Finally, the analysis furnishes a prediction that the "two camp situation" will surely be realized:

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers. and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of proThus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population." Here a bit of sociological analysis is used to justify a total rejection of the entire social order of the present, its ideas, culture and political authority:

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

.. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class."

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. . . The cohesive force of civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is exclusively the state of the ruling class, and in all cases remains essentially a machine for keeping down the oppressed, exploited class.9

And now we are emotionally and intellectually prepared for this frank proclamation of a dogma:

Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange-in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the

'Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1884). Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 323.

economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.10

In these statements we find thrown together facts, analysis, and dogma. It is a fact that there are classes. The analysis of power in terms of relations other than legal authority has validity. But beyond facts and analysis, it is nothing but dogma to assert (a) that all human actions are motivated by class struggles; (b) that there are no classes except those based on property distinctions; (c) that the ownership of the means of production is the root of oppressive class rule; and (d) that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is entirely splitting all the people into two hostile camps.

Communist explanation of evil

Other dogmatic beliefs of Communists flow from the basic dogma of the class struggle. Thus they assert that the root of all evil in the world is the exploitation of one class by another by means of privately owned land or capital. But for private property, there would be no exploitation, Communists claim. But for exploitation, there would be no oppressive power. But for oppressive power, there would be no crime.

The Communist doctrine of evil in human life is somewhat more complicated than this (particularly through the concept of man's "alienation" from other men, his work, and himself) but it basically amounts to the dogma that most evil is the consequence of private property, and that, with exploitation and oppression, it will vanish when private property of land and capital is abolished.

2. Class Struggles and Historical Change

This concept of class struggle furnishes the Communists with an explanation of history. They say about recorded history (a) that everything that happened has ultimately been an aspect of class struggles; (b) that one can distinguish in these class struggles certain major phases; (c) that history moves along a certain line through these phases and cannot move otherwise; and (d) that this forward movement of history must culminate in communism. Let us take up each of these doctrines in

turn.

Class struggles as the form of historical change

History, a series of dramatic political changes, has happened, according to Communist ideology, because the division of society into classes

"Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1877), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, pp. 134, 135.

makes the establishment of political power necessary, and political power rises, declines, and falls as its basis changes. The basis of political power, according to the Communist thesis, has been the ownership of the means of production. In the development of society the techniques of production have periodically changed, so that the means of production which were powerful yesterday gave way to new means of production today. The owners of these new means of production then were the up and coming class. But the owners of the old means of production still held sway by means of the machinery of political power they had established. It is political power which prevented a gradual change of peaceful progress from the rule of one class to that of another. So the up and coming class slowly gained influence and economic strength within the framework of political rule established by the old class, until one day this framework would be violently broken and the new class would take over political power. This theory has been laid down by Marx in a wellknown passage:

.

The general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, esthetic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear

before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.11

Knowledge of the "laws" of bistorical change

On the strength of this theory, the Communists believe that they are in possession of the key to history. They believe that the concept of classes, class struggle, forces of production, relations of production, and revolution, enable them not only to explain the past, but understand the present and recognize the direction events are taking into the future. In the realm of history, the process of change seems to them to have become as clear as that of mutation has as a result of Darwin's theories:

. . It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science—this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.12

This is a theory of material causation of all history:

In modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all political struggles are class struggles, and all class struggles for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form-for every class struggle is a political struggleturn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation. Therefore, here at least, the state—the political order is the subordinate, and civil societythe realm of economic relations-the decisive element.

... If the state even today, in the era of big industry and of railways, is on the whole only a reflexion, in concentrated form, of the economic needs of the class controlling production, then this must have been much more so in an epoch when each generation of men was forced to spend a far greater part of its aggregate lifetime in satisfying material needs, and was therefore much more dependent on them than we are today. An ex

"Marx, Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (January 1859), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, pp. 362, 363.

Engels, Preface to the Third German Edition of Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1885), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 246.

amination of the history of earlier periods, as soon as it is seriously undertaken from this angle, most abundantly confirms this.13

.. Now Marx has proved that the whole of previous history is a history of class struggles, that in all the manifold and complicated political struggles the only thing at issue has been the social and political rule of social classes, the maintenance of domination by older classes and the conquest of domination by newly arising classes. To what, however, do these classes owe their origin and their continued existence? They owe it to the particular material, physically sensible conditions in which society at a given period produces and exchanges its means of subsistence.14

This view of history is called historical materialism. It is the special philosophy of Marx who developed it and applied it in his writings. Note that it attributes the ultimate moving power in human affairs to material factors, viz., the "forces of production," but insists that the actual movements are political, and, at the decisive points, violent. "Force is the midwife of history," said Marx.

3. The Destination of History

Marx thought he had discovered the secret of social and political change and how it happens in history. His followers, particularly Lenin and Stalin (in most cases following Engels rather than Marx) went much further. They mapped out the entire course of human history, from the earliest beginnings, to what they believed must be the ultimate end. Engels, in a very superficial book called The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, had distinguished certain phases of social development. Engels' already too simplified classification was reduced to even simpler terms, and now all Communists are taught that the history of mankind passes through five phases. These phases are distinguished in terms of the techniques of economic production and the relations of production with their corresponding social classes.

Five phases of human society

In the first and primitive phase, there was supposedly no private property, no class division and no state. With the introduction of private property, there came, according to the theory, the first division into classes. The first class society was a slaveholding society, with slaves owned as private property. When that society had run its course, and slavery was no longer profitable, a new class of feudal landowners supposedly emerged from the ruins and became the ruling class of the next type of society-feudal society.

13 Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (1886), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, pp. 393, 394.

"Engels, "Karl Marx" (1877), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 163.