A Revised Historical Materialism E-Book

Ib Gram-Jensen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The three essays in this volume can be read individually, but all turn on the case for a revision of Marx' and Engels' historical materialism and for a less arbitrary way of reading their texts. The first one deals with the major weaknesses of Marx' and Engels' historical materialism and how to develop a better alternative without losing the critical and revolutionary edge of the original version. The second one demonstrates how Hal Draper misread some crucial passages in The Communist Manifesto, and offers a more cogent representation. The third one is a mere sketch, but suggests how the revised historical materialism outlined in the first essay makes it possible to understand the phenomenon of war.

Leseprobe

For Susanne

Contents

Preface

1. A Revised Historical Materialism

2. Hal Draper and the Adventures of the Communist Manifesto

3. War and Historical Materialism

References

Preface.

The three essays in this volume make up an attempt to round off the arguments in Experience and Historical Materialism, Structure, Agency and Theory and A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays and thus to offer a relatively concise presentation of the case for a revision of Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, and for a less arbitrary way of reading their texts.

The first essay deals with the major weaknesses of Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism and sketches the suggested alternative. The second is a critique of Hal Draper’s interpretation of some crucial passages in The Communist Manifesto. And the third one, a mere sketch, suggests how to understand the phenomenon of war in the context of a revised historical materialism according to which the interaction of social circumstances and agency, rather than the dialectic of forces and relations of production as in Marx and Engels, is conceived of as the motive power of historical development and transformations. The essays can be read individually, but still bear on the same problematic.

A Revised Historical Materialism.

a. Introduction.

In Experience and Historical Materialism, the following warning and explanation was given to readers about the nature of “the version – or revision – of classical historical materialism”1 suggested in Structure, Agency and Theory, which was still unpublished when the passage was written:

It may be just as well to warn readers at the outset that while the suggested conception of the nature of the process of historical development derives from historical materialism and is indeed, in the opinion of this writer, a variety of historical materialism, it is also, in a real sense, a revised, or revisionist, variety of it, which may cause scandal to some, and give rise to misunderstandings. A brief summary of some main points of the text may, therefore, be useful. The suggested theoretical position rejects collective subjects and the reduction of human agents (their consciousness, individuality and actions) to the mere supports or products of structural causality. It rejects the reduction of human agents and agency to discursive articulation or ideological interpellation, but acknowledges the irreducibility of agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality to simple (and hence derivable) effects of that reality. And it rejects Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, but accepts their general historical-materialist approach, their critique of the capitalist mode of production and type of society, and the objective interest of the working class in accomplishing the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society – while, however regretfully, rejecting their expectations and predictions of its inevitability along with the idea of the dialectic of forces and relations of production supposed to prompt or force the working class to effect it.2

In the meantime, Structure, Agency and Theory has been published, with copious discussion and documentation of the weaknesses in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, and presentation of the suggested revised version and some of its consequences. It may, however, be useful to offer a shorter discussion for the benefit of readers disinclined to tackle the three volumes of Structure, Agency and Theory; besides, Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism and their conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations are criticised from a somewhat different angle here, drawing on Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie and Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenchaft in addition to the texts referred to in Structure, Agency and Theory.

The suggested revision of historical materialism is of course not purported to constitute a complete, finished or definitive, let alone unchallengeable, theory. It is no more than a set of argued suggestions on how to surmount a number of substantial problems in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, submitted for discussion.

The notion of a revised historical materialism will very probably strike some with horror, but an unargued rejection of such a theoretical construction or approach, once weaknesses in the unrevised one have been located, is an irrational attitude, the dogmatic insistence on the incontestable correctness of the latter. What can and must be demanded of the revised historical materialism is that it is able to provide a better understanding of the process of historical development than the unrevised one, and hence a better basis for the analysis of past and present history and thus for the handling of social circumstances. It must, in other words, constitute a theoretically and empirically progressive problemshift,3 which will be demonstrable in terms of historical analysis and explanations measurable in terms of Hexter’s “reality rule”4, and demonstrable in terms of successful social practice, insofar as it is actually applied to the questions relevant in this context.

It might be considered unnecessary to justify the need for a revised historical materialism at any great length here, as the case has been made in Structure, Agency and Theory as well as in Experience and Historical Materialism and A Critique of Mau and Other Essays. Nevertheless, the somewhat different approach to the question and the inclusion of the abovementioned late texts by Engels inevitably renders the argument somewhat different, making certain aspects and points stand out more clearly. Therefore, a rather full argument taking this into consideration seems proper, and may also be easier to follow without having read either Structure, Agency and Theory, Experience and Historical Materialism or A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays beforehand.

The revision is not an attempt to identify everything in Marx and Engels which may be criticised and rejected. It turns on the rejection of Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations (in the era of class societies) and their consequent conception of “the prehistory of human society”,5 that is, history before the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society which marks the end of the era of class societies, as a process ruled by laws of development and transformations guaranteeing that this supersession will indeed be accomplished. And the revision consists in the substitution of the said conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production by that of the interaction between social circumstances and agency as the motive power of historical development and transformations, with agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality as an irreducible causal factor in this interaction.

This suggested revision eliminates the tension in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism between the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations on the one hand and that of human agents as the makers of their own history under given and inherited circumstances on the other. It makes it possible to explain the failure of Marx’ and Engels’ expectations and predictions to come true, and to explain the empirical distance, or lack of symmetry, between agents’ class positions on the one hand and ideological divisions on the other.

Finally, it may be noted that the said tension and its ultimate theoretical effects have been adumbrated by Anderson, although in another context, and although the proposed revision might not appeal to him:

[.....]. The most hazardous conclusions that the system of Capital yielded were the general theorem of the falling rate of profit, and the tenet of an ever-increasing class polarization between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Neither has yet been adequately substantiated. The first implied an economic breakdown of capitalism by its inner mechanisms; the second a social breakdown by way – if not of an immiseration of the proletariat – of an ultimate absolute preponderance of a vast industrial working class of productive labourers over a tiny bourgeoisie, with few or no intermediary groups. The very absence of any political theory proper in the late Marx may thus be logically related to a latent catastrophism in his economic theory, which rendered the development of the former redundant.6

This “catastrophism”, which is actually hardly latent, is based on Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, the classical formulation of which is found in Marx’ 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and so are their expectations and predictions about the inevitability of the fall of the bourgeoise and the victory of the proletariat.7

b. The Weaknesses of Marx’ and Engels’ Historical Materialism.

The emphasis on agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality in the suggested revised historical materialism is no ad hoc explanation of historical developments which are irreducible to effects of structural causes, but a means of moving from structural to historical analysis. That the relationship between these two levels of analysis is one of complementarity8 is not a symptom of an inconsistency: it is predictable from the very conception of agency and its interaction with social circumstances at the core of the revision, the conception solving the puzzle of class positions and ideological divisions.

A point which has been made before, but bears repetition, is that this complementarity is not a mere matter of different levels of abstractions, that is, in terms of the number of explanatory factors taken into account, which would imply a continuum from structural to historical analysis. The difference is that between a structural analysis abstracting from agency in the sense that agents are only taken into account as the personifications of economic/structural categories, bearers or character masks of specific class relations and interests, as in Marx’ structural analysis of capitalism,9 on the one hand and one which takes account of their articulation of experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality, with their consequent actions, on the other.10 The social structure delimits a field of the possible, with pressures and possibilities, in terms of this articulation and the outcomes of the interaction between social circumstances and agency resulting from the actual articulation, but the explanatory logic is irreducibly changed once agency is no longer abstracted from.

If human agents’ making of their own history was not mediated through their articulation of their experiences of and their responses to their “lived” reality, but a simple effect of the social circumstances in which they find themselves at any given point in time, theory itself would be reducible to the same determination and could not make any difference (such as shortening and alleviating the birthpangs of social developments11).12 We have to assume that we act on what we think about the world and our possibilities rather than on the objective facts about them (although the two may of course be more or less distant from each other) if we are to consider human agents – ourselves – the makers of their – our – own history (albeit under irreducibly real social circumstances interacting with our agency). And accept the uncertainty about the future because of this, and because our knowledge about social reality is inevitably partial, approximate and provisional.

In fact, the suggested revision is not quite new. It is to a considerable extent inspired by the so-called British Marxist Historians,13 the historical analyses of whom seem cogent, and conscious of the interaction between social circumstances and agency as its motive power. In particular, Thompson has emphasised

[.....] experience – a category which, however imperfect it may be, is indispensable to the historian, since it comprises the mental and emotional response, whether of an individual or of a social group, to many inter-related events or to many repetitions of the same kind of event.14

[.....]. Experience arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise without thought; it arises because men and women [.....] are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves and their world. [.....] What we mean is that changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness, proposes new questions, and affords much of the material which the more elaborated intellectual exercises are about.15

What Althusser overlooks is the dialogue between social being and social consciousness. Obviously, this dialogue goes in both directions. If social being is not an inert table which cannot refute a philosopher with its legs, then neither is social consciousness a passive recipient of “reflections” of that table. Obviously, consciousness, whether as unselfconscious culture, or as myth, or as science, or law, or articulated ideology, thrusts back into being in its turn: as being is thought so thought also is lived – people may, within limits, live the social or sexual expectations which are imposed upon them by dominant conceptual categories.16

In addition to these essential reminders from Thompson, one may quote the following concise summary of the interaction between social circumstances and agency from outside the group of British Marxist Historians:

[.....]. Social conditions (Verhältnisse) are, then, both a product and a determinant of social behaviour, and thus an important dialectic between Verhältnisse and Verhalten is constituted. [.....] Through their social practice (“Tätigkeit”) men change both nature and social conditions, which then in their turn react on social practice and so on.17

Finally, of course, this notion of an interaction or dialectic between human agency on the one hand and natural and social conditions on the other is found in Marx himself, from his early writings and on:

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man [der Mensch] makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a speciesbeing. Or rather, he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, only because he is a speciesbeing. Only because of that is his activity free activity.18

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. [.....] Acting on external nature and changing it through this movement, he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities dormant in nature and subjects the play of its powers to his own mastery. We are not dealing with the first animal-like instinctive forms of labour here. [.....]. We presuppose labour in a form in which it belongs exclusively to man. A spider carries out operations resembling those of a weaver, and a bee puts many a human builder to shame in the construction of its wax cells. But what is from the outset distinguishing the poorest builder from the best bee is that he has constructed the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of the labour-process a result appears which even at its beginning was already present in the imagination of the worker, i. e., already ideally.19

It is this conception of the interaction between social circumstances (of course including any natural conditions affecting social life) and agency which has an uneasy coexistence with the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism. And the suggested revision of their historical materialism consists, basically, in ridding it of the tension between these two conceptions by excising the latter one. And in spelling out the implications of the conceptualisation of agency in terms of agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality – the latter being defined as “the objective circumstances in which agents live, whether conscious of them or not: the total ensemble of objective conditions affecting the life of agents.”20

A law to the effect that (the development of the productive forces will eventually be fettered by the relations of production and) the class with an interest in the continued development of the productive forces will effect a historical transformation is implicit in the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations: without such a law, rather than a tendency or a mere possibility, there is no guarantee that the dialectic will actually bring about a transformation, even with the specific reasons why the capitalist proletariat could, in Marx’ and Engels’ opinion, be trusted to accomplish the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society.

Hence the Russian reviewer quoted by Marx in the Afterword to the second edition of the first volume of Capital only drew a logical conclusion when he wrote about the law of the transition from one order of the whole to another, the social movement considered as “a process of natural history ruled by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions” by Marx and “the explanation [Aufklärung] of the specific laws ruling the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its substitution by another, higher one.”21 He simply spelled out the logical implication of Marx’ argument and predictions about the inevitable transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society inevitably accomplished by the proletariat. And Marx, in his turn, praised the reviewer’s depiction of “the method employed in “Capital””,22 “the dialectical method”, for its accuracy.23

But this conception of, and emphasis on, laws ruling social/historical development and transformations grates against Marx’ and Engels’ conception of human agents as the makers of their own history (under given circumstances)24 and their explicit rejections of teleological interpretations of history.

If agents are effectively reduced to the supports or bearers of “laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions”, how can they be considered the makers of their own history in any meaningful sense, and how can one say that, “it is hardly “history” that uses man as a means of going through with its ends – as if it were a person apart – rather it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own ends”?25 The tension in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism between a determinist-teleological tendency, with agency as the mere support or bearer of the abovementioned law or laws of history, on the one hand and a conception of historical development as open-ended on the other, is irreducible.

To be sure, Marx and Engels argue in terms of the pressure of capitalism and its consequences on the working class to effectuate a transition to socialism and eventually classless society, and of factors aiding the class to acquire the class capacities to do so.26 But in effect these arguments only acquire their predictive force from the underlying assumption that their accomplishment of this transformation will be in accordance with the “specific laws ruling the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its substitution by another, higher one”, like the transition from smallscale industry to capitalism which went before it.27 There is thus a certain circularity in this, as historical transitions and the development of capitalism and the working class and its organisations are interpreted according to “the general conclusion” Marx arrived at by the mid-1840s, and read as confirmations of it.

What prevents the abovementioned tension in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism from becoming immediately visible is, in fact, no more than an assumption or prediction linking “the specific laws ruling the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its substitution by another, higher one”, or the dialectic of forces and relations of production, with agency, namely the assertion, which may of course seem rather plausible, that the class with an interest in the continued development of the productive forces will respond to its fettering by the relations of production by abolishing these relations – and be able to succeed in doing so. This assertion is visible in the Manifesto and in Capital, but is spelled out in Marx’ letter of 28 December 1846 to Annenkow:

M. Proudhon mixes up ideas and things. People [die Menschen] never relinquish what they have won, but this does not mean that they never relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive forces. Quite the contrary. In order not to lose the results attained, in order not to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, people are obliged, as soon as their mode of carrying on commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their inherited social forms. I am using the word “commerce” here in the widest sense it has in German: Verkehr. For example: the privileges, the institution of guilds and corporations, the whole regulatory regime of the Middle Ages, were social relations that solely corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the previously existing state of society from which these institutions had arisen. Under the protection of the corporative and regulatory regime, capital was accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were founded – and people would precisely have forfeited these fruits if they had tried to retain the forms under whose shelter these fruits had ripened. Hence there were two thunderclaps, the revolution of 1640 and that of 1688. All old economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, the political order which was the official expression of the old society, were shattered in England. Thus the economic forms in which people produce, consume and exchange are transitory and historical. With the acquisition of new productive forces people change their mode of production, and with the mode of production they change all economic circumstances that were merely the relations necessary for this particular mode of production.28

This assumption may of course be defended by pointing to the fact of historical transformations in the past; but the fact that such transformations have occurred does not prove that they will inevitably occur whenever the development of the productive forces is fettered by the relations of production – or for that matter that it will be, or has been, fettered (in the strict sense of the word) by capitalist relations. The objective and fundamental working-class interest in effecting the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society must be considered real enough – but not as a case directly parallel to that of the English revolutions of 1640 and 1688.

Marx and Engels argue cogently that the development of the productive forces in capitalism tends towards the exploitation, impoverishment and subjugation of the working class, the alienation of human agents rather than their liberation from want and their subjection to nature and their social relations, in stark contradistinction to the potential for the leap from the kingdom of necessity to that of freedom created by the very same development of the forces.

Even if the term class struggle is deliberately omitted from Marx’ 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,29 Marx does mention the conflict fought out by human agents in the era of social revolution which begins when the development of the productive forces is fettered by the relations of production.30 There is no doubt that human agency, and class struggle, are the means by which Marx and Engels assumed historical transformations to be brought about in the “prehistory of human society”. But the promise given in sentence 11 and 1231 in effect means that this process is the way of history (or the prehistory of human society) to move from one type of society to another, with the foreseeable end result that the prehistory of human society is closed with the supersession of capitalism, the leap from the realm of necessity to that of freedom later to be predicted in Anti-Dühring.

In this way the tension between history, or historical development, as a process using human agents for its own purposes on the one hand and history as nothing but the activity of human agents pursuing their own ends32 on the other may be rendered less visible, but it is still there: how can there be any guarantee that history (or prehistory) which is nothing but human agents’ pursuit of their own ends will inevitably lead to the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society if it is not “a process of natural history ruled by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions”?

The relevant passages in Die heilige Familie, Die deutsche Ideologie and the 1859 Preface do not give any unequivocal answer to one or the other effect: they are inherently ambiguous, showing no awareness of the tension, in effect trying to have it both ways. And this ambiguity was never overcome by Marx and Engels: they remained confident in the supersession of capitalism, although their rejection of teleological interpretations and explanations of history and their emphasis on irreducible human agency, agents as the makers of their own history under given and inherited circumstances, suggested an open-ended process of historical development.

This latter interpretation might seem to be borne out by the passage in Engels’ letter to Conrad Schmidt of 27 October 1890, in which he dismisses a critique of his and Marx’ historical materialism:

If therefore Barth supposes that we deny any and every reaction of the political, etc., reflexes of the economic movement upon the movement itself, he is simply tilting at windmills. He has only got to look at Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which deals almost exclusively with the particular part played by political struggles and events, of course within their general dependence upon economic conditions. Or Capital, the section on the working day, for instance, where legislation, which is surely a political act, has such a trenchant effect. Or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie (Chapter 24). Or why do we fight for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically impotent? Force (that is, state power) is also an economic power!33

But a little more than a month earlier, he had written what must in the final analysis be read to the opposite effect to another correspondent. Perhaps the tension in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, and the drift towards a conception of history as ruled by effectively teleological laws “ruling the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its substitution by another, higher one” comes out at least as strongly as in the Afterword to the second edition of Capital in Engels’ letter to Bloch of 21-22 September 1890. Engels’ words about history being made “in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in its turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life”, and “innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event”34 would, to be sure, in themselves seem to suggest agents as the makers of an unmastered, unpredictable, openended history. But before committing them to the paper, he had already stated that, “There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid in all the endless host of accidents [.....] the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.”35 And writes that the process by which the historical events are produced “has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion.”36

In a letter of 25 January, 1894, Engels dealt somewhat more systematically with economic basis and non-economic forces and with accident and necessity, by way of reply to a letter of 19 January from Walther Borgius who asked Engels to explain what should be understood by “economic relations”.37 Engels’ answer to Borgius merits quotation at some length, demonstrating as it does that his position on these questions was basically the same as that expressed om his letters of 1890 to Schmidt and Bloch.38 The first thing to note, however, is his broad definition of economic relations:

1. What we understand by the economic relations, which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society, is the manner and method by which men in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception this technique also determines the manner and method of exchange and, further, of the distribution of products and with it, after the dissolution of gentile society, also the division into classes, and hence the relations of lordship and servitude and with them the state, politics, law, etc. Further included in economic relations are the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived – often only through tradition or by force of inertia; also of course the external environment which surrounds this form of society.

[.....]

2. We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately conditions historical development. But race is itself an economic factor. Here, however, two points must not be overlooked:

a) Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately asserts itself. [.....] So it is not, as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, that the economic situation produces an automatic effect. No. Men make their history themselves, only they do so in a given environment, which conditions it, and on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other – the political and ideological relations, are still ultimately the decisive ones, forming the keynote which runs through them and alone leads to understanding.

b) Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan, or even in a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, the complement and form of appearance of which is accident. The necessity which here asserts itself athwart all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. [.....].

So with all the other accidents, and apparent accidents, of history. The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run zigzag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve, you will find that this axis will run more and more nearly parallel to the axis of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with.39

What Engels is arguing both in his letter of 21-22 September 1890 to Joseph Bloch and here is in effect that the individual wills, the innumerable intersecting forces, somehow more or less cancel out, “are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant”, the historical event, which “may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition.”40 But if so, how can it be assumed that, “the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary”, and that the closure of the prehistory of human society by the transition from capitalism to socialism and classless communist society, the leap from the realm of necessity into that of freedom, is the predictable outcome?

Even on the recognition that the material reproduction of society with its given preconditions will always circumscribe a field of the possible, with pressures and probabilities,41 a field also circumscribed by previous historical development, how can human history be taken to proceed in the manner of a natural process and be essentially subject to the same laws of motion? How can it be taken for granted that agents’ actions will indeed serve the realisation of economic necessity, and eventuate in a curve with an average axis so near to that of economic development as to make no real difference? And how can the possibility that different choices and actions, in their interaction with social circumstances, may make the difference between the maintenance or supersession of a type of society, and between different possible substitutes for it, be excluded?

Now, Engels’ references to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Capital, Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philisophie in his letters to Bloch, Schmidt and Borgius42 may of course be considered conclusive evidence that Engels had not, when he wrote these letters, come to believe that the working class will be victorious so to speak by “accident” actually caused by the economic necessity “which ultimately always asserts itself”: that he merely emphasised one aspect of what he had argued in Anti-Dühring: that the possibility of making the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom is here,43 and that economic necessity is the necessity of the supersession of capitalism which will force the working class to accomplish this supersession in the way to do so shown by the capitalist mode of production itself: by seizing political power and turning the means of production in the first instance into state property.44 If so, this is a prediction which may be supportable or not by the observation of various circumstances and developments in contemporary capitalist society (that is, advanced capitalist societies up to the late 1870s). But such support does not amount to a guarantee that as a consequence of the very nature of the process of historical development in general and capitalist development in particular the working class cannot fail to make the right choices and be able to realise its aspirations.45 Nor does it explain how human actors’ conflicting aspirations cancel out, thus allowing economic necessity to affirm itself.

We may safely assume that Engels did believe in his own predictions in Anti-Dühring. But this belief was, in effect, derived from the assumption that working-class actors will make the right choices and will have the (class) capacities necessary to realise their aspirations: that, in other words, the promise made in the 1859 Preface, in the 11th and 12th of the “15 sentences”, that this will indeed be the case, is valid. But this promise is itself based on a hypothesis on the nature of historical development and transformations (in the prehistory of human societies) turning on the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, a hypothesis which can hardly, with the wisdom of hindsight, be considered confirmed by historical experience.

In any case it is evident from Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie that his argument on necessity and accident is not made up for the occasion, but, on the contrary, embedded in his and Marx’ historical materialism. In Anti-Dühring, Engels had already remarked that

The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but, nota bene, not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contrast to the naively revolutionary, simple rejection of all previous history, modern materialism sees in the latter the process of evolution of humanity, it being its task to discover the laws thereof.46

And the same point is made at some length in the last chapter of Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen philosophie, published in 1888. It is only necessary to quote the following paragraph:

Now, however, the history of the development of society turns out to be fundamentally [wesentlich] different from that of nature. In nature, it is – insofar as we ignore the repercussion of human beings on nature – nothing but unconscious blind agencies affecting each other and in the interaction of which the general law asserts itself. Of all that happens – neither of the countless seemingly accidental occurrences which become visible on the surface, nor of the final results confirming the regularity within these accidental occurrences – nothing happens as a willed conscious end. In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are nothing but human beings endowed with consciousness, acting with deliberation or passion, aiming at specific ends; nothing happens without a conscious intention, without a willed purpose. But this difference, however important it is for the historical investigation of especially single epochs and events, cannot change anything about the fact that the course of history is ruled by inner general laws. Because in spite of the consciously willed purposes of all individuals, accident rules on the surface even here. What is willed happens only rarely, in most cases the numerous willed ends intersect and struggle with each other, or these ends are impracticable from the outset, or the means inadequate. In this way the clashes between the countless individual wills and individual actions in the historical sphere bring about a state of things wholly analogous to that obtaining in unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are willed, but the results actually resulting from the actions are not willed, or insofar as they nevertheless momentarily seem to correspond to the willed end, they will eventually have consequences quite different from the willed ones. Thus, the historical events likewise seem to be very largely ruled by accident. But everybody playing on the surface of accident will always be controlled by internal hidden laws, and what matters is only to discover these laws.47

Basically, these “internal hidden laws” ruling the history (or prehistory) of human society are those sketched in the 1859 Preface, more specifically, the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations.

So, the tension in Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism between human agents as the makers of their own history on the one hand and historical development and transformations (“the social movement”) as “a process of natural history ruled by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions”48 on the other is not eliminated by Engels’ argument, which moreover implies a paradox. If it is true in any real sense that, “it is hardly “history” that uses man as a means of going through with its ends – as if it were a person apart – rather it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own ends”,49 even if “economic relations” as defined by Engels50 delimit the field of the possible, does it not make any difference what those choices or ends (agents’ aspirations) are? And how do conflicting ends, aspirations, choices (and actions) cancel out, so that economic necessity invariably asserts itself – whether or not it is supposed to imply the supersession of capitalism?

The tension in Engels’ argument becomes visible as he actually asserts, in his letter to Bloch of 21-22 September 1890, that

[.....]. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) – do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.51

But if so, and Engels’ assertion seems logical enough, how can the process of historical development be asserted to proceed in the manner of a natural process and essentially [wesentlich] subject to the same laws of motion?52 If agency actually can, and does, make a real difference in terms of its outcome, the process of historical development is of another kind than natural processes, from which volition, according to Engels’ own words quoted above, is absent. Engels seems to try to eat his theoretical cake and have it by insisting on human actors as the makers of their own history and at the same time on the fundamental similarity between this historical development and that of natural processes, and especially that both can be accounted for by reference to “essentially the same laws of motion.”

If economic necessity is assumed inevitably to assert itself, if “what emerges is something that no one willed”,53 and/or, “the social movement” is supposed to be (like) a process of natural history “ruled by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions”, then history is in effect assumed to use human agents as a means of going through with its ends, and human agents are effectively reduced to the mere supports of economic necessity or the ends of history. While if history is nothing but the activity of human agents pursuing their own ends, then the ends, aspirations and actions of agents – the experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality which they articulate – must be taken to make an irreducible difference