READ and DISCUSS:

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx, 1859)⁴

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with … the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production … and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms - in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation”.

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Engels, 1886)⁵

“The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, only mechanics … had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in its infantile form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes. … The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This was in accordance with the level of the natural science of that time. … Nature, it was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again. … The history of the development of the Earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all”.

Introduction to ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’ (Engels, 1892)⁶

“When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. … The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall. … But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church … it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully a third of the soil of the Catholic world. … Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now, up to then, science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion. … The class most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and … every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first instance”.

1. Reading Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’,

(a) What phrase used by Marx sums up the essence of a ‘materialist’ philosophical outlook?

(b) What does Marx say about how and when revolutionary changes happen in human development?

2. Reading Engels on ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’,

(a) What were the weaknesses of the kind of materialist philosophy put forward in the eighteenth century?

(b) How did that mechanical materialism reflect the development of scientific thinking at that time?

3. Reading Engels’ Introduction to ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,

(a) Why did the rising capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – need science which more accurately described the real world, rather than one based on theological beliefs?

(b) In what ideological ‘disguise’ was the opposition to feudalism usually expressed?