Economies as the basis of living ethics

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FOREWORD ...

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I. THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY . I

Chapter I The Economic Interpretation Of History

Content and Extent of Historical Records. — Theories of Hibtoky: Divine (Juidance; Hegel's Evolution of the Absolute Idea; In* BTiTUTioNs; CjreatMen; Marx.— Economic Interpretation of Hibtoby: Quotation from Marx; Quotation Restated; Books on the Subject.— Illubtratkjnh: Declaration of Independence and magna Charta; American History In and After the Formation of tub Constitution; Colonial Histoky. — Ethh.al Illustration; Slavery.— Economic Interpretation of History and Socialism. — ^Economic Determinism Co.mplkx; Ideal of Future Society.

Poets, Utopian dreamers, divines, yes, even philosophers, have placed far back in times hoary and remote, a golden age of innocence, truth, and general happiness. This airy fabric, science has blown away into nothingness. The vice, the falsehood, the wretchedness and misery of the present hour are not the offspring of so fair and happy a parentage. Multitudes of known facts are rendered wholly inexplicable to reason on any .such hypothesis of the descent and degeneration of man. On the contrary, the record of man is the record of his ascent from primeval slime through the brute up to the status of the first and highest of all known living things.

From primordial slime to the brute, and then, at some one moment in far-off ages, our forefather, our ancestral Adam burst the shell of the mere brute, man emerged, hardly distinguishable from the other anthropoids surrounding him, but still man; at that moment human history began. At that moment began the onward, upward march of that tremulous intelligence crouching for shelter under tree or bush or cave, or using them as lurking coverts to snatch with stealth or fierce rush his prey, tip to the state of the man of this hour, who fronts with open eye and questioning mind, the universe of matter and spirit, of space and time, his beginning, his end, the beginning and the ending of all things else. The record of man's passage from the brute grown conscious up to the free self-poised intelligence of to-day, his gropings, toils, achievements, passions, and triumphs, his losses and gains, his fears, fancies, and beliefs, and how with incredible toil and unspeakable sufferings he fashioned his thoughts and his desires into laws, morals, religions, institutions, and states, — this is what we call human history.

Of this total record, how little remains. Ages and ages roll away. Still the offspring of that brute Adam differs but little from the beasts competing with him, but the magic spark still glimmers, though waveringly. Ages more, the spark flickers now brighter now fainter but ever on a higher level. Age after age, age after age, hgher levels are attained, and so after myriads of years institutions begin to emerge whose traces remain visible even to-day. In a groping, dimeyed, brutish way these institutions are tried out; storm and restorm; the liberal and the conservative are born; they battle to and fro, scarcely knowing why or for what they are battling. Upward still they climb, from the brute to the savage, from the savage to the barbarian, from the barbarian to the semi-civilized, and then at last into the light which we now term civilization.

Thousands and thousands of years have elapsed since first this upward march began, — tens, and according to some even hundreds of thousands of years; we need not here seek all possible accuracy, but man has existed on the earth from forty to two hundred and forty thousand, or according to later authorities over a million years. Records we have for some six thousand to nine thousand years ; the records of the preceding ages are lost save only what may be inferred from scattered remains of man's existence in extinct geological ages. Historical records of any considerable magnitude cover only about five thousand years.

But then again how many faceted is that record; what a complexity, what a maze, a tangle, a very welter of frenzy and folly, crime, madness, heroism, joy, suffering, love, scorn of life, scorn of death, every shade of extreme opposites which human nature is capable of; all this helter-skelters, or huddles in shapeless masses across the pages. One gasps at the enormous multitude of acts and facts, is lost in " mazed perplexity." No single mind can firmly hold all this detail, — ■ races, nations, classes, institutions, laws, manners, and morals, all of which vary with climes, situations, and times. To the average reader the whole is motley, or else an enormous seething ferment, the mother of every possible crudity. Nor can it be otherwise in its details. For just as every material atom plays a part in the physical universe, so too in the drama of history every human being counts something towards the total spectacle. Since then all details as such surpass the power of the greatest human intelligence, it is necessary to group these details into subgroups, and to gather these subgroups into larger groups; it is necessary to fashion some scheme, idea, or concept, which shall fuse these details into a more or less comprehensible whole. Only thus can order arise in the vast disorder, only thus from the chaos can come a cosmos. Such an idea, scheme, or concept, constitutes an interpretation of history. It is the intention here to make mention of some of these schemes, and especially to call attention to the latest and most important of them all.

THEORIES OF HISTORY

The assumption is, — man evolved from the brute. The theory of the golden age, the original perfection of man, simply makes history and the progress of men unintelligible. It runs counter to the whole trend of modern science. Man then emerged from the brute, ignorance within, beast and brute without. But even as to-day an animal shows by its action its recognition of an outer force superior to its own, so rising man did the same. In time he came alst) to recognize in himself something which we now call personal initiative;

4 ETHICS AKEi ECONOMICS

he was himself somehow H ctfittt oi power, he himself wis a cause from which results flowed. In the end he tried to explain natural events in a similar fashion. Hence he clothed all nature with powers like his own. He peopled wood, forest, mountain, stream, and lake. In all the manifestations of fire, flood, storm, sunshine, growth, decay, he saw the effects of beings similar to himself. Stronger minds " sate brooding o'er this abyss."^— and so came at last the concepts which gave us in the end the concept of deity in all its shadings.

After achieving existence, this concept achieved indeperi* denee. It then functioned backward as indicating the primal cause of all things. Hence history became a field for the exercise of the divine. Crudely enough at first the idea would be worked out. The gods stood apart from man, benevolent influences, malevolent powers, Ormudz and Ahriman, deities and devils. They fought their own fights, and used mankind as playthings of as tools of their plans. Or, again, as external agents, they directed the course of human events in accordance with their purposes or caprices respecting man's good and their own. Hence fetishism, totemism, mythologies^ Homer, Herodotus, the Greek dramatists, local and state religions, and all sorts of religious cults. We do hot seek here all possible accuracy. The simple idea is that the concept of the divine regulation of human aflfairs was purified in its passage from fetishism to monotheism arid that this concept lives in lull vigor at the present hour.

Every country and age will illustrate the power of this concept. The example most familiar to us all is the Jewish theocracy of the Old Testament. The Jewish people are there represented as the chosen people, the immediate and peculiar care of God. Through His chosen instruments and servants, MoseSy Joshua, the judges, kings, and prophets, He saved His people out of captivity, led therii through the wiHerness, delivered ort Mount Sinai to Moses, With whOm He talked face to face, the tables of the law, and through Moses and his successors, established and maintained the theocracy

©f Israel. Throughout the entire story, Israel is constantly re^l^ resented as always more or less under the immediate direction of God. No pious Jew can doubt that the history of Israel at least was divinely directed, whatever the meaning and purpose of the history of other nations. Naturally such an interpretation must have spread wherever Jewish religious conceptions took vigorous root. Hence, Christianity and M.)- hammedanism are permeated with the doctrine. The thought works in full vitality throughout our whole civilization.

As a doctrine, the divine guidance of history has elements that lie in two difTerent regions, the region of faith and the region of knowledge. In the region of faith, it is open to every believer to entertain the thought that the divine power directs the course of history. To faith, the motley of humari history undoubtedly has a plan and scope which to proper intelligence would be perfectly mtelligible. But then to faith " God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." Hew, why, by what means can not be fathomed, for " the ways of the Lord are unsearchable, past finding out ; " "clouds and darkness are His throne." By hypothesis, He is supreme intelligence whose ways and purposes, so far as definiteness goes, are utterly inscrutable. We may bow the head in humble reverence, we can not presume to interrogate. As a workable scheme in the walks of human knowledge, the divine guidance of history is unavailing. The maze remain*? not less a maze to us, even though we believe that to other? of perfect intelligence the maze is perfectly transparent. And in this condition we must leave the subject. Faith may ease the heart ; it does not furnish a workable formula to solve history's problems.

As men progressed in refrned intelligence, many found unsatisfactory the concept of God as a huge being placed outside the universe, now and then with a push setting it right, or as with the Jews, occasionally straightening^ out superhuman tangles. Such a conception seemed derogatory to the divine perfection. Creation seemed too much lik-^ a bungle. Hence the more refined and abstract view, that God governs and directs the entire physical and spiritual universe by general laws. His work is perfect from the outset. He sees all things from the beginning. He needs not, like the puny artificer man, make a trial here, a patch there, or rectify mistakes as they occur in actual experience. By no means. Foreseeing all possibilities from the very first, His plans and purposes are so framed as to realize themselves mfallibly by the very qualities and laws of the things which He himself formed. He wills perfectly to a perfect result. But God is moral perfection. Hence, too, moral order must pervade the universe. Hisloiy itself is shot through and through with this moral order. Hence, to learn this moral order we must study history, which in turn is cleared and becomes expiicaable from the existence of moral order and general laws.

Again it is not the purpose here to contest these propositions. As before, there is the region of relig'ous faith, and the region of working knowledge and reason. Tennyson in his great " In Memoriam " has traversed the entire ground. In his own words, " We have but faith, we can not know ; " — " Oh yet we trust that somehow good will be the final goal of ill ; " ■ — "That nothing walks with aimhss feet;" — and that there is " One far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves." So clear to faith is ." the one far-off divine event," that the multiplex of history is no longer without form, no longer without meaning and purpose, and thus not without a pervasive principle of interpretation. But to mere human intelligence, the concepts of morality and " one far-off divine event " are too general. You can not descend into the arena with such weapons as these. They leave the enormous multitude of concrete historical facts as unworkable, as intractable, as discordant, as if divines, philosophers, and poets had never labored to such superb results as Tennyson's " In Memoriam."

It were quite possible to dwell upon other phases and shadings of these two conceptions of history, such as " Fate." ** Destiny," " The Logic of Events," and so on, but we pass to something seemingly less high and remote, to man himself.

For, after all, man as man, — the very meanest of all mankind, — is a prodigy, well nigh a miracle. Man has somehow arrived. Reason, emotion, conscience, will, are somehow here an time and space within us all. Often you have heard of the dignity and worth of man. Often you have heard of his inalienable rights, and often, doubtless, because of cruelty and injustice, your passions have been aroused, your nerves tingled, your temples throbbed, your hearts hammered in your chests, your whole man was as a coiled compress, as a caged thunderbolt, and you felt then man's worth indeed. Man then has somehow arrived. Whence this miracle, man and why? You would understand his course and destiny.

Go, then, to Hegel's " Philosophy of History," " the crowning achievement of a comprehensive intellect." Says Hegel in effect (Morris) : " We see in universal history a drama in which nations are the actors. The theme of the drama is human character. The Philosophy of History undertakes to pass in review the drama as a whole, to discover the final cause, to demonstrate its motive, to indicate its significance, * * * The true subject of development is especially the human spirit. This spirit viewed according to its essential nature as defined in the notion of freedom^ this is the fundamental subject of universal history, and hence also the guiding principle of development, * * * as also conversely, historic events are to be viewed as products of this principle, as deriving only from it their meaning and character. * * * Universal history is the unfolding of spiritual being in time, as nature is the unfolding of the divine idea in space, * * * history is progress in the consciousness of freedom."

There you have it. The maze of history is untangled, the formula is secured, " History is progress in the consciousness of freedom:" conversely, "historic events are to be viewed as products of this principle, as deriving only from it their meaning and character." Do you not catch the idea? Take^ then, this abstract idea of freedom down from its lofty heights into the sweaty tumult. Explain with it how man comes to enslave his fellow-man through all the ages; explain by it the origin, continuance, and growth of despotism, state, social, legal, religious. Explain wi.h this principle the million-sided, multi-colored spectacle of human history in all its innumerable concrete details. Absurd. The weapon is as air gras ;ed by the hand. It is as if a man were to predict a chemical combination by means of abstract conceptions of space, time, matter, motion, law, mathematics, cause, and effect. The laws of material objects are found only by long, careful observation of the objects themselves. The laws are inductions from experience. Man and men are not less real objects than are material things. As little can law be read into man as into material objects.

Hegel's formulation seems simple enough. Determine upon some purpose or motive as adequate or important. Read history to find illustrations, then declare this motive to be the real driving power. And in effect this is what Hegel seems to do. He pitches for various anterior reasons upon freedom. And then he reviews universal history, weaving picturesque expressions together concerning the spiritual, the absolute, and freedom, garnishing the whole with multitudinous biblical phrasings, all tending to show how fine was Hegel's eye for a phrase.

As a test for the concrete realities of history, of the sweating, fighting warriors, of the fiercely or gently loving and lusting men and women, of the ceaseless struggle for bread and wealth, it is perfectly evident that " man coming to realize his freedom " or " the unfoldment of reason in its progress of self-consciousness, freedom and self-realization," — such phrases will not fill the bill. Fine they may be as an appendage to an abstract a priori philosophy, but they afford not a glimmer of light over the real complexity of the real maze of the history of real men and real women. They represent a product rather than a cause.

Another view: History is explained as both the consequence and the cause of human institutions, especially those of the state, the church, the legislature, the family, the courts, the police, and similar organizations. Yet these are but infants in age. Only a few thousand years ago, and not one of these institutions existed. What of the milleniums before they came? And how did these institutions themselves come into existence ?

Or, again, since, after all, men are real objects that act and react upon one another, and since history also at bottom is but a record of the achievements of man, and, further, so wonderful has been the part played on the stage by some men, that still another school are wont to explain all history as the result of the actions and reactions of its great men. The course of history is determined by its Alexanders, Caesars, Pope Hildebrands, Lincolns, and so on.

Evidently we here leave the realm of abstract ideas and come to palpable realties which we touch more or less closely every day. For it does make a great deal of difference to each of us what the structure of the state may be, what the temper of the army is, what the law reads, how judges and the police enforce the law, what the school and the church may be, and ■whether we have to do with an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Washington, or a Lincoln. These things are not ghostly abstractions. They are force-bearing realities.

The mass of the great histories belong to one or other or both of these classes. Doubtless in all of them you will likewise find reference to the divine guidance, to moral order, and even to the goal of the unfoldment of reason toward self-realization and freedom. But for the most part, you find events traced to the power of the state, to policy, to law, to the army, to this means or to that, to this folly or that. In the thronging historical procession, every fancy, folly, vice, and virtue has full swing, — save only that they are directed more or less by the long molding, yet every changing power of ideas and purposes embodied in great men, and in institutions of all sorts and kinds.

Grand and satisfying as these ideas are, satisfying because they deal with genuine realities and concrete truths, they still can not be final. Consider the myriads of ages of man's existence on the earth. It is perfectly certain that the Btate, the family, property, and law were once not at all what we mean by these words. Our institutions of the state, the family and so on are but infants in point of time. What of human development before our present institutions existed? Other institutions? But whence again those institutions? They did not drop from Hegelian clouds, nor spring seedless from the earth. Nor has an idea or a truth merely to be announced to find immediate acceptance and opportunity for self-development. On the contrary, institutions and ideas have to fight for life not less than the meanest fungi and the highest vertebrates.

Come from the school of Hegel, Karl Marx some sixty years ago, in the early forties, reviewing critically Hegel's " Philosophy of the State," swept back from Hegel's ghostly concepts into the very thickest turmoil of driving realities. He found the state, the family, law, institutions, and even con- •ciousness itself to be rooted and bottomed on economic ideas and relations. The economic interpretation of history was born. Not, of course, that others before Marx had not had similar thoughts. Only this, Marx was the first to use the thought masterfully. The tools to the user, — Marx is the true father of this doctrine.

MARX'S INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

In the famous Preface of his " Critique of Political Economy " Marx wrote in 1859 : " In social production in life, men enter into relations, definite, necessary, and independent of their wills, relations of production which correspond to a definite grade of the development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a legal and political superstructure rises, and to which definite social forms of consciousness correspond. The mode of production in material life conditions the social, political, and sp'ritual life-process in general. It is not man's consciousness that determines his existence, but conversely his social existence determines his consciousness. At a certain stage in his de- ▼clopment the material productive powers of society fall into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or what is their legal expression, with the property relations ivithin which they had hitherto moved. From being forms of the development of the productive powers, these relations become their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change in the economic foundation the whole huge superstructure more or less slowly undergoes a revolution. In considering such transformations two things must be distinguished: (a) the material transformation in the economic conditions of production, a transformation to be established as true on grounds of natural science, (b) the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical, — in short, ideological, forms wherein men became conscious of this conflict and fight the conflict out. As little as one judges what an individual is, from what that person thinks of himself, just so little can one judge from his consciousness such an epoch of transformation. Rather, this consciousness one must explain from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between social productive powers and relations of production. A conformation of society never perishes before all its possible productive powers are developed and new higher relations of production are never substituted before their material conditions of existence have been engendered in the womb of the old society itself."

To put this ponderously grand statement containing past, present, and future, into less abstract general terms. Man is an animal before he is a thinker or a dreamer. The spiritual rests upon the material. To live, man first must eat, clothe himself, find shelter. The conditions under which he secures these results are the economic conditions under which he lives. To secure and hold these essentials he unconsciously creates customs, laws, institutions. A change in the mode of gaining food, clothing, shelter, by new inventions or discoveries causes a conflict between the old estab-

1? ETHICS AND ECONQMIC3

lished forms and the new forms struggling into existence. Other forms of consciousness, new ideas of right and wrong, of good and bad, emerge. New creeds and doctrines arise. When, by struggle and growth, the new methods of production gain the victory, nqw ethics, laws, and institutions confirm and establish the newer methods. Further, within the society now more or less firmly established on the newer basis, an inevitable conflict arises among the modes of production. Hence, again, innumerable changes within any given society at any given stage of advancement. Hence, class distinctions with their innumerable corollaries. Still further, societies conflict with other societies. These conflicts rest largely on the question of the production and the distribution of the gains from existing productive conditions. Hence, national and racial rivalries and hatreds. Finally, and on the whole, since so many institutions find their ultimate foundations in these conflicts, and since man's individual consciousness is overwhelmingly a product of his social relations, it becomes clear that morals, religions, philosophies, arts, and aesthetics all are subject more or less to the deep-reaching influences of the economic structure of the society in which these find ^kpression.

This, then, in brief and in the rough is the economic interpretation of history,— a birth of the last fifty years. With this idea descend into the confused welter of historical facts and fancies. How intelligible and significant becomes the immense mass of seemingly discordant and meaningless facts. One can see always in clear view real actors, genuine men and women, seeking with fury or with stealth what they wanted, what you and I want this very day. This view is growing in power and influence. It has already sent to the rubbish heap an immense amount of historical writing. All history has to be rewritten in the I'ght of this conception.

It has been called, even by its authors and some ardent expounders, the materialistic view of history, and it has already caused painful misgivings to numerous pious souls-

ECONOMIC iKTEkPRETAtlON OF HISTORY 13

But there need be no fear. This concept does not profess to explain everything. The gentlest trusting piety can adjust its devotional impulses to this view. There is no contradiction. There is some steadfastness in human character, something calculable. So here. Even the ghostly verbiage of Hegel need not be retracted, nor is institutional history, nor are great men denied. Not at all. Only this, — any interpretation of history which aims to deal with real force-bearing factors must henceforth make intelligible peace with the economic factor or else straightway to the rubbish heap. The totality of man is not denied. But the foundation of the whole man is material. Material conditions are the determinants of mass movements, are directive of and the source of great human social changes. Apart from this foundation, there is no real history of the human race. On the foundation of the production and distribution of material goods, arise, interact, and perish the innumerable fabrications of the human spirit.

History is but the evolution of economics. It is an aspect of the general doctrine of evolution. The origin of species as general life forms in the one case becomes the origin of societies, institutions, classes, states, laws, and morals in the other. And in this latter case, the production and distribution of material goods is fundamental. Law, ethics, politics, the collision of nations, the struggle of the classes, the clash of individuals, find the larger part of their explanations in the contest about material interests, be the disguises what they may.

The thesis is tremendous in sweep. It can be justified only by detailed analysis applied to the entire field of history itself. The field has been as yet but scantily cultivated. But the results obtained are so brilliant that the ultimate occupation of the whole ground can hardly be doubted. Of this analysis you will find convincing pieces in Loria's " Economic Foundations of Society," A. M. Simon's " Social Factors in American History," Roger's " Economic Interpretation of History." Much in Marx himself, in Engels, and in others.

Here you can expect only a very rough outline sample applied, for instance, to our own history.

ILLUSTRATION; AMERICAN HISTORY

As a prelude: Consider that famous document, the Declaration of Independence. What millions have read and heard read that famous paper. Hearts were expanded, new life and force were born, souls were lifted beyond themselves, mil* lions of money and thousands and thousands of lives have dedicated that document to the revered muniments of history. Consider it economically. Its first two somewhat rhetorical paragraphs are introductory and expressive of the philosophy of government current at the time and appropriate to the economic concepts and conditions of the age. It then submits against King George's government twenty-nine indictments j ten of these indictments deal quite directly with conditions of material wealth, tax, commerce, and war; ten deal with British interference with our legislatures, laws, and other forms securing our proper economic conditions, life, liberty, and property; the remaining nine deal with various arbitrary governmental acts, such as substituting new legal modes, failure to do justice on the mercenary troops, and so on. Thia is the essence. The ethics, the philosophy, the emotion centered about the document are forms of consciousness corresponding to and giving passionate expression to economic needs. Similarly with that ancient palladium of English and American liberty, the Magna Charta, the Great Charter. The Magna Charta contains sixty-three articles; three are introductory and closing; forty-eight refer clearly to matters pertaining to property and property rights; the remaining twelve have to do with such matters as legal procedure, and so on — an echo of personal and property relations. Our document is much more rhetorical than the English charter, — a new philosophy had arisen from changed economic relations — but the weight of the two famous papers rests manifestly upon property, the production, the distribution, and the possession of wealth, together with the establishment of conditions for

ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY IS

realizing the desire for this. And the procedure throughout has been an almost undiluted application of the reigning philosophy in economics, laissez-faire, unlimited competition of legally free individuals, — except for certain favored classes of industry.

Our politics have been dominated throughout by economic elements. Hamilton's report on finance started a division, the assumption of certain state debts, revolutionary war debts, customs, protection, the national bank, and so on. These were decisive legislative acts. To be sure, at first these were trying times; it was a question whether the government would go at all; the economic side was decisive, — viz., the intolerable financial condition of the confederacy. This and the like sort of trouble in production and exchange during the Napoleonic period culminating in the war of 1812.