APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V.
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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER Y.
Economists have a strange way of proceeding. For them there are but two sorts of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institutions are artificial institutions, bourgeois institutions are natural institutions. They resemble in this respect the theologians who also establish two sorts of religion. Every religion but theirs is an invention of man, whilst their own particular religion is an emanation from God. In saying that the existing relations—the relations of bourgeois production—are natural the economists mean to say that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed in conformity with the laws of nature. Hence these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history since there have been feudal institutions, and in these feudal institutions are found relations of production quite different from those of bourgeois society, which economists wish to pass off as natural, and consequently eternal.
Feudalism had its proletariat too—serfdom—which contained all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had its two antagonistic elements, which are equally labelled the noble side and the bad side of feudalism, without regard to the fact that it is always the bad side which ends by prevailing over the noble side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history by forcing on the class struggle. If at the epoch of the domination of feudalism economists full of enthusiasm for the virtues of chivalry, enamoured of the charming harmony between rights and duties, proud of the patriarchal life of the towns, anxious to maintain the prosperous domestic industry in the country, full of admiration for the development of organised industry by corporations, in short, if the economists in their regard for all that constitutes the noble side of feudalism had proposed to themselves to efface the whole of the shady side of this picture—serfdom, privilege, anarchy—what would have come of it? They would have destroyed all the elements which involved struggle, and would have nipped in the bud the development of the bourgeoisie. They would have proposed to themselves the absurd problem how to eliminate history.
When the bourgeoisie had won the day there was no longer any question of the good or bad side of feudalism. The productive forces which had been developed by it under feudalism were acquired. All