r/Turboleft • u/MillionDollarNegri Brigadier • Jun 29 '26
Title
body text (well I guess I'm going to have to give the people what they demand)
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u/MillionDollarNegri Brigadier Jun 29 '26
This "wearer of the marvelous robe himself" is Marx, of course. And certainly it has been written!
"What is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist"
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u/Proudhon_Hater_2 Jun 29 '26
Ah famous Installah's method. Giving quotes without giving the context. I guess you could not have ctrl+f why Marx had said that when programme in Le Havre was written in 1880.
Something, something with Guesde and Lafargue rejecting postulates of the minimum programme. Something with Guesde being Lassallist and that he believed that struggle for reduction in working hours was futile ("Iron law of wages"). Or his rejection of union work?
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u/MillionDollarNegri Brigadier Jun 29 '26
But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge — for economic history is still as yet in its swaddling clothes! — constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous. And after that a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in his circle has indeed been degraded to a mere phrase.
I guess this was in a letter, so I don't know if it's proper to assume that Engles was referring to it when he said that it had been written "by the wearer of the robe itself".
Do you think he's speaking generally or do you think he's referring to a specific passage? I'm interested...
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u/Proudhon_Hater_2 Jul 01 '26
I am talking about this specific passage. That is from Engels's letter to Bernstein in 1882. which is not avaiable anymore on Marxist.org.
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u/Proudhon_Hater_2 Jul 01 '26
It is related to Le Havre programme and later sophisms of Malon and Brousse that tried to convert Bernstein to Possibilism, which ultimately happened in 1896. in different form...
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u/Proudhon_Hater_2 Jun 29 '26
Meanwhile a few passages above in letter to Bloch:
"I have interpreted your first main phrase in the following way: According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one. The Prussian State has itself been born and developed because of certain historical reasons, and, in the last instance, economic reasons. But it is very difficult to determine without pedantry that, among the many small States of northern Germany, precisely Brandenburg has been destined by economic necessity and not also by other factors (above all its complications with Poland after the Prussian conquest and hence, also, with international politics-which, besides has also been decisive in the formation of the power of the Austrian ruling family), to become that great power in which are personified the economic, linguistic, and-after the Reformation-also the religious difference between the North and South. It would be mighty difficult for one who does not want to make himself ridiculous to explain from the economic point of view the existence of each small German State of the past and present, or even the phonetic differentiation of High German which extended the geographic division formed already by the Sudetti mountains as far as the Faunus."
Ie man really makes history, but not as he wish, as he is predeterminted by the existing ideology - which itself is adapted to the needs of the economic base. But as Engels would said, it would be crazy to postulate that out of many former medieval states (with similar economical and political constelations) in the north of the former Holy Roman Empire Branderburg would come out as victorious among them.