Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/150

 146 has hitherto taken place, we give due place to those that are intellectual, as well as those that are materialist and economic.

The materialist conception of history is, therefore, in no way essential to the Socialist theory. It undoubtedly was of enormous service to that theory about the middle of last century, but its service to Socialism was of precisely the same nature as its service to the science of history. The Socialist theory depends upon a conception of history which shows the gradual evolution of event, of epoch, of organisation; it does not depend upon any one explanation of why history does present that orderly progress.

Indeed, that is conclusively shown in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves. When the opponents of Socialism seek to raise prejudice in their favour by quotations from these writers which smack of economic determinism, they glean their extracts from the earlier statements of the theory written when, as Engels afterwards explained, "there was not always time, place and opportunities to do justice to the other considerations concerned in and affected by it," (the economic factor). All that either Marx or Engels (Marx putting more emphasis on the economic factor than Engels, perhaps) meant to argue for was that the economic factor was the prime moving cause. The other causes could not operate without it; it awakened them into activity. I may use the words of Engels himself written to the magazine