Engels To Conrad Schmidt In 1890

by
Robert Vienneau
My articles My siteMy booksMy videos
Follow on:

This is another example of Engels explaining the theory of historical materialism. I know of this letter from Mills and Goldstick (1989). They also point out this letter from Engels. Here we see the metaphor of ideas "standing on their head", not in relation to Hegel's idealism, but as real economic relations reflected in finance. I like the emphasis on the interdependence of industries that could be expressed in Leontief matrices. Does this letter express a deterministic, strict dependence of the superstructure on the base? Or does Engels explain historical materialism as a mutual interaction of base and superstructure?

London, 27 October 1890

Dear Schmidt,

I am taking advantage of this, the first free time I have had, to answer you letter. I think you would be very well advised to accept the post in Zurich. At any rate you'll be able to learn a good deal about economics there, especially if you bear in mind that Zurich is, after all, only a third-rate financial and speculative market and hence that the impressions to be gained there will be dulled, if not deliberately distorted, these being but reflections seen at second or third remove. But you will learn how the machinery works in practice and will be obliged to follow at first hand the stock market reports from London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and thus the world market - in its reflection as a money and stock market - will be revealed to you. Economics, politics, etc., are reflected as objects are in the human eye - they pass through a converging lens and are therefore seen the wrong way up, standing on their heads. Except that there is no nervous apparatus to set them on their feet again for the benefit of the imagination. Your money market man sees the trend of industry and of the world market merely in the inverted reflection of the money and stock markets and thus for him effect becomes cause. I observed this back in the 40s in Manchester; as a guide to industrial progress and its periodical peaks and troughs, the London stock market reports were absolutely useless, since the gentlemen sought to explain everything in terms of money market crises, though these were themselves for the most part little more than symptoms. At that time they were concerned to explain away industrial crises by attributing them to temporary overproduction and thus the thing also had a tendentious aspect which invited distortion. This is a point which has now ceased to apply - once and for all, at any rate so far as we are concerned, and it is, moreover, a fact that the money market may also have its own crises in which actual industrial disturbances play only a subordinate role, if any at all, and in this sphere there is much to be ascertained and investigated, particularly in regard to the history of the last 20 years.

Where there is division of labour on a social scale, the various sections become mutually independent. Production is, in the final analysis, the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products becomes independent of actual production, the former follows a trend of its own which is, by and large, undoubtedly dictated by production but, in specific cases and within the framework of that general dependence, does in turn obey laws of its own, laws inherent in the nature of this new factor; it is a trend having its own phases and reacting in turn on the trend of production. The discovery of America was due to the gold famine which had already driven the Portuguese to Africa (cf. Soetbeer's Edelmetall-Produktion), because the vast expansion of European industry and the corresponding growth in trade in the 14th and 15th centuries called for more means of exchange than Germany - the main source of silver from 1450 to 1550 - was able to provide. The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch and British between 1500 and 1800 had as its aim import from India and no one thought of sending exports there. And yet how tremendous were the repercussions upon industry of these discoveries and conquests carried out solely in the interests of trade - it was only the need to export to those countries which created and developed large-scale industry.

It is the same with the money market. Once trade in money becomes divorced from trade in commodities, it will - under certain circumstances determined by production and by the trade in commodities and within those limits — develop in its own way subject to the special laws and distinctive phases determined by its own nature. If, in addition and in the course of this further development, the trade in money expands to comprise trade in securities, the said securities being not simply government paper, but also the shares of industrial and commercial concerns, i.e. if the trade in money gains direct control of a section of the production by which it is largely dominated, then the reaction of the trade in money on production will be even stronger and more complex. The traders in money own railways, mines, foundries, etc. These means of production assume a twofold aspect: They must be run, now in accordance with the immediate interests of production, now in accordance with the needs of the shareholders in so far as these are traders in money. The most striking example of this is the North American railroads, the running of which is entirely dependent on the day-to-day stock market operations of a Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, etc., which have nothing whatever to do with any particular railroad or its interests quaa means of transport. And even here in England the railway companies have for decades been fighting over the boundary areas separating this concern or that - struggles in which a vast amount of money has been squandered, not in the interests of production and transport, but solely out of a rivalry which for the most part had but one purpose, namely to facilitate the stock market operations of the traders in money who held the shares.

With these few remarks about my view of the relationship of production to the trade in commodities and of both to the trade in money, I have already dealt in the main with your questions about historical materialism generally. The subject is best approached from the standpoint of the division of labour. Society engenders certain common functions which it cannot do without. Those nominated for this purpose form a new branch of the division of labour within society. They thereby acquire interests of their own vis-à-vis, amongst others, their mandatories and become independent of them - and so you have the state. From then on the process is much the same as in the trade in commodities and, later, the trade in money - while the new independent power must, it is true, generally follow the trend of production, it will also, by virtue of its inherent independence, i.e. a relative independence formerly conferred upon it and which it has gradually enlarged, react in turn upon the conditions and the course of production. It is the interaction of two unequal forces, of the economic trend on the one hand and the new political power which is striving for the greatest possible independence and which, having once been installed, assumes a trend of its own, on the other. By and large, the economic trend will predominate but it must also be reacted upon by the political trend which it has itself induced and which has been endowed with relative independence - the trend of, on the one hand, state power and, on the other, of the simultaneously engendered opposition. Just as the trend of the industrial market is largely reflected in the money market, given the provisos set out above, but, of course, the wrong way up, the struggle between the already extant and warring classes is reflected in the struggle between government and opposition, and again the wrong way up; it is no longer reflected directly but indirectly, not as a class struggle but as a struggle over political principles, and in so distorted a form that it has taken us a thousand years to sort it out again.

The government may react to economic developments in three ways: it can take the same direction, in which case things go faster; it may take a contrary one, in which case, as conditions are today and in any of the larger nations, it will eventually come to grief, or it may block certain lines of economic development and lay down others - which will ultimately amount to the same as one of the two foregoing instances. But it is obvious that, in instances 2 and 3, political power can wreak havoc with economic development and cause energy and materials to be squandered on a vast scale.

Then again there is the instance of the seizure and brutal destruction of economic resources which, in earlier days and in certain circumstances, could ruin economic development both locally and nationally. Today, this would mostly have the opposite effect, at least where the larger nations are concerned. In the long run the vanquished may have more to gain economically, politically and morally than, on occasion, the victor.

It is much the same in the case of the law: As soon as the new division of labour becomes necessary and creates professional lawyers, yet another new, independent field is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, is nevertheless capable of reacting in its own way to those spheres. In a modern state not only must the law correspond to the general economic situation and be its expression, it must of itself constitute a coherent expression that does not, by reason of internal contradictions, give itself the lie. And to achieve this, the fidelity with which economic conditions are reflected is increasingly thrown to the winds. All the more so for the rarity with which a statute book is the harsh, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of one class: this of itself would be contrary to the 'concept of law'. The pure, logical concept of law of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1792-96 had already been adulterated in many respects even in the Code Napoléon and, in so far as it was embodied therein, has had to be constantly subjected to all manner of modifications as a result of the growing power of the proletariat. Not that this has prevented the Code Napoléon from being the statute book on which all new codifications in every part of the world are based. Thus the course of the 'law's development' has largely consisted simply in this: Firstly, the attempt to eliminate the contradictions arising from the direct translation of economic conditions into legal principles and to establish an harmonious legal system and, secondly, the fact that the influence and pressure of further economic developments repeatedly disrupt that system, involving it in fresh contradictions (at this stage I am speaking only of civil law).

The reflection of economic conditions as legal principles is likewise necessarily one that presents the image the wrong way up; it does so without the beholder being aware of it; the lawyer imagines he is dealing in a priori principles whereas they are, in fact, no more than economic reflections - and thus the whole thing is the wrong way up. And it seems to me self-evident that this inversion which, in as much as it is not recognised, constitutes what we call an ideological view, reacts in its turn on the economic base and may, within certain limits, modify the same. The basis of the law of inheritance, assuming the family to have attained the same stage of development, is an economic one. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to prove that, for instance, absolute testamentary freedom in England and the strict limits imposed thereon in France are in every respect of economic origin. But both, in a very significant way, react on the economy in that they influence the distribution of wealth.

Now as regards the more rarefied ideological fields such as religion, philosophy, etc.; these have a prehistorical fund of what today would be termed rubbish which was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the historical period. In so far as these various false conceptions of nature, of the nature of man, of spirits, magic forces, etc., are economically based, it is only in a negative sense; false conceptions of nature are the corollary of the low level of economic development in the prehistorical period, but also on occasion its precondition if not its actual cause. And even if economic necessity may have provided the main incentive for progress in natural science and done so to an increasing extent, it would be pedantic to seek economic causes for all this primitive rubbish. The history of science is the history of the gradual elimination of that rubbish and/or its replacement by new, if progressively less ridiculous, rubbish. The people responsible for this in turn belong to special spheres of the division of labour and see themselves as working in an independent field. And to the extent that they constitute an independent group within the social division of labour, what they produce, including their errors, exerts a reciprocal influence on social development as a whole and even on economic development. But for all that, they are themselves in their turn subject to the dominant influence of economic development. In philosophy, for example, this is most easily demonstrated in respect of the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the 18th-century sense), but an absolutist at a time when, throughout Europe, absolute monarchy was in its heyday and, in England, was embarking on a struggle with the populace. In religion as in politics, Locke was the product of the class compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more logical successors, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie - and, in the case of the French, even of the bourgeois revolution. German philosophy, from Kant to Hegel, is permeated by the German philistine - now in a positive, now in a negative, sense. But in every epoch philosophy, as a definite sphere of the division of labour, presupposes a definite fund of ideas inherited from its predecessors and from which it takes its departure. And that is why economically backward countries can nevertheless play first fiddle where philosophy is concerned - France in the 18th century as compared with England, upon whose philosophy the French based themselves and, later on, Germany as compared with both. But in France as in Germany, philosophy, like the general flowering of literature at that time, was also the result of growing economic prosperity. I am in no doubt about the ultimate supremacy of economic development over these fields also, but it will come about within the terms laid down by each individual field; in philosophy, for instance, by the operation of economic influences (which again for the most part operate only in their political, etc., guise) on extant philosophical material handed down by predecessors. Here, political economy creates nothing a novo [from scratch], but determines the way in which the existing fund of ideas changes and develops, and this too is done for the most part indirectly, since it is its political, legal and moral reflections which exert the greatest immediate influence on philosophy.

As for religion, I have said all that is necessary in the last chapter of Feuerbach.

So if Barth opines that we deny that the political, etc., reflections of the economic trend have any effect whatsoever on that trend itself, he is simply tilting at windmills. After all, he only has to look at Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire which is devoted almost exclusively to the particular role played by political struggles and events - needless to say within the framework of their general dependence on economic conditions. Or again at Capital, e. g. the section on the working day where legislation, which is, after all, a political act, appears in such an uncompromising light. Or at the section on the history of the bourgeoisie (Chapter 24). Otherwise why should we be fighting for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically powerless? Might (i.e. state power) is also an economic force!

But I have no time at present to criticise the book. The third volume has got to come out first and in any case I believe that e.g. Bernstein is also perfectly capable of attending to it.

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world such metaphysically polar opposites exist only in a crisis, that instead the whole great process takes place solely and entirely in the form of interplay - if of very unequal forces of which the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and the most vital - and that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. So far as they are concerned, Hegel might never have existed.

As regards the rumpus in the party, I was forcibly dragged into it by the gentlemen of the opposition and thus had no choice. Mr Ernst's conduct vis-à-vis myself is quite indescribable unless I call it that of a schoolboy. I am sorry if he's a sick man and forced to write for his living. But if someone has an imagination so vivid that he can't read a line without inferring the opposite of what it says, he should apply his imagination to spheres other than socialism which is no figment. He should write novels, plays, art criticism and the like, when all he will harm is bourgeois culture, benefiting us in the process. He might then acquire sufficient maturity to be able to achieve something in our field also. Never before have I seen such a rigmarole of half-baked material and utter rubbish as has been dished out by the said opposition. And these callow lads, who are blind to everything but their own boundless egotism, propose to dictate party tactics. I have learnt more from a single one of Bebel's articles in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung than from all the rigmarole these chaps have produced. And they imagine they are worth more than that clear-sighted man who has such an admirably correct grasp of circumstances and depicts them so graphically and succinctly. They are all of them failed belletrists, and even a successful belletrist is a pretty obnoxious animal.

I should be sorry were the Volks-Tribüne to succumb. Under your editorship it has shown that something might well be achieved by a weekly which devotes more space to theory than to news - and I am well aware what sort of contributors you have! But I must say that, now that the Neue Zeit has become a weekly, it's somewhat doubtful whether yours can be kept going. At all events, you will be glad to cast off the joys and sorrows of editorship and have time for something other than purely journalistic tasks. And even in Berlin the immediate future will be dominated by all the various reverberations of the late rumpus, and there'll be nothing to gain for anyone by being mixed up in it.

Your printing the passage from my letter did no harm, but that sort of thing is best avoided. In a letter, one writes from memory and at speed, without looking anything up, etc., and is thus always liable to let slip some expression which may well be seized on by one of those people we Rhinelanders describe as a Korinthenscheisser [someone who trivializes everything], and God knows what rubbish might not come of it.

Many thanks for your anticipatory congratulations on my 70th birthday which is still a month ahead. So far I am still very well except that I still have to spare my eyes and am not allowed to write by gaslight. Let's hope I remain so.

Now I must close.

With warm regards,

Yours,

F. Engels

• Charles W. Mills and Danny Goldstick. 1989. A new old meaning of 'ideology'. Dialogue 28: 417-432.