Herein is a speech delivered in August 1934, and published in 1935. It reappeared
in Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,”
page 25-69, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, and was transcribed by Jose Braz for the
Marxists Internet Archive.
The role of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into
man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as
deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research
would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use
the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money,
could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote
antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have
used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the
mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the
historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of
gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with
the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between
whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics;
Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the
Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the
Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell."