Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/346

320 these problems can only become intelligible when the material conditions rendering their solution possible already exist, at least in the germ.

Such is the celebrated formula of historical or economic materialism whereby history is represented as a dialectical and objective mass process independent of the individual will. The formula will be found in the preface to Marx's Critigue of Political Economy, published in the year 1859. The first sketches of this formulation exist in earlier works, but Marx himself, and to a still greater extent Engels and his younger disciples, were subsequently responsible for such extensive variations in the formula that the "real basis" of productive relationships has been supplemented or replaced by technical advances (including the fundamental sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.), racial qualities, the geographical environment, the energies that determine the relationships of population, etc. At the same time, historical materialism, in view of the criticism it encountered, was reduced to a method, a heuristic method.

It would be quite incredible that so obscure and inaccurate a formula should have had so powerful an influence, had it not become the scientific basic formula of revolutionary socialism, which in Germany and other countries has effected the national and international organisation of the working masses to constitute the social democracy.

Marxist historical materialism has been philosophically and sociolologically superseded. The history of mankind has a significance different from that which Marx impressed upon it with his doctrine of historical materialism based upon the materialism of Feuerbach.

Practically and socio-politically, just as much as theoretically, Marxism abandons its positions, or at least modifies them to a great extent. In especial it is necessary to insist on the fact that Marxist social democracy, above all in Germany and Austria, has had the revision of its doctrines forced upon it by participation in political and parliamentary work. Revisionism has never possessed any theorist whose ability and force rivalled those of Marx. It was the work of practical politics which necessitated revisionism.

In Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, and England, the Marxists, during their political activities within their own party, during their work in parliaments, local governments,