publications. The number of parliamentary publications is so great that separate monthly catalogues of them appear; you would be in the position of having to look for sewing needles in a cartload of hay and still now and then coming up with a pin. But if you nevertheless want to undertake something here and there in this line (it is mostly gruesome work if it is to be done well), I shall gladly give you any information. Incidentally, if Braun wants a regular man for it, he can do no better than apply to E. Bernstein, 4 Corinne Road, Tufnell Park, N. Ede wants to study English conditions as soon as he is free of the Sozialdemokrat, so that would suit well. He is going to the seaside for a few weeks today or tomorrow, so I cannot ask him about this case, which has only just occurred to me.
I saw Paul Barth’s book reviewed in the Vienna Deutsche Worte by that bird of ill omen Moritz Wirth, and the review left me with an unfavourable impression of the book itself as well. I shall look at it, but I must say that if little Moritz quotes him correctly as saying that the only example he can find in all Marx’s writings of the dependence of philosophy etc. on the material conditions of existence is that Descartes declared animals to be machines, then I am sorry for the man who can write such a thing. And if the man has not yet discovered that, while the material mode of existence is the primum agens, this does not exclude the ideal spheres from exerting in their turn a reacting, though secondary, effect upon it, then he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about. But, as I said, all this is second-hand, and little Moritz is a dangerous friend. The materialist conception of history also has a lot of friends of that sort nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx said of the French “Marxists” of the late seventies: “Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas Marxiste.”
There has also been a discussion in the Volks-Tribüne about the distribution of products in the society of the future, whether it is to be according to the quantity of labour or otherwise. The matter has been handled very “materialistically”, against certain idealist phrases about justice. But strangely enough it has occurred to nobody that the mode of distribution depends essentially on how much there is to distribute, and that this must surely change with the progress of production and of social organisation, so that the mode of distribution may well change too. But to everyone taking part, “socialist society” appears not as something in constant change and progress but as a stable thing fixed once for all, which must therefore also have a mode of distribution fixed once for all. All one can reasonably do, however, is 1. try to discover the mode of distribution with which a start will be made, and 2. try to find the general tendency in which further development moves. But I find not a word about this in the whole debate.
In general, the word “materialist” serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labelled without further study; that is, they stick on this label and then think the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied afresh; the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined in detail before one tries to deduce from them the political, civil-law, aesthetic, philosophical, religious and other views that correspond to them. Up to now little has been done here, because only a few people have seriously set about it. Here we can use help in masses; the field is infinitely large, and anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. Instead of this, however, the phrase “historical materialism” (anything can be turned into a phrase) serves only too many of the younger Germans simply as a means of knocking their own relatively scanty historical knowledge (economic history is still in its swaddling clothes!) into a system with all possible speed, and then thinking themselves something tremendous. And then a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in his circle has indeed been degraded into a mere phrase.
However, all this will right itself. We are strong enough in Germany now to stand a great deal. One of the greatest services the Anti-Socialist Law did us was to free us from the importunity of the German student with a socialist tinge. We are now strong enough to digest the German student too, who is again making himself very conspicuous. You, who have really accomplished something yourself, must have noticed how few of the young literary men who attach themselves to the party take the trouble to study economics, the history of economics, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of the formations of society. How many know more of Maurer than his name! The journalist’s self-assurance has to do everything, and the result is what you would expect. It sometimes seems as if these gentlemen thought anything was good enough for the workers. If these gentlemen only knew how Marx thought his best things still not good enough for the workers, how he regarded it as a crime to offer the workers anything less than the very best!
In our workers, and in them alone, I have had unconditional confidence since the brilliant test they have passed since 1878. Like every great party, they will make mistakes in the details of their development, perhaps great mistakes. The masses learn only through the consequences of their own mistakes, through experiments on their own bodies. But all that will be overcome, and with us much more easily than elsewhere, because our young people really are of indestructible health, and then because Berlin, which will hardly get beyond its specific Berlinism so soon, is our centre only formally, as London is, not as Paris is in France. I have often enough been annoyed with the French and English workers, in spite of knowing the causes of their blunders, but with the Germans never since 1870: with individuals who spoke in their name, yes, but never with the masses, who always put everything back on the rails. And I would bet that I shall never be in the position of being annoyed with them.