Frederick Engels to W. Borgius1
IN BRESLAU2 London, 25 January 1894
This letter by Frederick Engels to W. Borgius is very important because in this Engels categorically states what Marx and he understood by economic forces or economic factors. Engels dispels illusions of economic determinism and very succinctly summarizes the basic postulates of historical materialism. His letters to J. Bloch, C. Schmidt and some others have been quoted time and again to show how Marxism has nothing to do with economism, except that it developed in opposition to it right since the time of Bernstein. However, this letter has remained somewhat in obscurity, though it has one of the clearest and most powerful exposition of Marxist case against economism. We are reprinting this letter here as the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois academia, in its blissful ignorance, never tires of putting this bogus charge of economism on Marxism, because it cannot counter Marxist arguments as they are.
—Editor
Dear Sir,
Herewith the answers to your questions.
- By economic relations, considered by us to be the determinant upon which the history of society is based, we understand the manner in which men of a certain society produce the necessities of life, and exchange those products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus they comprise the entire technology of production and transport. As we see it, that technology also determines the manner of exchange, likewise the distribution of products and hence, following the dissolution of gentile society, also the division into classes, hence the relations of rulers and subjects, and hence the state, politics, the law, etc. Economic relations further comprise the geographical basis on which these are enacted, and, indeed, the inherited remnants of earlier stages of economic development, remnants which often owe their survival only to tradition or vis inertiae3 they also, of course, comprise the external environment by which this form of society is encompassed.
If, as you say, technology is indeed largely dependent on the state of science, then how much more is not the latter dependent on the state and the requirements of technology? If society has a technological requirement, the latter will do more to promote science than ten universities. Hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) owes its existence solely to the need to regulate mountain streams in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only since the discovery of its technological uses have we known anything rational about electricity. Unfortunately historiographers in Germany have got into the habit of writing about the sciences as though they had appeared out of the blue.
- We see economic conditions as that which, in the final analysis, determines historical development. But the human race is itself an economic factor. Here, however, there are two points which should not be overlooked:
- a) Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But each of these also reacts upon the others and upon the economic basis. This is not to say that the economic situation is the cause and that it alone is active while everything else is mere passive effect, but rather that there is reciprocal action based, in the final analysis, on economic necessity which invariably prevails. The state, for instance, exerts its influence through protective tariffs, free trade, good or bad fiscal systems, and even your German philistine’s mortal weariness and impotence, consequent upon Germany’s impoverished economic condition between 1648 and 1830, and expressing itself first in Pietism and then in sentimentality and cringing servility to princes and nobles, even this was not without economic effect. It was one of the greatest obstacles to recovery and was not removed until chronic poverty became acute as a result of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Thus the effect of the economic situation is not, as is sometimes conveniently supposed, automatic; rather, men make their own history, but in a given environment by which they are conditioned, and on the basis of extant and actual relations of which economic relations, no matter how much they may be influenced by others of a political and ideological nature, are ultimately the determining factor and represent the unbroken clue which alone can lead to comprehension.
- b) While men may make their own history, they have not hitherto done so with a concerted will in accordance with a concerted plan, not even in a given and clearly delimited society. Their aspirations are at variance, which is why all such societies are governed by necessity of which the counterpart and manifestation is chance. The necessity which here invariably prevails over chance is again ultimately economic. This brings us to the question of what are known as great men. The fact that such and such a man, and he alone, should arise at a particular time in any given country, is, of course, purely fortuitous. But if we eliminate him, a replacement will be called for and such a replacement will be found—tant bien que mal,4 but found he will ultimately be. That Napoleon, this particular Corsican, was the military dictator rendered necessary by a French Republic bled white by her own wars, was fortuitous; but that, in the absence of a Napoleon, someone else would have taken his place is proved by the fact that the moment someone becomes necessary—Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc.—he invariably turns up. If it was Marx who discovered the materialist view of history, the work of Thierry, Mignett Guizot and every English historiographer prior to 1850 goes to show that efforts were being made in that direction, while the discovery of the same view by Morgan shows that the time was ripe for it and that it was bound to be discovered.
The same thing applies to all fortuitous and seemingly fortuitous events in history. The further removed is the sphere we happen to be investigating from the economic sphere and the closer to the purely abstract, ideological sphere, the more likely shall we be to find evidence of the fortuitous in its development, and the more irregular will be the curve it describes. But if you draw the mean axis of the curve, you will find that the longer the period under consideration and the larger the area thus surveyed, the more approximately parallel will this axis be to the axis of economic development.
In Germany the greatest obstacle to accurate interpretation is the irresponsible neglect of economic history in literature. It is so difficult, not only to rid oneself of the historical ideas drummed into one at school, but actually to get together the material necessary for the purpose. Who, for instance, has so much as read old G. von Gülich5 whose dry catalogue of material nevertheless contains so much that throws light on innumerable political facts!
Come to that, I believe that the fine example provided by Marx in the 18. Brumaire6 should, precisely because it is a practical example, go a long way towards answering your questions. I also think that I touched on most of these points in the Anti-Dühring7 Chapters 9-11 and II , 2-4, also II I, and in the introduction, and again in the final section of the Feuerbach.8
Please do not take every word I have said above for gospel, but rather consider them in their general context; I am sorry not to have had the time to write to you in such careful detail as I should have had to do for publication.
Would you kindly convey my compliments to Mr … and thank him for sending me the …***9which greatly amused me.
Yours very sincerely, Engels
First published in the magazine Der Sozialistische Akademiker, No. 20, 1895
Printed according to the magazine
1. Engels replies to W Borgius’ letter of 19 January 1894. The journal Der sozialistische Akedemiker (No. 20, 1895) published this reply for the first time together with the addressee’s name; the subsequent publications gave the wrong name, Heinz Starkenburg.
The condensed English version of the letter was first published in: K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin, On the Theory of Marxism, International Publishers, New York, [1948].
2.now Worclaw
3. the force of inertia
4. for better or for worse
5. G. Gülich, Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels, der Gewerbe und des Ackerbaus der bedeutendsten handelstreibenden Staaten unserer Zeit (Historical Description of Trade, Industry and Agriculture of the Most Important Commercial States of Our Time).
6. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
7. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science.
8. F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.
9. omitted in MS.
