298

In contrast to Hegel, Marx saw the cause of peoples’ ideal motive forces not in the “world spirit”, but in the activities of the people making up the society. He discovered the simple fact, hidden however under ideological cover, that “mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence ana consequently the degree ot economic devel opment attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on TfMtfnn f &>*

ned have been evolved, and in the light of which jhey mufit- tViprpfnrp hp pvplampH inct-paH nt nirp versa, as had hitherto been the case.”  [298•1  Marx applied the materialistic principle ot the primacy of matter and of the secondary nature of consciousness to society and found that_r jn 299 it is the material conditions of people’s life, the production of material wealth and the resultant economic relations that are the decisive factors, not spiritual activity or consciousness.

p Having revealed the decisive role of material production in human life, Marx naturally came to the conclusion that the decisive role in social development is played by the producers of material wealth-the masses of the people-and to recognition of the class struggle as the driving force behind historical development.

p Pre-Marxian sociologists, while advancing a specific aspect of consciousness as the determining factor in the functioning and development of society or explaining the essence of social life on this basis, were unable to notice the recurring and regular nature of social phenomena typical of different countries, and to differentiate between important and secondary events in the complex intermingling of social phenomena. The outcome was, at best, a description of these phenomena, or a compilation of facts, or untreated data, incapable of revealing the laws of history. And without a knowledge of these laws, there could not be any genuine social science. Marx’s identification ot production relations as the key factor, allowed him to notice recurrences in the lite ot different nations, to single out the most common patterns in their social structure and to express these common features through the general concept ot socio-economic formation. According to Marx, a socio-economic formation is characterised by definite production relations, which come into 300 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1978/MLP519/20070711/399.tx" being on the basis of the given level of development ot the productive forces, by the relevant poTIfTcal and legal superstructure corresponding t-n production relations, and by the forms of social conjciousness, the family, the way of life, etc. This generalisation made it possible to pass from a description and arbitrary appraisal of social phenomena, from the point of view of the ideas favoured by this or that author, to strict scientific analysis of them.

p Finally, in contrast to earlier sociologists who, basing themselves on man’s definite ideas and aims and unable to see that they were dependent on material social relations, linked such ideas and aims to a spiritual factor, Marx by reducing all social relations to relations of production, and the latter to the level of development of the productive forces, was able to present the development of socio-economic formations as a process ’of natural history proceeding on the basis of ob-

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p people.

By making this discovery Marx was the first to turn sociology into a science  [300•1 . “Just as Darwin,” wrote Lenin on this score, “put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, ’created by God’ and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical 301 aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.”  [301•1