Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/50

 as the French and English socialism which was their theoretical though very insufficient expression. But the old idealistic philosophy of history which was as yet by no means laid aside knew nothing of class wars dependent upon material interests, and nothing of material interests, specially. Production, like all economic phenomena only occupied a subordinate position as a secondary element of the history of civilisation." The new facts, moreover rendered necessary a new investigation of all preceding history and then it became evident that all history up to then had been a history of class struggles and that these mutually conflicting classes are the results of a given method of production and distribution at a given period, in a word, of the economic conditions of that epoch. Hence, that the economic structure of society at a given time furnishes the real foundations upon which the entire superstructure of political and juristic institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other abstract notions of a given period are to be explained in the last instance. Idealism was thereupon driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history ; a materialistic philosophy of history was set up, and the path was discovered by which the consciousness of man could be shown as springing from his existence rather than his existence from his consciousness.

But the socialism which had existed so far was just as incompatible with the materialistic conception of history as was the naturalistic French materialism with the dialectic and the modern discoveries in natural science. The then existing socialism criticised the prevailing capitalistic methods of production and their results but it could not explain them and thus could not match itself against them, it could only brush them on one side as