I. The Transforming of Instinctive into Conscious Impulses

Under the influence of such ideas the belief arose that a just remuneration for labor can only be brought about in a certain sense, by making the means of production public property, i.e., by making the community itself in some way the owner of the means of production—of the machinery, the land and the means of transport and distribution. The question simply did not arise: “Can we make the commodity independent of the remuneration for labor?” but they put the question thus: “How can we bring about a just form of remuneration, assuming as an obvious axiom that the labor flows into the commodity?” That is how they put the question, and on this everything else depends. Indeed even the materialistic conception of economic science, the extreme “Materialist Conception of History” depends on this way of putting the question. I have already explained to you the materialistic conception of history, where the modern proletarian thinks: Everything that works within the civilization of mankind, all spiritual creation, all thought, all politics, in a word everything other than the economic processes themselves—is a mere super-structure, an ideology erected on the foundation of that which is worked-out economically. The economic life is the real thing. The way the human being is placed within the economic structure—this is the real thing in human life. The kind of thoughts he has result from his connections with the economic life. Thoroughly rigorous Marxists, like Franz Mehring for example, write in this fashion even about Lessing. (I only give this one example.) They ask: “What was the nature of the economic life in the second half of the 18th century? What were the methods of manufacture? What were the methods of purchase? What was the relation of the industrial life to the remainder of mankind? And as a consequence, what was the habit of men's thoughts? How did such a phenomenon as Lessing arise?” This individual personality, Lessing, with all the works that he produced, is explained out of the economic life of the second half of the 18th century! Kautsky and others like him even try to explain the appearance of Christianity from this point of view. They investigate the economic conditions at the commencement of our era. Certain conditions of production were holding sway. As a consequence, men began to unfold what these writers describe as a kind of communistic thinking, which was then christened by the name of Christ Jesus. The true, the real thing, was the economic order at the beginning of our era. Christianity is an ideology, a super-structure, a reflection as it were, of the economic order. There is nothing else than the economic order. All other things hover above it like a Fata Morgana, a mirror-image, an unreality, or at most (as I explained in earlier lectures) as something that reacts in turn upon the events of other kinds.