From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International
Franz Mehring: On Historical Materialism
(From the Archives of Marxism)
Marxists seek to understand the world in order to change it. Our
aim is the forging of workers parties to overthrow the capitalist profit system
through proletarian revolutions worldwide, ushering in an egalitarian socialist
society. In his 1893 pamphlet, On Historical Materialism, excerpted
below, Franz Mehring drew on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and
advanced an appraisal of conceptions and thoughts as subordinate but integral
elements of the material social structure. A brilliant historian and
theoretician, Mehring was also an outstanding communist. When the German Social
Democracy aligned with its “own” bourgeoisie in World War I, Franz
Mehring—already well into his sixties—picked up the banner of revolutionary
internationalism along with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, including by
joining them in founding the German Communist Party in December 1918. Mehring
died on 29 January 1919, shortly after the murder of his comrades, Luxemburg and
Liebknecht.
* * *
Let us glance once again at the accusations and objections which
have been made against historical materialism: that it denies all ideal forces,
that it makes humanity the helpless plaything of a mechanical development, that
it rejects all moral standards.
Historical materialism is no closed system crowned by an ultimate
truth; it is the scientific method for the investigation of processes of human
development. It starts from the unchallengeable fact, that human beings do not
only live in nature but also in society. There have never been people in
isolation; every man who accidentally loses contact with human society, quickly
starves and dies. But historical materialism thus recognizes all ideal forces in
the widest context. “Of everything that happens in nature, nothing happens as a
desired, conscious purpose. On the other hand, in the history of society, the
participants are nothing but human beings endowed with consciousness, acting
with thought and passion, working for specific purposes; nothing happens without
a conscious intention, without a planned goal.... Will is determined through
thought or passion. But the levers which in turn determined the passion or the
thought are of very different kinds. They can be outside objects or ideal
motives, greed, ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice,’ personal hatred or just
individual peculiarities of all kinds” (Engels). This is the essential
difference between the history of the development of nature on the one hand and
of society on the other. But apparently all the innumerable conflicts of
individual actions and wills in history only lead to the same result as the
unconscious, blind agencies in nature. On the surface of history accident seems
to reign as much as on the surface of nature. “Only rarely does what is desired
take place; in most cases, the desired aims cut across each other, and come into
conflict, or these aims are from the beginning impossible or lacking in means.”
But when, through the interplay of all the blind accidents which appear to
dominate in unconscious nature, a general law of movement nevertheless imposes
itself—only then does the question arise whether the thoughts and desires of
consciously acting human beings are also dominated by such a law.
And the law is to be found, if one searches for it, through which
the ideal driving forces of human beings are set into motion. A human being can
only reach consciousness in a social relationship, thinking and acting with
consciousness; the social grouping of which he is part awakens and directs his
spiritual forces. The basis of all social community, however, is the form of
production of material life, and this determining also in the last analysis the
spiritual life process, in its manifold reflections. Historical materialism, far
from denying the ideal forces, studies them down to their very basis, so that it
can achieve the necessary clarity about where the power of ideas is drawn from.
Human beings make their own history, certainly, but how they make
history, this is dependent in each case upon how clear or unclear they are in
their heads about the material connections between things. Ideas do not arise
out of nothing, but are the product of the social process of production, and the
more accurately an idea reflects this process, the more powerful it is. The
human spirit does not stand above, but within the
historical development of human society; it has grown out of, in and with
material production. Only since this production has begun to develop out of a
highly variegated bustle into simple and great contradictions, has it been able
to recognize the whole relationship; and only after these latter contradictions
have died or been overcome, will it win domination over social production, and
will the “prehistory of man come to an end” (Marx); and then “men will make
their own history with full consciousness, and the leap of man from the realm of
necessity into that of freedom” will take place (Engels)….
Only historical materialism demonstrates the law of this
development of thought, and finds the root of this law in that which first made
man into man, the production and reproduction of immediate life. That beggarly
pride which once decried Darwinism as the “theory of the apes” may struggle
against this, and find solace in the thought that the human spirit flickers like
an unfathomable will-o’-the-wisp, and with Godlike creative powers fashions a
new world out of nothing. This superstition was dealt with by [German
Enlightenment-era writer and philosopher] Lessing, both in his mockery of the
“bald ability to act now in one way, now in another, under exactly the same
circumstances,” and also through his wise words:
The pot of iron
Likes to be lifted with silver tongs From the flame, the easier to think itself A pot of silver.
We can deal more briefly with the accusation that historical
materialism denies all moral standards. It is certainly not the task of the
history researcher to use moral standards. He should tell us how things were on
the basis of an objective scientific investigation. We do not demand to know
what he thinks about them according to his subjective moral outlook. “Moral
standards” are caught up, involved in a continuous transformation, and for the
living generation to impose on former generations its changing standards of
today, is like measuring the geological strata against the flying sand of the
dunes. Schlosser, Gervinus and Ranke, and Janssen [German historians]—each of
them has a different moral standard, each has his own class morals, and even
more faithfully than the times they depict, they reflect in their works the
classes they speak for. And it goes without saying that it would be no different
if a proletarian writer of history were to make rash criticisms of former times
from the moral standpoint of his class today.
In this respect historical materialism denies all moral
standards—but in this respect alone. It bans them from the study of
history because they make all scientific study of history
impossible.
But if the accusation means that historical materialism denies the
role of moral driving forces in history, then let us repeat: the precise
opposite is true. It does not deny them at all, but rather for the first time
makes it possible to recognize them. In the “material, scientifically
determinable upheaval of the economic conditions of production” it has the only
certain yardstick for investigating the sometimes slower, sometimes faster
changes in moral outlook. These too are in the last analysis the product of the
form of production, and thus Marx opposed the Nibelungen tales of Richard
Wagner, who tried in the modern manner to make his love stories more piquant by
means of a little incest, with the fitting words: “In remote antiquity the
sister was the wife and that was moral.” Just as thoroughly as it clears up the
question of the great men who are supposed to have made history, historical
materialism also deals with the images of historical characters that come and go
in history according to their favour and disfavour in the eyes of different
parties. It is able to do every historical personality justice, because it knows
how to recognize the driving forces which have determined their deeds and
omissions, and it can sketch in the fine shadings which cannot be attained by
the coarser “moral standards” of the ideological writing of history.
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