Chapter VII: Part II: Historical Materialism (3)

The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be the directing power of social life. The great industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social classes, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many classes of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen the new cities rise around factories and create around their circumference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of history as a sinister illustration of a society of equals. And who did not feel--even if that had not been announced in the so-called doctrine of the Rev. Malthus--that the number of guests which this mode of economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of hands, is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation and becomes a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid and violent economic transformation which was accomplished openly in England had succeeded there, because that country had been able to build up for itself, as compared with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then unknown, and because to maintain this monopoly an unscrupulous policy had been rendered necessary, and that permitted all, for one happy moment, to translate into prose the ideological myth of the state, which was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the people.

This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the _laudatores temporis acti_ from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology, which had accumulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into contact with the facts which the rapid events of so intensive a _processus_ imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling.

Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never reached the proletarians, either because these had no political consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate and often salutary criticism of economics--a one-sided criticism, indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception.

All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is society, itself, which, by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts upon which it rests, engenders from itself, within itself, the contradiction, and finally triumphs over this by its passage into a new form. The solution of the existing antitheses is the proletariat, which the proletarians themselves know or do not know. Even as their misery has become the condition of present society, so in their misery is the justification of the new proletarian revolution. It is in this passage from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the self-criticism exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its own _processus_--it is in this only that the dialectic of history consists, which Marx and Engels, in so far as they were materialists, drew from the idealism of Hegel. But on the final reckoning it matters little whether the literary men, who knew no other meaning for dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry nor whether the doctors and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge of particular facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated forms of thought.

But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been luminously illustrated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on the stage, all the antagonistic forces of modern society, because this society has developed on the ruins of previous forms, and because, in so short a time and with so hasty a march, it has traversed the phases of its birth and its establishment.

The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex consciousness of its movement.

The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government, an extraordinary mass of economic resources; thus, there were, on the one side, the singular policy of the assignats which finally annulled themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic title rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so many troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were, driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the Assembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes the psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf, which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in itself all the elements of objective tragedy.

The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a giant, arising, from all sides, on the shoulders of those most wretched in their poverty, and through all the devious ways of politics; it was especially shameless in its way of taking part in war and its glorious successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened by the urgency of circumstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity of business.

The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual production in the antagonistic field of competition, revolted furiously, through violence and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a revolutionary government which, strong in its certainty of saving its country, and stronger still in its illusion of founding for eternity the liberty of equals, believed it was possible to suppress gambling by the guillotine, to eliminate Business by closing the Stock Exchange and to assure existence to the common people by fixing the maximum of prices for objects of prime necessity. Commodities, prices and Business reasserted with violence their own liberty against those who wished to preach to them and impose ethics upon them.

Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the Thermidorians, whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden causes as in its apparent effects, the triumph of Business over democratic idealism. The constitution of 1793, which marks the extreme limit that can be reached by the democratic ideal, was never put into practice. The grave pressure of circumstances, the menace of the foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from the Girondists to the Vendee, rendered necessary an exceptional government, which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against the Business which was bringing into existence the property of new proprietors. The constitution of the year III. consecrated the principle of moderate liberalism, whence proceeds all the constitutionalism of the European continent; but it was, before all else, the road leading to the guaranty of property. To change the proprietors while preserving property--that is the banner, the watchword, the ensign which defied through the years from Aug. 10, 1792, the violent tumults as well as the bold designs of those who attempted to found society upon virtue, equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory was the footpath by which the revolution arrived at the downfall of itself as an idealistic effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed corruption, this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but property is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice, there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange adventurer of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially smiled, and he was the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an end to this gigantic fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor trace of moral scruples.

In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution, fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life, which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it triumphed over the last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor also become for it a free commodity.

All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state, also, was becoming a technical appliance, which substituted bureaucracy for hierarchy. And as the ancient titles no longer assured their possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon victorious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever shall be, the typical and classical form of the law of every shopkeeping society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and selling.

The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular circumstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many other classes and semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology, which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human race from superstition, and even from religion, to make of each individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are its beginnings:--and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the most idealistic of to-day as the work of several centuries to come--that is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy of the guillotine?

That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned their property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly rich purveyors, marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of letters; it was the prose of the court of that strange man to whom the qualities of military genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had, without any doubt, conferred the right of treating as an ideologist whoever did not admire the bare fact which, in life, as it was with him, can be nothing else than the simple brutality of success.

The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by circumstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak, prepared by society itself, and it is no wonder if the revolution, which was preceded ideologically by the most acute form of rationalistic doctrinairism ever known, ended finally by leaving behind it the intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical and sociological science, like that which our own century has attempted to construct.

And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with Saint Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific socialism took its birth. The important thing is in these two points; that historical materialism could not arise but from the theoretical consciousness of socialism; and that it can henceforth explain its own origin with its own principles, which is the greatest proof of its maturity.

Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas do not descend from heaven.

VIII.

The road traversed thus far has enabled us to take exact account of the precise and relative value of the so-called doctrine of factors; we know also how its adherents come to eliminate objectively those provisional concepts, which were and are a simple expression of a thought not fully arrived at maturity.

And, nevertheless, it is necessary that we speak further of this doctrine, in order to explain better and more in detail for what reasons two of the so-called factors, the state and the law, have been and are still considered as the principal and exclusive subject of history.

Historians have indeed for centuries placed in these forms of social life the essence of development. Moreover, they have perceived this development only in the modification of these forms. History has for centuries been treated as a discipline relative to the juridico-political movement and even to the political movement principally. The substitution of society for politics is a recent thing, and much more recent still is the reduction of society to the elements of historical materialism. In other words, sociology is of quite recent invention, and the reader, I hope, will have understood for himself that I employ this term for the sake of brevity, to indicate in a general manner the science of social functions and variations, and that I do not hold to the specific sense given it by the Positivists.

It is more satisfactory to say that, up to the beginning of this century, the data bearing upon usages, customs, beliefs, etc., or even upon the _natural conditions_, which serve as the foundation and connection for social forms, were not mentioned in political histories unless as objects of simple curiosity, or as accessories and complements of the narration.

All this cannot be a simple accident, and indeed is not. There is, then, a double interest in taking account of the tardy appearance of social history, both because our doctrine justifies yet again by this means its reason for existence, and because we thus eliminate, in a definite manner, the so-called factors.

If we make an exception of certain critical moments in which social classes, by an extreme incapacity for adapting themselves to a condition of relative equilibrium, enter into a crisis of more or less prolonged anarchy, and if we make an exception of those catastrophes in which an entire world disappears, as at the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, or at the dissolution of the Califate, then it may be said that, ever since there has been a written history, the state appears not only as the creation of society but also as its support. The first step that child-like thought had made in this order of considerations is in this statement: That which governs is also that which creates.

If, moreover, we make an exception of certain short periods of democracy exercised with the vivid consciousness of popular sovereignty, as was the case in a few Greek cities, especially at Athens, and in a few Italian cities, and especially Florence (the former nevertheless were composed of free men who were proprietors of slaves, and the latter of privileged citizens who exploited foreigners and peasants) the society organized into a state was always composed of a majority at the mercy of the minority. And thus the majority of men has appeared in history as a mass sustained, governed, guided, exploited and ill treated, or at least as a variegated conglomeration of interests, which a few had to govern, maintaining in equilibrium the divergences, either by pressure or by compensation.

Thence the necessity of an art of government, and as it is this before all else which strikes those who are studying collective life, it was natural that politics should appear as the author of the social order and as the sign of the continuity in the succession of historic forms. To say politics is to say activity, which, up to a certain point, is exercised in a desired direction, until the moment at least when calculations dash themselves against unknown or unexpected obstacles. By taking the state as an imperfect experience would suggest for the author of society, and politics for the author of the social order, it resulted that the narrators or philosophical historians were driven to place the essence of history in a succession of forms, institutions and political ideas.

Whence the state drew its origin, where the basis of its performance was found, that mattered not, as that matters not in current reasoning. The problems of the genetic order arose, as is known, rather late. The state is and it finds its reason for existence in its present necessity; that is so true that the imagination has not been able to adapt itself to the idea that it has not always existed, and so it has prolonged its conjectural existence back to the first origins of the human race. The gods or demigods and heroes were its founders, in mythology at least, just as in mediaeval theology the Pope is the first and therefore the divine and perpetual source of all authority. Even in our time, inexperienced travelers and imbecile missionaries find the state where there is, as among savages and barbarians, nothing but the gens, or the tribe of gentes, or the alliance of gentes.

Two things were necessary that these prejudices of the judgment should be overcome. In the first place, it was necessary to recognize that the functions of the state arise, increase, diminish, alter and follow each other with the variations of certain social conditions. In the second place, it was necessary to arrive at a comprehension of the fact that the state exists and maintains itself in that it is organized for the defense of certain definite interests, of one part of society against all the rest of society itself, which must be made in such a way, in its entirety, that the resistance of the subjects, of the ill treated and the exploited, either is lost in multiple frictions, or is tempered by the partial advantages, wretched though they be, to the oppressed themselves. Politics, that art so miraculous and so admired, thus brings us back to a very simple formula; to apply a force or a system of forces to the total of resistances.

The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these social conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the theory of classes, the genesis of which is in the manner of the different occupations, granted the distribution of labor, that is to say, granted the relations which co-ordinate and bind men together in a definite form of production.

Thenceforth the concept of the state has ceased to represent the direct cause of the historic movement as the presumed author of society, because it has been seen that in each of its forms and its variations there is nothing else than the positive and forced organization of a definite class rule, or of a definite compact between different classes. And then by an ulterior consequence from these premises, it is finally to be recognized that politics, as the art of acting in a desired direction, is a comparatively small part of the general movement of history, and that it is but a feeble part of the formation and the development of the state itself, in which many things, that is to say, many relations, arise and develop by a necessary compact, by a tacit consent, or by violence endured and tolerated. The reign of the unconscious, if by that we mean what is not decreed by free choice and forethought, but what is determined and accomplished by a succession of habits, customs, compacts, etc., has become very considerable in the domain of the data which form the object of the historic sciences; and politics, which has been taken as an explanation, has itself become something to explain.

We know now in a positive way the reasons in consequence of which history had necessarily to appear under a purely political form.

But this does not mean that we ought to believe that the state is a simple excrescence, a mere accessory of the social body, or of free association, as so many Utopians and so many ultra-liberal thinkers of anarchist tendencies have imagined. If society has thus far culminated in the state, it is because it has had need of this complement of force and authority, because it is at first composed of units which are unequal by reason of economic differentiations. The state is something very real, a system of forces which maintain equilibrium and impose it through violence and repression. And to exist as a system of forces it has been compelled to develop and to establish an economic power, whether this latter rests upon robbery, the result of war, or whether it consists in direct property in the domain, or whether it is constituted little by little, thanks to the modern method of public taxes, which takes on the constitutional appearance of a self-imposed system of taxation. It is in this economic power, so considerable in modern times, that its capacity for acting is founded. It results, that by reason of a new division of labor, the functions of state give rise to special orders and conditions, that is to say, to very particular classes, without including the class of parasites.

The state, which is and which must be an economic power that in its defense of the ruling classes it may be furnished with means to repress, to govern, to administer and to make war, creates in a direct or an indirect manner an aggregation of new and particular interests, which necessarily react upon society. Thus the state, by the fact that it has arisen and that it maintains itself as a guaranty of the social antitheses, which are a consequence of economic differentiations, creates around itself a circle of persons interested directly in its existence.

Two consequences follow therefrom. As society is not a homogeneous whole, but a body of specialized articulations, or, rather, a multiform complexus of objects and interests, it happens that sometimes the directors of the state seek to isolate themselves, and by this isolation they oppose themselves to the whole of society, and then, in the second place, it happens that organs and functions, created first for the advantage of all, end by no longer serving any interest but those of groups, and permit abuses of power on the part of coteries and camorras. Thence arise aristocracies and hierarchies born from the use of the public power, thence arise dynasties; in the light of simple logic these formations appear wholly irrational.

From the first beginnings of written history the state has increased or diminished its powers, but it has never disappeared, because ever since there have been, in the society of men unequal in consequence of economic differentiation, reasons for maintaining and for defending, through force or conquest, slavery, monopolies, or the predominance of one form of production, with the domination of man over man. The state has become, as it were, the field of an endless civil war, which is developing always, even if it does not always show itself under the startling form of Marius and Sylla, days of June and wars of Secession. Within the state, the corruption of man by man has always flourished, because, if there is no form of domination which does not meet resistance, there are no forms of resistance which, in consequence of the pressing needs of life, may not degenerate into a passive compact.

For these reasons, historic events, seen on the surface of the ordinary monotonous narrative, appear like the repetition of the same type, with few variations, like a series of kaleidoscopic pictures. We need not be astonished if the idealistic Herbart and the caustic or pessimistic Schopenhauer arrived at this conclusion, that there is no history, in the sense of any actual _processus_, which is to say in common language; history is a tiresome song.

When political history is once reduced to its quintessence, the state remains illuminated in all its prose. Thenceforth there is no more trace either of theological divination, nor of metaphysical transubstantiation, so much in vogue among certain German philosophers,--for whom the state is the Idea, the State Idea which is realized in history, the state is the full realization of the personality, and other stupidities of the same sort. The state is a real organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a mode of association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production, or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state assumes, either a system of property, or a compact between several systems of property. There is the foundation of all its art, the exercise of which demands that the state itself became an economic power, and that it also dispose of means and processes to make property pass from the hands of some into the hands of others. When, by the effect of an acute and violent change of the forms of production, it is necessary to resort to an unusual and extraordinary readjustment of the relations of property (for example, the abolition of mortmain and fiefs, the abolition of commercial monopolies), then the old political form is insufficient and revolution is necessary to create a new organ which may operate the new economic transformation.

If we make an exception of the very ancient times which are unknown to us, all history is developed in the contacts and the antagonisms of the different tribes and communities, and thereafter of the different nations and different states; that is to say, that the reasons for the internal antitheses in the circle of each society are always more and more complicated with frictions with the outside world. These two reasons for antagonism condition each other reciprocally, but in ways which are always varying. Often it is internal disturbance which urges a community or a city to enter into external collisions; at other times it is these collisions which alter the internal relations.

The principal motive for the different relations between the different communities has been from the beginnings, even as it is to-day, _commerce_ in the broad sense of the word, that is to say, exchange, whether it is a matter of giving up, as in the poor tribes, merely the surplus in exchange for other things, or whether it is a matter, as to-day, of production on a large scale, which is carried on with the exclusive intention of selling so as to draw from a sum of money a larger sum of money. This enormous mass of events exterior and interior, which accumulate and pile upon each other in history, is such a trouble to the historians who content themselves with exploring it and summarizing it, that they become lost in the infinite attempts at chronological groups and bird's-eye views. Whoever, on the contrary, knows the internal development of the different social types in their economic structure, and who considers political events as the particular results of the forces acting in society, ends by triumphing over the confusion born out of the multiplicity and the uncertainty of first impressions, and instead of a chronological or synchronous series, or a view of the whole, he can arrive at the concrete series of a real _processus_.

In the presence of these realistic conditions all the ideologies founded on the ethical mission of the state or on any such conception, fall to the ground. The state is, so to speak, fitted into its place, and it remains encased, as it were, in the surroundings of the social development, in its capacity of a form resulting from other conditions, and in its turn, by reason of its existence, reacting naturally upon the rest.

Here arises another question.

Will this form ever be outgrown?--or can there be a society without a state?--or can there be a society without classes?--and if we must be more explicit, will there ever be a form of communist production with a distribution of labor and of tasks such that there will be no room in it for the development of inequalities, that source of domination of man over man?

It is in the affirmative answer to this question that _scientific socialism_ consists, in so far as it affirms the coming of communistic production, not as a postulate, nor as the aim of a free volition, but as the result of the _processus_ immanent in history.

As is well known, the premise of this prevision is in the actual conditions of present capitalist production. This, socializing continually the mode of production, has subjected living labor more and more with its regulations to the objective conditions of the technical process, it has day after day concentrated the property in the means of production more and ever more into the hands of a few, who as stockholders, or speculators, are always found to be more and more removed from immediate labor, the direction of which passes over to intelligence and science. With the increased consciousness of this situation among the proletarians, whose instruction in solidarity comes from the actual conditions of their employment, and with the decrease of the capacity of the holders of capital to preserve the private direction of productive labor, a moment will come, when in one fashion or another, with the elimination in every form of private rent, interest, profit, the production will pass over to the collectivist association, that is to say, will become communistic. Thus will disappear all inequalities, except those of sex, age, temperament and capacity, that is to say, all those inequalities will cease which engender economic classes, or which are engendered by them, and the disappearance of classes will put an end to the possibility of the state, as domination of man over man. The technical and pedagogical government of intelligence will form the only organization of society.

In this fashion, scientific socialism, in an ideal fashion at least, has triumphed over the state; and its triumph has given it a complete knowledge both of its mode of origin and the reasons for its natural disappearance. It has understood it precisely because it does not rise up against it in a one-sided and subjective fashion, as did more than once, at different epochs, the cynics, the stoics, the epicureans of all sorts, the religious sectaries, the visionary monks, the utopians and finally, in our days, the anarchists of every stripe. Still more, instead of rising up against it, scientific socialism is proposing to show how the state continually rises up of itself against itself, by creating in the means with which it cannot dispense, as, for example, a colossal system of taxation, militarism, universal suffrage, the development of education, etc., the conditions of its own ruin. The society which has produced it will reabsorb it; that is to say, that just as society in organizing a new form of production will eliminate the antagonisms between capital and labor, so, with the disappearance of proletarians and the conditions which render proletarians possible, will disappear all dependence of men upon his fellow man in any form of hierarchy, whatever it may be.

The terms in which the genesis and the development of the state evolve, from its initial point of appearance in a particular community, where economic differentiation is beginning, up to the moment where this disappearance begins to foreshadow itself, make it henceforth intelligible to us.

The State has been reduced till it is but a necessary complement of certain definite economic forms, and thus the theory which would have seen in it an independent factor in history is thenceforth forever eliminated.

It is henceforth relatively easy to take account of the fashion in which _law_ has been raised up to the rank of a decisive factor of society, and thus of history, directly or indirectly.

Before all else, we must remember in what fashion arose this philosophic conception of justice generalized, which is the principal foundation of the theory which maintains that history is dominated by the progress of independent legislation.

With the precocious dissolution of the feudal society in certain parts of Central and Northern Italy, and with the birth of the Communes, which were republics of production grouped in trade guilds and merchant guilds, the Roman law was forced into a place of honor. This law flowered anew in the Universities. It entered into a struggle with the barbaric laws and also in part with the canon law; it was then evidently a form of thought which answered better to the needs of the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to develop.

In fact, considering the peculiarities of rival laws, which were either customs of barbarous nations, or corporation privileges, or papal or imperial concessions, this law appeared as the universality of _written reason_. Had it not arrived at the point of regarding human personality in its most abstract and human relations, since a certain Titius is capable of becoming debtor and creditor, of selling and buying, of making a cession, a donation, etc.? Roman law, although elaborated in its last editing at the command of emperors by servile parasites, appeared then, amid the decline of mediaeval institutions, as a revolutionary force, and as such it constituted a great step of progress. This law, so universal that it gave the means of overthrowing barbaric laws, was certainly a law which corresponded to human nature considered under its generic relations; and by its opposition to private laws and privileges it appeared as a natural law.

We know, moreover, how this ideology of natural law arose. It acquired its greatest distinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but it had long been prepared for by the jurisprudence which took for its base the Roman law, whether it adopted it, revised it, or corrected it.

To the formation of the ideology of natural law another element contributed, the Greek philosophy of later epochs. The Greeks, who were the inventors of those definite arts of the mind which are sciences, never, as is known, drew from their multiple local laws a discipline corresponding to that which we call the science of law. On the contrary, by the rapid progress of abstract research in the circle of their democracies, they arrived very soon at a logical, rhetorical and pedagogical discussion on the nature of justice, the state, the law, penalty; and in their philosophy we may trace the rudimentary forms of all later discussions. But it is not until later, that is to say, in the Hellenistic epoch, when the limits of Greek life were sufficiently enlarged to be mingled with those of the civilized world, that, in the cosmopolitan environment which carried with it the need of searching in each man for the generic man, the rationalism of justice arose--of justice or of natural right in the form given it by the stoic philosophy. The Greek rationalism which had already furnished a certain formal element to the logical codification of Roman law reappeared in the eighteenth century in the doctrine of natural right.

That ideology, whose criticism has served as an arm and an instrument for giving a juridical form to the economic organization of modern society, has had, consequently, various sources. Yet, in fact, this juridical ideology reflects, in the struggle for law and against law, the revolutionary period of the bourgeois spirit. And, although it takes its doctrinal point of departure in a return to the traditions of the ancient philosophy, in the generalization of Roman jurisprudence, in everything else, and in all its development, it is completely new and modern. Roman law, although it was generalized by scholasticism and by modern elaboration, still remains within itself a collection of special cases which have not been deduced according to a preconceived system, nor preordained by the systematic mind of the legislator. On the other hand, the rationalism of the stoics, their contemporaries and their disciples, was a work of pure contemplation, and it produced no revolutionary movement around it. The ideology of natural law, which finally took the name of philosophy of law, was, on the contrary, systematic, it started always from general formulae, it was aggressive and polemic, and still more, it was at war with orthodoxy, with intolerance, with privilege, with constituted bodies; in fine, it fought for the liberties which to-day constitute the formal conditions of modern society. It is with this ideology, which was a method of struggle, that arose for the first time, in a typical and decisive form, that idea that there is a law which is one and the same with reason. The laws against which the struggle was carried on appear as deviations, backward steps, errors.

From this faith in rational law arose the blind belief in the power of the legislator, which grew into fanaticism at the critical moments of the French Revolution.

Thence the belief that society as a whole is to be submitted to one single law, equal for all, systematic, logical, consistent. Thence the conviction that a law guaranteeing to all a legal equality, that is to say, the privilege of contracting, guaranteed also liberty to all.

The triumph of true law assures the triumph of reason, and the society which is regulated by a law equal for all is a perfect society!

It is useless to say that there were illusions at the bottom of these tendencies. We all know to what this universal liberation of men was to lead. But what is most important here is the fact that these persuasions arose from a conception of law, which considered it as detached from the social causes which produced it. Likewise that reason, to which these ideologies appealed, reduced itself to relieving labor, association, traffic, commerce, political forms and conscience from all limits and all obstacles which prevented free competition. I have already shown in another chapter how the great Revolution of the eighteenth century may serve us for experience. And if there is still some one to-day who insists on speaking of a rational law which dominates history, of a law, in short, which would be a _factor_, instead of being a simple _fact_ in historic revolution, that means that he is living out of our time and that he has not understood that our liberal and equalitarian codification has already, in fact, marked the end and the term of that whole school of natural law.

By different ways we have arrived in this century at reducing law, considered previously as a rational thing, into a material thing, and thus into a thing corresponding to definite social conditions.

In the first place, the interest in history gained in extent and in depth, and it led students to recognize that to understand the origins of law, it was not sufficient to stop at the data of pure reason, nor at the study of Roman law alone. Barbaric laws, the usages and customs of nations and societies, so despised by the rationalists, have been theoretically restored to honor. That was the only way to arrive, through the study of the most ancient forms, at an understanding of how the most recent forms could have been successively produced.

Codified Roman law is a very modern form; that personality, which it assumes as a universal subject, is an elaboration of a very advanced epoch, in which the cosmopolitanism of social relations was dominated by a military-bureaucratic constitution. In this environment, in which a written code of reason had been built up, there was no longer any trace of spontaneity or popular life, there was no more democracy. This same law, before arriving at this crystallization, had arisen and had developed: and if we study it in its origins and in its developments, and especially if, in this study, we employ the comparative method, we recognize that, upon many points, it is analogous to the institutions of inferior societies and nations. It therefore becomes evident that the true science of law can be nothing less than the genetic history of the law itself.

But, while the European continent had created in the codification of civil law the type and the textbook of practical bourgeois judgment, was there not in England another self-originating form of law, which arose and developed in a purely practical manner, from the very conditions of the society which produced it without system, and without the action of methodical rationalism having any part in it? The law, which actually exists and is applied, is therefore a much simpler and much more modest thing than was imagined by the enthusiasts who sing the praises of written judgment, of the empire of reason. For their defense, it must not be forgotten that they were the ideal precursors of the great Revolution. For ideology it was necessary to substitute the history of legal institutions. The philosophy of law ended with Hegel; and if objectors mention the books published since, I reply that the works published by professors are not always the index of the progress of thought. The philosophy of law thus became the philosophical study of the history of law. And it is not necessary to repeat here again how historic philosophy ended in economic materialism and in what sense critical communism is the reversal of Hegel.

This revolution, apparently a revolution in ideas alone, is merely an intellectual reflection of the revolutions which have been produced in practical life.

In our century, legislating has become an epidemic; and reason enthroned in legal ideology has been dethroned by parliaments. In these the antitheses of class interests have taken on the form of parties; and the parties struggle for or against definite laws; and all law appears as a simple fact, or as a thing which it is useful or not useful to do.

The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. The small and the large bourgeoisie, agrarians and manufacturers, advocates of the poor and defenders of accumulated wealth, monarchists and democrats, socialists and reactionaries, have bitterly contended over extracting profit from the action of the public authorities and over exploiting the contingencies of politics and parliamentary intrigue, to find the guaranty and the defense of certain definite interests in the interpretation of existing law, or in the creation of a new law. This new legislation has more than once been revised, and the strangest oscillations may be observed in it; extending from the humanitarianism which defends the poor and even animals, to the promulgation of martial law. Justice has been stripped of its mask and has become merely a profane thing.

The consciousness of experience has come to us and has given us a formula as precise as it is modest; every rule of law has been and is the customary, authoritative, or judicial defense of a definite interest; the reduction of law to economics is then almost immediately accomplished.

If the materialistic conception finally came to furnish to these tendencies an explicit and systematic view, it is because its orientation has been determined by the visual angle of the proletariat. This last is the necessary product and the indispensable condition of a society in which all the persons are, from an abstract point of view, equal before the law, but where the material conditions of development and the liberties of each are unequal. The proletarians are the forces through which the accumulated means of production reproduce themselves and reconstitute themselves into new wealth; but they themselves live only by enrolling themselves under the authority of capital; and from one day to the next they find themselves out of work, impoverished and exiles. They are the army of social labor, but their chiefs are their masters. They are the negation of justice in the empire of law, that is to say, that they are the irrational element in the pretended domain of reason.

History then has not been a _processus_ for arriving at the empire of reason in law; it has thus far been nothing else than a series of changes in the form of subjection and servitude. History then consists entirely in the struggle of interests, and law is but the authoritative expression of the interests which have triumphed.

These formulae indeed do not permit us to explain, by the immediate examination of the various interests which are at its base, every particular law which has appeared in history. The facts of history are very complicated; but these general formulae suffice to indicate the style and the method of research which has been substituted for legal ideology.

IX.

Here I must give certain formulae.

Granted the conditions of the development of labor and the instruments appropriated to it, the economic structure of society, that is to say, the form of production of the immediate means of life, determines, on an artificial field, _in the first place and directly_, all the rest of the practical activity of those associated, and the variation of this activity in the _processus_ which we call history, that is to say:--the formation, the frictions, the struggles and the erosions of the classes;--the corresponding regulations relative to law and morality;--and the reasons and modes of subordination and subjection of men toward men and the corresponding exercise of dominion and authority, in fine, that which gives birth to the State and that which constitutes it. It determines, _in the second place_, the tendency and in great part, _in an indirect fashion_, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, religion and science.