what role do ideas play in Historical Materialism? [Archive]

Dave B

14th July 2010, 18:19

I think that there may be an interesting quote from Engels on this below.

The general idea is I think that material conditions or economics give the general direction to the development of ideology as a kind of Hegelian spirit of the age but a material one, however the exact path it takes involves an interaction with pre existing ideologies.

Which are themselves adaptations to previous material conditions.

It is a bit like Darwinian evolution where the animal or in the analogy the ideology adapts to a new material environment. The adaptation has to work on the pre-existing animal as a complete redesign is not practical. Hence you can weird stuff like grass eating flightless parrots in the mountains of New Zealand filling an ecological niche normally left to goats and sheep like animals.

In other words the materially based ideology can look a bit ‘strange’.

They way it works often is intellectuals at random create mutated ideologies and the ruling class selects and supports the ones that fit their purposes. The kind of ‘mutations’ you get tend to be somewhat dependant on the present cultural and ideological milieu that it has to work with.

Historical development can get knocked about a bit by random accidents as well I suppose like the battle of Hastings and the coincidence of the double invasion etc.
Anyway;

Engels to J. Bloch In Königsberg London, September 21, 1890

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.

The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.

There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany,

Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power).

Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting force, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition.

For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. 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.

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (http://www.revleft.com/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm) is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusion to it in Capital (http://www.revleft.com/1867-c1/index.htm). Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (http://www.revleft.com/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (http://www.revleft.com/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm), in which I have given the most detailed account of historical material which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideology (http://www.revleft.com/1845/german-ideology/index.htm) was not published in Marx or Engels lifetime]

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly.
And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too....
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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm)

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