Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 1

Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History.

by Antonio Labriola.

PREFACE.

On the tenth of March, 1896, the same year that the last despairing revolt of the small producer against capitalism in America was to end in the overwhelming defeat of Bryan, an Italian scholar published in the city of Rome the remarkable work which is now for the first time offered to American readers.

To publish this book in America at that time would have been an impossibility. The American socialist movement was then hardly more than an a.s.sociation of immigrants who had brought their socialism with them from Europe. Today it numbers at least half a million adherents, and its platform is an embodiment of the ideas first adequately stated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and now first adequately explained and elaborated in this remarkable work of Labriola.

The central and fundamental proposition of socialism is not any scheme for reconstructing society, on a cut-and-dried programme, nor again is it any particular mathematical formula showing to what extent the laborer is robbed by the present system of the fruits of his labor; it is precisely this Historical Materialism, which Labriola has so admirably explained in the present work.

Some idea of the place accorded to this book by European socialists may be gathered from the preface to the French edition by G. Sorel, one of the most prominent socialists of France.

He says: "The publication of this book marks a date in the history of socialism. The work of Labriola has its place reserved in our libraries by the side of the cla.s.sic works of Marx and Engels. It const.i.tutes an illumination and a methodical development of a theory which the masters of the new socialist thought have never yet treated in a didactic form.

It is therefore an indispensable book for whoever wishes to understand something of _proletarian ideas_. More than the works of Marx and Engels it is addressed to that public which is unacquainted with socialist preconceptions. In these pages the historian will find substantial and valuable suggestion for the study of the origin and transformation of inst.i.tutions."

The economic development of the United States has reached a point where the growth of the Socialist Party must henceforth go forward with startling rapidity. That the publication of this volume may have some effect in clarifying the ideas of those who discuss the principles of that party, whether with voice or pen, is the hope of the

TRANSLATOR.

PART I

IN MEMORY OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.

I.

In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of the publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgments and all our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last fifty years. That date marks the beginning of the new era. This is arising, or, rather, is separating itself from the present era, and is developing by a process peculiar to itself and thus in a way that is necessary and inevitable, whatever may be the vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet be foreseen.

All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and the moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the circ.u.mstances under which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which burst forth from Paris to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency toward socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.

Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its distinctive character?

We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter for the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the proletariat,--or again the indications of political relationship to the other revolutionary parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth chapter. These indications and these measures, although they deserved to be taken into consideration at the moment and under the circ.u.mstances where they were formulated and suggested, and although they may be very important for forming a precise estimate of the political action of the German communists in the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850, henceforth no longer form for us a ma.s.s of practical judgments for or against which we should take sides in each contingency. The political parties which since the International have established themselves in different countries, in the name of the proletariat, and taking it clearly for their base, have felt, and feel, in proportion as they are born and develop, the imperious necessity of adopting and conforming their programme and their action to circ.u.mstances always different and multiform. But not one of these parties feels the dictatorship of the proletariat so near that it experiences the need or desire or even the temptation to examine anew and pa.s.s judgment upon the measures proposed in the Manifesto. There are really no historic experiences but those that history makes itself. It is as impossible to foresee them as to plan them beforehand or make them to order. That is what happened at the moment of the Commune, which was and which still remains up to this day the only experience (although partial and confused because it was sudden and of short duration) of the action of the proletariat in gaining control of political power. This experience, too, was neither desired nor sought for, but imposed by circ.u.mstances. It was heroically carried through and it has become a salutary lesson for us to-day. It might easily happen that where the socialist movement is still in its beginnings, appeal may be made, for lack of personal direct experience--as often happens in Italy--to the authority of a text from the Manifesto as if it were a precept, but these pa.s.sages are in reality of no importance.

Again, we must not, as I believe, seek for this vital part, this essence, this distinctive character, in what the Manifesto says of the other forms of socialism of which it speaks under the name of _literature_. The entire third chapter may doubtless serve for defining clearly by way of exclusion and ant.i.thesis, by brief but vigorous characterizations, the differences which really exist between the communism commonly characterized to-day as scientific,--an expression sometimes used in a mistaken and contradictory way,--that is to say, between the communism which has the proletariat for its subject and the proletarian revolution for its theme, and the other forms of socialism; reactionary, bourgeois, semi-bourgeois, pet.i.t-bourgeois, utopian, etc.

All these forms except one[1] have re-appeared and renewed themselves more than once. They are reappearing under a new form even to-day in the countries where the modern proletarian movement is of recent birth. For these countries and under these circ.u.mstances the Manifesto has exercised and still exercises the function of contemporary criticism and of a literary whip. And in the countries where these forms have already been theoretically and practically outgrown, as in Germany and Austria, or survive only as an individual opinion among a few, as in France and England, without speaking of other nations, the Manifesto from this point of view has played its part. It thus merely records as a matter of history something no longer necessary to think of, since we have to deal with the political action of the proletariat which already is before us in its gradual and normal course.

That was, to antic.i.p.ate, the att.i.tude of mind of those who wrote it. By the force of their thought and with some scanty data of experience they had antic.i.p.ated the events which have occurred and they contented themselves with declaring the elimination and the condemnation of what they had outgrown. Critical communism--that is its true name, and there is none more exact for this doctrine--did not take its stand with the feudalists in regretting the old society for the sake of criticising by contrast the contemporary society:--it had an eye only to the future.

Neither did it a.s.sociate itself with the petty bourgeois in the desire of saving what cannot be saved:--as, for example, small proprietorship, or the tranquil life of the small proprietor whom the bewildering action of the modern state, the necessary and natural organ of present society, destroys and overturns, because by its constant revolutions it carries in itself the necessity for other revolutions new and more fundamental.

Neither did it translate into metaphysical whimsicalities, into a sickly sentimentalism, or into a religious contemplation, the real contrasts of the material interests of every day life: on the contrary, it exposed those contrasts in all their prosaic reality. It did not construct the society of the future upon a plan harmoniously conceived in each of its parts. It has no word of eulogy and exaltation, of invocation and of regret, for the two G.o.ddesses of philosophic mythology, justice and equality, those two G.o.ddesses who cut so sad a figure in the practical affairs of everyday life, when we observe that the history of so many centuries maliciously amuses itself by nearly always contradicting their infallible suggestions. Once more these communists, while declaring on the strength of facts which carry conviction that the mission of the proletarians is to be the grave diggers of the bourgeoisie, still recognize the latter as the author of a social form which represents extensively and intensively an important stage of progress, and which alone can furnish the field for the new struggles which already give promise of a happy issue for the proletariat. Never was funeral oration so magnificent. There is in these praises addressed to the bourgeoisie a certain tragical humor,--they have been compared to dithyrambics.

The negative and ant.i.thetical definitions of other forms of socialism then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less upon the more abstract ant.i.thesis between the possible and the real as if the things were on one side and on another side were their shadows and their reflections in ideas. History is all of a piece, and it rests upon the process of formation and transformation of society; and that evidently in a fashion altogether objective and independent of our approval or disapproval. It is a dynamic of a special cla.s.s to speak like the positivists who are so dainty with expressions of this sort but are often dominated by the new phrases which they have put out. The different socialist forms of thought and action which have appeared and disappeared in the course of the centuries, so different in their causes, their aspects, and their effects, are all to be studied and explained by the specific and complex conditions of the social life in which they were produced. Upon a close examination it is seen that they do not form one single whole of continuous process because the series is frequently interrupted by changes in the social fabric and by the disappearance and breaking off of the tradition. It is only since the French Revolution that socialism presents a certain unity of process, which appears more evident since 1830 with the definite political supremacy of the capitalist cla.s.s in France and England and which finally becomes obvious, we might say even palpable, since the rise of the International. Upon this road the Manifesto stands like a colossal guide post bearing a double inscription: on one side the first sketch of the new doctrine which has now made the circle of the world; on the other, the definition of its relations to the forms which it excludes, without giving, however, any historic account of them.

The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture, an expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization of its very necessity, that is to say, in the realization that it is the outcome and the solution of the struggles of existing cla.s.ses. These struggles have varied according to times and places and out of them history has developed; but, they are all reduced in our days to the single struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the workingmen inevitably forced into the ranks of the proletariat. The Manifesto gives the genesis of this struggle; it details its evolutionary rhythm, and predicts its final result.

In that conception of history is embodied the whole doctrine of scientific communism. From that moment the theoretical adversaries of socialism have no longer had to discuss the abstract possibility of the democratic socialization of the means of production;[2] as if it were possible in this question to rest their judgment upon inductions based upon the general and common apt.i.tudes of what they characterize as human nature. Thenceforth, the question was to recognize, or not to recognize, in the course of human events the necessity which stands over and above our sympathy and our subjective a.s.sent. Is or is not society in the countries most advanced in civilization organized in such a way that it will pa.s.s into communism by the laws inherent in its own future, once conceding its present economic structure and the friction which it necessarily produces within itself, and which will end by breaking and dissolving it? That is the subject of all discussion since the appearance of this theory and thence follows also the rule of conduct which imposes itself upon the action of the socialist parties whether they be composed of proletarians alone or whether they have in their ranks men who have come out from the other cla.s.ses and who join as volunteers the army of the proletariat.

That is why we voluntarily accept the epithet of scientific, provided we do not thus confuse ourselves with the positivists, sometimes embarra.s.sing guests, who a.s.sume to themselves a monopoly of science; we do not seek to maintain an abstract and generic thesis like lawyers or sophists, and we do not plume ourselves on demonstrating the reasonableness of our aims. Our intentions are nothing less than the theoretical expression and the practical explanation of the data offered us by the interpretation of the process which is being accomplished among us and about us and which has its whole existence in the objective relations of social life of which we are the subject and the object, the cause and the effect. Our aims are rational, not because they are founded on arguments drawn from the reasoning of reason, but because they are derived from the objective study of things, that is to say, from the explanation of their process, which is not, and which cannot be, a result of our will but which on the contrary triumphs over our will and subdues it.

Not one of the previous or subsequent works of the authors of the Manifesto themselves, although they have a much more considerable scientific leaning, can replace the Manifesto or have the same specific efficacy. It gives us in its cla.s.sic simplicity the true expression of this situation; the modern proletariat exists, takes its stand, grows and develops in contemporary history as the concrete subject, the positive force whose necessarily revolutionary action must find in communism its necessary outcome. And that is why this work while giving a theoretical base to its prediction and expressing it in brief, rapid and concise formulae, forms a storehouse, or rather an inexhaustible mine of embryonic thoughts which the reader may fertilize and multiply indefinitely; it preserves all the original and originating force of the thing which is but lately born and which has not yet left the field of its production. This observation is intended especially for those who applying a learned ignorance, when they are not humbugs, charlatans, or amiable dilettanti, give to the doctrine of critical communism precursors, patrons, allies and masters of every cla.s.s without any respect for common sense and the most vulgar chronology. Or again, they try to bring back our materialistic conception of history into the theory of universal evolution which to the minds of many is but a new metaphor of a new metaphysics. Or again they seek in this doctrine a derivative of Darwinism which is an a.n.a.logous theory only in a certain point of view and in a very broad sense; or again they have the condescension to favor us with the alliance or the patronage of that positive philosophy which extends from Comte, that degenerate and reactionary disciple of the genial Saint-Simon, to Spencer, that quintessence of anarchical capitalism, which is to say that they wish to give us for allies our most open adversaries.

It is to its origin that this work owes its fertilizing power, its cla.s.sic strength, and the fact that it has given in so few pages the synthesis of so many series and groups of ideas.[3]

It is the work of two Germans, but it is not either in its form or its basis the expression of personal opinion. It contains no trace of the imprecations, or the anxieties, or the bitterness familiar to all political refuges and to all those who have voluntarily abandoned their country to breathe elsewhere freer air. Neither do we find in it the direct reproduction of the conditions of their own country, then in a deplorable political state and which could not be compared to those of France and England socially and economically, except as regards certain portions of their territory. They brought to their work, on the contrary, the philosophic thought which alone had placed and maintained their country upon the level of contemporary history:--this philosophic thought which in their hands was undergoing that important transformation which permitted materialism, already renewed by Feuerbach combined with dialectics, to embrace and understand the movement of history in its most secret and until then unexplored causes,--unexplored because hidden and difficult to observe. Both were communists and revolutionists, but they were so neither by instinct, by impulse nor by pa.s.sion. They had elaborated an entirely new criticism of economic science and they had understood the connection and the historic meaning of the proletarian movement on both sides of the Channel, in France and in England, before they were called to give in the Manifesto the programme and the doctrine of the Communist League. This had its center in London and numerous branches on the continent; it had behind it a life and development of its own.

Engels had already published a critical essay in which pa.s.sing over all subjective and one-sided corrections he brought out for the first time in an objective fashion the criticism of political economy and of the ant.i.theses inherent in the data and the concepts of that economy itself, and he had become celebrated by the publication of a book on the condition of the English working cla.s.s which was the first attempt to represent the movements of the working cla.s.s as the result of the workings of the forces and means of production.[4] Marx, in the few years preceding, had become known as a radical publicist in Germany, Paris and Brussels. He had conceived the first rudiments of the materialistic conception of history. He had made a theoretically victorious criticism of the hypotheses of Proudhon and the deductions from his doctrine, and had given the first precise explanation of the origin of surplus value as a consequence of the purchase and the use of labor power, that is to say the first germ of the conceptions which were later demonstrated and explained in their connection and their details in Capital. Both men were in touch with the revolutionists of the different countries of Europe, notably France, Belgium and England; their Manifesto was not the expression of their personal theory, but the doctrine of a party whose spirit, aim and activity already formed the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation.

These are the beginnings of modern socialism. We find there the line which separates it from all the rest.

_The Communist League_ grew out of the _League of the Just_; the latter in its turn had been formed with a clear consciousness of its proletarian aims through a gradual specialization of the generic group of the refugees, the exiles. As a type, bearing within itself in an embryonic design the form of all the later socialist and proletarian movements, it had traversed the different phases of conspiracy and of equalitarian socialism. It was metaphysical with Gruen and utopian with Weitling. Having its princ.i.p.al seat at London it was interested in the Chartist movement and had had some influence over it. This movement showed by its disordered character, because it was neither the fruit of a premeditated experience, nor the embodiment of a conspiracy or of a sect, how painful and difficult was the formation of a proletarian political party. The socialist tendency was not manifested in Chartism until the movement was near its end and was nearly finished (though Jones and Horner can never be forgotten). The _League_ everywhere carried an odor of revolution, both because the thing was in the air and because its instinct and method of procedure tended that way: and as long as the revolution was bursting forth effectively, it provided itself, thanks to the new doctrine of the Manifesto, with an instrument of orientation which was at the same time a weapon for combat. In fact, already international, both by the quality and differences of origin of its members, and still more by the result of the instinct and devotion of all, it took its place in the general movement of political life as the clear and definite precursor of all that can to-day be called modern socialism, if by modern we mean not the simple fact of extrinsic chronology but an index of the internal or organic process of society.

A long interruption from 1852 to 1864 which was the period of political reaction and at the same time that of the disappearance, the dispersion and the absorption of the old socialist schools, separates the International of the _Arbeiterbildungsverein_ of London, from the International properly so called, which, from 1864 to 1873, strove to put unity into the struggle of the proletariat of Europe and America.

The action of the proletariat had other interruptions especially in France, and with the exception of Germany, from the dissolution of the International of glorious memory up to the new International which lives to-day through other means and which is developing in other ways, both of them adapted to the political situation in which we live, and based upon riper experience. But just as the survivors of those who in December, 1847, discussed and accepted the new doctrine, have re-appeared on the public scene in the great International, and later again in the new International, the Manifesto itself has also re-appeared little by little and has made the tour of the world in all the languages of the civilized countries, something which it promised to do but could not do at the time of its first appearance.

There was our real point of departure; there were our real precursors.

They marched before all the others, early in the day, with a step rapid but sure, over this exact road which we were to traverse and which we are traversing in reality. It is not proper to give the name of our precursors to those who followed ways which they later had to abandon, or to those who, to speak without metaphor, formulated doctrines and started movements, doubtless explicable by the times and circ.u.mstances of their birth, but which were later outgrown by the doctrine of critical communism, which is the theory of the proletarian revolution.

This does not mean that these doctrines and these attempts were accidental, useless and superfluous phenomena. There is nothing irrational in the historic course of things because nothing comes into existence without reason, and thus there is nothing superfluous. We cannot even to-day arrive at a perfect understanding of critical communism without mentally retracing these doctrines and following the processes of their appearance and disappearance. In fact these doctrines have not only pa.s.sed, they have been intrinsically outgrown both by reason of the change in the conditions of society and by reason of the more exact understanding of the laws upon which rest its formation and its process.

The moment at which they enter into the past, that is to say, that at which they are intrinsically outgrown, is precisely that of the appearance of the Manifesto. As the first index of the genesis of modern socialism, this writing, which gives only the most general and the most easily accessible features of its teaching, bears within itself traces of the historic field within which it is born, which was that of France, England and Germany. Its field for propaganda and diffusion has since become wider and wider, and it is henceforth as vast as the civilized world. In all countries in which the tendency to communism has developed through antagonisms under aspects different but every day more evident between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the process of its first formation is wholly or partly repeated over and over. The proletarian parties which are formed little by little have traversed anew the stages of formation which their precursors traversed at first; but this process has become from country to country and from year to year always more rapid by reason of the greater evidence, the pressing necessity and energy of the antagonisms, and because it is easier to a.s.similate a doctrine and a tendency than to create both for the first time. Our co-workers of 50 years ago were also from this point of view international, since by their example they started the proletariat of the different nations upon the general march which labor must accomplish.

But the perfect theoretical knowledge of socialism to-day, as before, and as it always will be, lies in the understanding of its historic necessity, that is to say, in the consciousness of the manner of its genesis; and this is precisely reflected, as in a limited field of observation and in a hasty example, in the formation of the Manifesto.

It was intended for a weapon of war and thus it bears upon its own exterior the traces of its origin. It contains more substantial declarations than demonstrations. The demonstration rests entirely in the imperative force of its necessity. But we may retrace the process of this formation and to retrace it is to understand truly the doctrine of the Manifesto. There is an a.n.a.lysis which while separating in theory the factors of an organism destroys them in so far as they are elements contributing to the unity of the whole. But there is another a.n.a.lysis, and this alone permits us to understand history, which only distinguishes and separates the elements to find again in them the objective necessity of their co-operation toward the total result.

It is now a current opinion that modern socialism is a normal and thus an inevitable product of history. Its political action, which may in future involve delays and set-backs but never henceforth a total absorption, began with the _International_. Nevertheless the Manifesto precedes it. Its teaching is of prime importance in the light which it throws on the proletarian movement, which movement indeed had its birth and development independently of any doctrine. It is also more than this light. Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction.

It was not enough to say that socialism was a result of history. It was also necessary to understand the intrinsic causes of this outcome and to what all its activity tended. This affirmation, that the proletariat is a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social order in which cla.s.s antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a revolution--but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised millennium. It is the scientific and reflected revelation of the way which our _civil society_ is traversing (if the shade of Fourier will pardon me!).

The Manifesto thus gives us the inside history of its origin and thereby justifies its doctrine and at the same time explains its singular effect and its wonderful efficacy. Without losing ourselves in details, here are the series and groups of elements which, reunited and combined in this rapid and exact synthesis, give us the clue to all the later development of scientific socialism.

The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and England which had already had since 1830 a working-cla.s.s movement which sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the name of socialism was then given.

To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory which should explain them,--and a theory which should not be a simple complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of the disadvantages, thenceforth recognized, of the economy of compet.i.tion: although many were then concerned with this. This new theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the conception of historical progress through the process of ant.i.theses from the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic had already described in its most general features, to the concrete explanation of the cla.s.s struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed that we observed the pa.s.sage from one form of ideas to another form they saw for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to another, that is from one form of economic production to another form.

This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity of the _new social revolution_ more or less explicit in the instinctive consciousness of the proletariat and in its pa.s.sionate and spontaneous movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which might be favored, sustained and a.s.sisted. The revolution became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains society itself; and thus it cannot emanc.i.p.ate itself without at the same time emanc.i.p.ating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing completely the form of production.

Just as the _League of the Just_ had become _The Communist League_ by stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbes and Blanqui (1839), so likewise the new doctrine, which the _League_ accepted and made its own, definitely abandoned the ideas which inspired the action of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a process, that which the conspirators believed to be the result of a pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism.