The Religion of Socialism: Being Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism

The Religion of Socialism: Being Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism

Universal History from a Socialist Standpoint

All things flow, said Herakleitos of Ephesus. Translated into modern language this is as much as to say, The reality of any given thing is simply the temporary form assumed by the elements composing it. In the historical development of the world we find stretched out, on (if we may so speak) the procrustean bed of time, the different factors which go to make up our life and civilisation of to-day, no less than that of any other period on which we may choose to fix our attention. Every custom, every law, every religious belief or rite, our very thought, language, characters, habits, not to speak of our architecture, our clothing, our literature, which are their outward and visible expression, could, both severally and as a whole, be traced back and back into the night of the past, till lost in prehistoric times and primitive forms of social life. All this may sound familiar enough, and some may even be disposed to resent the statement of it as a platitude. Yet how few really grasp the great truth, that they and theirs, as they appear to-day, are but products of a long historic development. How little do they realise that, were they to go but a short way back into the past, they would cease to recognise the characteristics of modern society; that their most cherished beliefs and practices, perchance, might be found to take their origin from such as would excite their keenest horror and indignation! How little do they dream that their conceptions of history, of past periods of civilisation, even when they have any, are unconsciously coloured through and through by the world they see around them? The critical conception of history, for which history is a succession of dependent social formations, one born from the other; in short, the true notion of human development as a continuity in diversity is perhaps the most important and wide-reaching speculative truth to which the nineteenth century has given birth. Once we occupy the critical standpoint, and we see history in a new light; then, for the first time, we discern a meaning in the often apparently capricious course of historic events. (See Appendix, I)

The method of historical sequence is based on that of logical sequence, but with the difference, that the abstract logical movement, as realised on the plane of history, has to be discovered by analysis and disentangled, so to speak, in its several lines, from the unessential matter with which it is encumbered. All growth or evolution involves the notion of capacity unrealised, and capacity realised; in the language of the schools, of the potential and the actual, of the matter and the form. The acorn is the unrealised capacity of the oak, which is realised in the oak; the new-born infant constitutes the capacity or possibility of the full-gown man; the capacity present in the child realises itself in the farm of the man. But the realisation of the capacity of a thing involves the destruction or negation of the immediate or present existence of that thing. Every step in the growth of a child is a step towards the negation of childhood. In proportion as the child progresses towards manhood the less he is of a child. In the man, the child, quâ child, no longer exists, any more than if he were dead. In the realisation of the perfection of the child’s faculties his childhood is abolished. In the same way the oak-tree presupposes the negation of the acorn; the acorn, as acorn, wears itself out and breaks up; but the moment of the destruction of the acorn is the moment of the genesis of the oak. The same process is seen throughout all life.

It appears, then, that growth implies a process comprising three terms; the first, indefinite and crude, with the seeds of its own negation present in it as part of its very nature from the first; the second, the accomplishment of this negation, which accomplishment, however, becomes the matrix whence issues the third and final term of the process, which is nothing else than the negation of that negation. Here what was latent capacity becomes reality; what was potential becomes actual; what was merely tendency becomes fact. But this Dialectic does not lie on the surface of history any more than on that of other planes of knowledge. The concrete world is a complex network of many different lines, each working out its own process; and in the entanglement of these lines it is sometimes difficult to discover the central course of development. As we have already pointed out, we are not here concerned with the logical process in its abstract and pure form. In history, as in the real world generally, it may be arrested, delayed, or modified in any particular instance, without any infringement of the general principle. A given seed, for instance, may die, or its vitality be suspended for years; or it may live and its normal development be diverted by some external cause. The aim and meaning of the philosophy of history- is the discovery of the Dialectic immanent in it, of the main process underlying the whole development. For in spite of the complexity which seems at first sight so insuperable, we can undoubtedly discern a main stream of development embodying itself, during one epoch, in one group of races or peoples, and passing on perhaps in the next epoch to another such ethnic group, but maintaining itself through the diversity of the material in which it is successively realised as the same stream of tendency, a movement one and indivisible. (See Appendix, II.) Thus, in history as elsewhere, nothing passes away absolutely, since all that has preceded forms an essential part of all that follows, a truth which, platitude as it may seem at first sight, can never be too assiduously borne in mind.

In the earliest period of human society man does not distinguish himself from the natural forces and objects around him. He conceives of nature as like himself animated and conscious, and hence as capable of being friendly or unfriendly towards him. In this stage, also, the individual man, as an individual, has not consciously distinguished himself or his interests from those of his fellow-men with whom be is associated; in other words, he is completely identified with his social surroundings; he lives simply in and for the society which has produced him. In consequence, all life, all work, all enjoyment, all government, is in common; individual interests and individual property are unknown. The individual, in short, is completely merged in the race. This earliest condition of man as a social being is what is sometimes referred to as Primitive Communism. It is essentially the prehistoric era, in human development – that of the Lake dwellers of Switzerland, of the men of the drift, and of the countless apes which succeeded before chronology begins. Yet, although it is mainly prehistoric, and therefore only to be reconstructed in imagination from its surviving traces in various parts of the civilised world, or from the crude, imperfect analogy afforded by the savage and barbaric races of the present day, we find rich indications of it in the world’s oldest literary monuments; in the Homeric poems, the Icelandic sagas, the Nibelungenlied, etc. As regards the surviving traces of its economical forms which we have spoken of, existing like little oases in the arid desert of civilisation surrounding them, we may refer by way of illustration to the Russian Mir, the Swiss Allemen, and the Hindoo village community, etc. How long this primitive period lasted in undisputed sway we know not. All we know is, that at the dawn of authentic chronology we find that it has been long superseded by civilisation, – civilisation in the form of the ancient Oriental empires. These represent the then highest phase of evolution, the dominating power of the world as the curtain rises on the drama of history.

It is not difficult to see that the primitive social formation is an instance of what Herbert Spencer would term the instability of the homogeneous. All the oppositions and antagonisms expressed in civilisation are as yet latent; but although latent, they are none the less present and bound to manifest themselves in the end. The first stage of human society is based on the principle of kinship in its various gradations of proximity. This notion of kinship of itself implies an exclusiveness, an antagonism, which must sooner or later issue in civilisation, with its classes and races, and its class and race feuds. This, indeed, we may regard as the chief principle of change in prehistoric society, its chief solvent. It produced the earliest form of organisation, – organisation for military and predatory purposes. Hence the prominence of militaryism in all early civilisations; it having been out of the necessity of organisation for offensive and defensive objects that civilisation first arose.

The term prehistoric as applied to the first period of social man has a deeper meaning than as merely indicating that we have no written records concerning it; it may be taken to mean that the antagonisms, with the unravelling of which history is concerned, have not as yet manifested themselves. Nature was as yet identified with man, being regarded, that is to say, as a system of conscious beings like human society; the individual was identified with the race. Hence the echoes of the prehistoric period, – the period, that is, preceding civilisation, either in the history of the world as a whole, or of any special people present us with the dim and shadowy figures of gods and heroes moving across the stage, with scenes in which the processes of nature personified, stand for the deeds of human beings, and in which the movement or the custom of a whole people or tribe appear as the action of an individual man, – its legendary divine founder. This is what we call mythology. Prehistoric man, his customs, and beliefs, is the material of myth. Time has as yet no significance, Myth knows no chronology.

History, I take it, can hardly be better defined than as the unravelling of oppositions; the bringing to distinctness of latent contradictions, the realisation in their conflict, of mutually hostile tendencies. The oppositions wherein history – or, which is the same thing otherwise expressed, the development of the State, or of Civilisation, consists, may, I think, be reduced to two chief pairs, i.e., the opposition or antagonism between Nature and Mind, and the opposition, or antagonism between the Individual and the Society. The first opposition spoken of, that between external nature and the human mind, is more immediately of speculative, religious, and artistic significance; while the second, that between individual and society, of more immediately practical interest. But they are intimately connected with each other, and advance pari passu. In the antagonism between individual and society is contained the notion of personal ownership of property, with the whole state-machinery which is its expression. In the antagonism between nature and, mind is given religion, that is, religion in the sense of supernatural or spiritual religion, as opposed to the naive nature religions of early man. In the period of primitive communism and that which immediately succeeded it, religion, it must, always be remembered, had for its end and object the society; it was the idealistic expression of the life of the society. Man was concerned with nature, which he conceived as composed of beings like himself, only in so far as it affected the society, – the clan, the tribe, the people, etc. With the progress of civilisation and of the reflective consciousness accompanying it, man separated himself as a conscious being from nature, which became henceforward inert matter for him, governed by deities outside it. At a later period, wider generalisation subordinated these deities to one all-powerful conscious being, to whom they, as well as nature, were subordinated. It was with this being that man now concerned himself, rather than, as before, with the processes of nature per se. What interested him henceforward was the relation of himself to this being. This became the subject-matter of religion, which ceased to occupy itself, as heretofore, with the life and movement of the community. Religion, now gradually ceasing to be social, became individual.

We have said that, what proximately led to the transformation of primitive communism into primitive civilisation was race or tribal exclusiveness, based on the notion of kinship, near or remote, through descent from some common divine ancestor, generally indicated by the possession of a common totem, – a plant or animal specially sacred to the clan or tribe. But within the historical period itself, we can distinguish progressive stages, which we shall see have been also determined by the same principle, – a principle by which the transformation of one form of civilisation into the other has been