what and how is produced in that society, and how the product is exchanged. Accordingly, the last causes of all social changes and political transformations are to be sought not in the increasing insight of men into the laws of eternal truth and justice, or some similar "ideas," but in the changes of the methods of production and distribution—not in the philosophy, but in the economics of the given epoch. They are not to be sought in morality, because morality itself is changeable and is itself the result of circumstances which lie deeper in the structure of human society. "Every moral theory which has existed until now was, in last analysis, the result of the economic conditions of the society in which it prevailed. The awakening insight that the existing social arrangements are unreasonable and unjust, that reason became nonsense and charity torture, is only a sign of the fact that the methods of production and forms of exchange have been quietly undergoing such changes that the social arrangements which have been cut to suit previous economic conditions are now out of joint. It also betokens that the means of remedying the discovered evils have already to a more or less degree been evolved with the changed relations of production."
The basis and superstructure of society of which Marx speaks in his famous preface to his "Zur Kritik," a portion of which was quoted in the preceding chapter, may therefore be formally constructed on something like the following plan: The basis of the structure is a given state of the development of the productive forces of society; this brings about certain relations between the individuals composing that society in the social process of production and distribution, which determine the division of the product among them; this, in its turn, results in a certain form of. society, certain social institutions, which express these relations; the society is then permeated by a condition of the minds and a set of habits and customs which conform to the social forms of that society; and all this culminates in the philosophy, literature, and art of the society which will be
