GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 667
that which emerges as the result of the confrontation comprises
within itself and transcends both opposite* whose
conflict has produced it. His Materialism leads him to
insist that the driving force behind the process of dialectical
development is in the last resort not a mental, but
a physical event. It is not the thoughts and wills of men,
but changes of climates, discoveries of raw materials, and
the inventions of new technical processes which determine
the course of history. The development of new industrial
techniques as a result of inventions suggests, it is true, the
activity of minds operating upon matter. But, Marx is
careful to point out, inventions do not spring fully fledged
from the creative brain of man. What men will invent is
determined not by them but for them, by the nature of
the problems with which the conditions under which they
are living confront them. Moreover, the conditions estab-
lished by the external environment determine in the case
of any particular invention which happens to be made,
whether it will be developed and applied. Thus even the
activity of inventing or creating is not, as it appears to
be, a spontaneous mental activity, but is a function or
by-product of environmental circumstances.
T^is brief sketch of the background of Marx's thought
will put the reader in a better position to understand the
political and ethical theory which he derives from it*
Fundamental Political Principles. The gist of the
resulting doctrine is contained in the following quotation
which I take from
from Marx's collaborator Engels,
Bertrand Russell's book, Freedom and Organization.
"The materialist conception of history starts from the
proposition that the production of the means to support
human life and, next to production, the exchange of things
produced, is the basis of all social structure; th$t in every
society that has appeared in history, the manner in which
wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or
orders, is dependent upon what is produced, how it is
nroduced, and how the products are exchanged. From this