Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 2

Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are at least in process of growth.

We may in broad outlines characterize the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and the modern capitalist methods of production as progressive epochs in the economic evolution of society.

The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production const.i.tute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of individuals.

But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of capitalistic society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society therefore, brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society."

Marx had some years before left the political arena and he did not return to it until later with the International. The reaction had triumphed in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic, liberal or democratic revolution. The bourgeoisie on its side had overcome the proletarians of France and England. The indispensable conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian movement suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had partic.i.p.ated in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against reaction saw its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne.

The survivors of the movement tried to make a new start at London, but soon Marx, Engels and others separated themselves from the revolutionaries and retired from the movement. The crisis was pa.s.sed. A long period of repose followed. This was shown by the slow disappearance of the Chartist movement, that is to say, the proletarian movement of the country which was the spinal column of the capitalist system.

History had for the moment discredited the illusions of the revolutionaries.

Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the already discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx ill.u.s.trated in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850 and especially the cla.s.s struggles in France, showing thus that if the revolution in the forms which it had taken on at that moment had not succeeded, the revolutionary theory of history was not contradicted for all that.[12] The suggestions given in the Manifesto found here their complete development.

Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte[13] was the first attempt to apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained within precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise from the apparent movement to the real movement of history and to discover their intimate connection. There are indeed great difficulties in rising from the phenomena of pa.s.sion, oratory, Parliaments, elections and the like to the inner social gearing to discover in the latter the different interests of the large and small bourgeois, of the peasants, the artisans, the laborers, the priests, the soldiers, the bankers, the usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously or unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man.

The crisis was pa.s.sed and this was precisely true in the countries which const.i.tuted the historic field from which critical communism proceeded.

All that the critical communists could do was to understand the reaction in its hidden economic causes because, for the moment, to understand the reaction was to continue the work of the revolution. The same thing happened under other conditions and other forms 20 years later when Marx, in the name of the International made in the "Civil War in France" an apology for the Commune which was at the same time its objective criticism.

The heroic resignation with which Marx after 1850 abandoned political life was shown again when he retired from the International after the congress at the Hague in 1872. These two facts have their value for biography because they give glimpses of his personal character. With him, in fact, ideas, temperament, policy and thought were one and the same. But, on the other hand, these facts have a much greater bearing for us. Critical communism does not manufacture revolutions, it does not prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms for revolts. It mingles itself with the proletarian movement, but it sees and supports that movement in the full intelligence of the connection which it has, which it can have, and which it must have, with all the relations of social life as a whole. In a word it is not a seminary in which superior officers of the proletarian revolution are trained, but it is neither more nor less than the consciousness of this revolution and especially the consciousness of its difficulties.

The proletarian movement has grown in a colossal fashion during these last thirty years. In the midst of numberless difficulties, through gains and losses, it has little by little taken on a political form. Its methods have been elaborated and gradually applied. All this is not the work of the magic action of the doctrine scattered by the persuasive virtue of written and spoken propaganda. From their first beginnings the communists had this feeling that they were the extreme left of every proletarian movement, but in proportion as the latter developed and specialized it became their necessity and duty to a.s.sist, (through the elaboration of programmes, and through their partic.i.p.ation in the political action of the parties) in the various contingencies of the economic development and of the political situation growing out of it.

In the fifty years which separate us from the publication of the Manifesto the specialization and the complexity of the proletarian movement have become such that there is henceforth no mind capable of embracing it in its completeness, of understanding it in its details and grasping its real causes and exact relations. The single International, from 1864 to 1873, necessarily disappeared after it had fulfilled its task. The preliminary equalization of the general tendencies and of the ideas common and indispensable to all the proletariat, and no one can a.s.sume or will a.s.sume to re-const.i.tute anything like it.

Two causes, notably, contributed in a high degree to this specialization, this complexity of the proletarian movement. In many countries the bourgeoisie felt the need of putting an end in the interest of its own defense to some of the abuses which had arisen in consequence of the introduction of the industrial system. Thence arose labor legislation, or as it has been pompously called social legislation. This same bourgeoisie in its own interest or, under the pressure of circ.u.mstances has been obliged, in many countries to increase the generic conditions of liberty, and notably to extend the right of suffrage. These two circ.u.mstances have drawn the proletariat into the circle of daily political life. They have considerably increased its chance for action and the agility and suppleness thus acquired permit it to struggle with the bourgeoisie in elective a.s.sembles. And as the _processus_ of things determines the _processus_ of ideas, this practical multiform development of the proletariat is accompanied by a gradual development of the doctrines of critical communism, as well in the manner of understanding history or contemporary life as in the minute description of the most infinitesimal parts of economics: in a word, it has become a science.

Have we not there, some ask, a deviation from the simple and imperative doctrine of the Manifesto? Others again say, have we not lost in intensity and precision what we have gained in extension and complexity?

These questions, in my opinion, arise from an inexact conception of the present proletarian movement and an optical illusion as to the degree of energy and revolutionary valor of the former movements.

Whatever be the concessions that the bourgeoisie can make in the present economic order even if it be a very great reduction in the hours of labor, it always remains true that the necessity for exploitation upon which the whole present social order rests imposes limits beyond which capital as a private instrument of production has no more reason for existence. If a concession to-day can allay one form of discontent in the proletariat, the concession itself can do nothing less than to give rise to the need of new and ever increasing concessions. The need of labor legislation arose in England before the Chartist movement and it developed afterwards along with it. It had its first successes in the period which immediately followed the fall of Chartism. The principles and the reasons of this movement in their causes and their effects were studied in a critical manner by Marx in Capital and they afterwards pa.s.sed, through the International, into the programmes of the different socialist parties. Finally this whole process, concentrating itself into the demand for eight hours, became with the 1st of May an international marshalling of the proletariat, and a means for estimating its progress.

On the other hand, the political struggle in which the proletariat takes part democratizes its habits; still more a real democracy takes birth which, with time, will no longer be able to adapt itself to the present political form. Being the organ of a society based on exploitation it is const.i.tuted as a bureaucratic hierarchy, as a judicial bureaucracy and a mutual aid society of the capitalists for the defense of their special privileges, the perpetual income from the public debt, the rent of land and the interest on capital in all its forms. Consequently the two facts, which according to the discontented and the hypercritical seem to make us deviate infinitely from the lines laid down by communism, become, on the contrary, new means and new conditions which confirm these lines. The apparent deviations from the revolution are, at bottom, the very thing which is hastening it.

Moreover, we must not exaggerate the significance of the revolutionary faith of the communists of fifty years ago. Given the political situation of Europe, if they had a faith, it was that they were precursors, and this they have been; they hoped that the political conditions of Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland might approximate to modern forms, and this has happened later, in part, and through other means; if they had a hope, it was that the proletarian movement of France and England might continue to develop. The reaction which intervened upset many things and stopped more than one development which had already begun. It upset also the old revolutionary tactic, and in these last years a new tactic has arisen. Therein lies all the change.[14]

The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding thread to a science and a practice which nothing but experience and time could develop. It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general march of the proletarian movement.

It is perfectly evident that the communists were influenced by the experience of the two movements which they had before their eyes, that of France, and especially the Chartist movement which the manifestation of April 10th was soon to strike with paralysis. But this scheme does not fix in any invariable fashion a tactic of war, which indeed had already been made frequently. The revolutionists had often indeed explained in the form of catechism what ought to be a simple consequence of the development of events.

This scheme became more vast and complex with the development and extension of the bourgeois system. The rhythm of the movement has become more varied and slower because the laboring ma.s.s has entered on the scene as a distinct, political party, which fact changes the manner and the measure of their action and consequently their movement.

Just as in view of the improvement of modern weapons the tactic of street riots has become inopportune, and just as the complexity of the modern state shows the insufficiency of a sudden capture of a munic.i.p.al government to impose upon a whole people the will and the ideas of a minority, no matter how courageous and progressive, even so, on its side, the ma.s.s of the proletarians no longer holds to the word of command of a few leaders, nor does it regulate its movements by the instructions of captains who might upon the ruins of one government raise up another. The laboring ma.s.s where it has developed politically has made and is making its own democratic education. It is choosing its representatives and submitting their action to its criticism. It examines and makes its own the ideas and the propositions which these representatives submit to it. It already knows, or it begins to understand according to the situation in the various countries, that the conquest of the political power cannot and should not be made by others in its name, and especially that it cannot be the consequence of a single blow. In a word it knows, or it is beginning to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat which shall have for its task the socialization of the means of production cannot be the work of a ma.s.s led by a few and that it must be, and that it will be, the work of the proletarians themselves when they have become in themselves and through long practice a political organization.

The development and the extension of the bourgeois system have been rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia and in India, but even in j.a.pan, new centers of modern production, thus complicating the conditions of compet.i.tion and the entanglements of the world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced, or will not be long to wait for. Equally rapid and colossal has been the progress of the proletariat. Its political education takes each day a new step toward the conquest of political power. The rebellion of the productive forces against the form of production, the struggle of living labor against acc.u.mulated labor, becomes every day more evident. The bourgeois system is henceforth upon the defensive and it reveals its decadence by this singular contradiction; the peaceful world of industry has become a colossal camp in which militarism develops. The peaceful period of industry has become by the irony of things the period of the continuous invention of new engines of war.

Socialism has forced itself into the situation. Those semi-socialists, even those charlatans who enc.u.mber with their presence the press and the meetings of our party and who often are a nuisance to us, are a tribute which vanity and ambitions of every sort render in their fashion to the new power which rises on the horizon. In spite of the foreseen antidote which scientific socialism is, the truth of which many people have not come to understand, there is a group of quacks on the social question, all having some particular specific to eliminate such or such a social evil: land nationalization, monopoly of grains in the hands of the State, democratic taxes, statization of mortgages, general strike, etc.

But social democracy eliminates all these fantasies because the consciousness of their situation leads the proletarians when once they have become familiar with the political arena to understand socialism in an integral fashion. They come to understand that they should look for only one thing, the abolition of wage labor; that there is but one form of society which renders possible and even necessary the elimination of cla.s.ses,--the a.s.sociation which does not produce commodities, and that this form of society is no longer the State, but its opposite, that is to say, the technical and pedagogical administration of human society, the self-government of labor. Behind the Jacobins are the gigantic heroes of 1793 and their caricatures of 1848.

_Social democracy!_ But is not that, say some, an evident attenuation of the communist doctrine as it is formulated in the Manifesto in terms so ringing and so decisive?

This is not the moment to recall that the phrase _social democracy_ has had in France many significations from 1837 to 1848, all of which were based upon a vague sentimentalism. Neither is it necessary to explain how the Germans have been able in this nomenclature to sum up all the rich and vast development of their socialism from the episode of La.s.salle now pa.s.sed over and transformed up to our own days. It is certain that _social democracy_ can signify, has signified and signifies many things which have not been, are not, and never will be, either critical communism or the conscious march toward the proletarian revolution. It is also certain that contemporary socialism even in the countries where its development is most advanced, carries with it a great deal of dross which it throws off little by little along the road.

It is certain also, in fine, that this broad designation of social democracy serves as an escutcheon and a buckler to many intruders. But here we need to fix our attention only upon certain points of capital importance.

We must insist upon the second term of the expression in order to avoid any equivocation. Democratic was the const.i.tution of the _Communist League_; democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new teaching; democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and its partic.i.p.ation in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of reaction; democratic finally was the very way in which the League was dissolved. In this first type of our present parties, in this first cell so to speak, of our complex organism, elastic and highly developed, there was not only the consciousness of the mission to be accomplished as precursor, but there was already the form and the method of a.s.sociation which alone are suitable for the first initiators of the proletarian revolution. It was no longer a sect; that form was already, in fact, outgrown. The immediate and fantastic domination of the individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which had its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It was the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only to those who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must be the same, and it is so, in the working cla.s.s parties and where this character is not or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation still elementary and confused simply engenders illusions and is only a pretext for intrigues, and when it is not so, then we have a pa.s.sover where men of understanding touch elbows with the madman and the spy; as for example the society of The International Brothers which attached itself like a parasite to the International and discredited it; or again the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells itself to capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and which studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes into the sinuosities of compet.i.tion; or again a group of malcontents, for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can do.

All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the wily bourgeoisie oftener than not stirs up of itself and which it makes the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of socialism during these last years.

Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of economic compet.i.tion and in the resistance of the political power, but also in the very conditions of the proletarian ma.s.s and in the mechanism sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow, varied, complex movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many people from seeing the increasing reduction of all cla.s.s struggles to the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized workers.

Even as the Manifesto did not write, as the utopians did, the ethics and the psychology of the future society, just so it did not give the mechanism of that formation and of the development in which we find ourselves. It is surely enough that these few pioneers have opened the road. We must walk upon it to arrive at understanding and experience.

Moreover man is distinctively the experimental animal; that is why he has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history.

Upon this road of contemporary socialism which const.i.tutes its development because it is its experience, we have met the ma.s.s of the peasants.

Socialism which at first kept itself practically and theoretically to the study and experience of the antagonisms between capitalists and proletarians in the circle of industrial production properly so called, has turned its activity toward that ma.s.s in which _peasant stupidity_ blossoms. To capture the peasants is the question of the hour, although the quintessential Schaeffle long ago mobilized the anti-collectivist brains of the peasants for the defense of the existing order. The elimination and the capture of domestic industry by capital, the pa.s.sage more and more rapid of agrarian industry into the capitalist form, the disappearance of small proprietorship, or its lessening through mortgages, the disappearance of the communal domaines, usury, taxes and militarism, all this is beginning to work miracles even in those brains a.s.sumed to be props of the existing order.

The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult; this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been and will be committed.[15] As long as the peasant shall not be gained over we shall always have behind us this _peasant stupidity_ which unconsciously repeats, and that because it is stupid, the errors of the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development of modern society in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with this conquest of the country districts. When that country shall have entered into the liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages, with all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarization, but also with the compensations and the advantages of the political development of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to fear the threat of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the same time have triumphed over the internal perils by the capture of the peasants.

The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a precise fashion from original doc.u.ments in all its phases. It partly returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the reaction and conspiracies, and under circ.u.mstances known to all, and Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of militarism and of finance without having at the same time the forms of modern production and the resulting capacity for compet.i.tion on equal terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of technical ability,--and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the application of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is this which gave the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio.

A modern state in a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a country where agriculture is in great part backward, it is that which gives birth to this general sentiment of universal discontent.

Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the mult.i.tude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, r.e.t.a.r.ded, embarra.s.sed and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. Italy has not been for reasons easy to guess a suitable field for the indigenous formation of socialist ideas and tendencies. The Italian Philippe Buonaroti, at first the friend of the younger Robespierre, become the companion of Babeuf and later attempted to re-establish Babeufism in France, after 1830. Socialism made its first appearance in Italy at the time of the International, in the confused and incoherent form of Bakuninism; it was not, moreover, a labor movement, but it was the work of the small bourgeois and instinctive revolutionists.[16] In these last years socialism has fixed itself in a form which _almost_ reproduces the general type of _social democracy_.[17] Now in Italy the first sign of life which the proletariat gave is in the shape of the rising of the Sicilian peasants followed by other revolts of the same kind on the continent to which others will perhaps succeed in the future. Is it not very significant?

After this incursion into the history of contemporary socialism we gladly return to our precursors of fifty years ago, who put on record in the Manifesto how they took possession of an advance post on the road of progress. And that is true not merely of the theorizers, that is to say, Marx and Engels. Both of these men would have exercised, under other circ.u.mstances and at all times either by tongue or pen, a considerable influence over politics and science such was the force and originality of their minds and the extent of their knowledge even if they had never met on their way the _Communist League_. But I am referring to all the "unknown" according to the exclusive and vain jargon of bourgeois literature:--of the shoemaker, Bauer, the tailors, Lessner and Eccarius, the miniature painter, Pfaender, the watchmaker, Moll,[18] of Lochner, etc., and many others who were the first conscious initiators of our movement. The motto, "Workingmen of all countries, unite," remains as their monument. The pa.s.sage of socialism from utopia to science marks the result of their work. The survival of their instinct and of their first impulse in the work of to-day is the ineffaceable t.i.tle which these precursors have acquired to the grat.i.tude of all socialists.

As an Italian, I return so much the more willingly to these beginnings of modern socialism because for me, at least, this recent warning of Engels' is not without importance. "Thus the discovery that everywhere and always political conditions and events find their explanation in economic conditions would not have been made by Marx in 1845, but rather by Loria in 1886. He has at least succeeded in impressing this belief upon his compatriots, and since his book has appeared in French even upon some Frenchmen and he may now go on inflated with pride and vanity as if he had discovered an epoch-making historic theory until the Italian socialists have time to despoil the ill.u.s.trious Mr. Loria of the peac.o.c.k feathers which he has stolen."[19]

I would willingly close here, but more remains to be said.

On all sides and from all camps protests arise and objections are urged against historical materialism. And some times these voices are swelled here and there by newly converted socialists, socialists who are philosophical, socialists who are sentimental and sometimes hysterical.

Then reappears, as a warning, the "question of the belly." Others devote themselves to exercise of logical gymnastics with abstract categories of egoism and altruism; for others again the inevitable struggle for existence always turns up at the right moment.

Morality! But it is high time that we understand the lesson of this morality of the bourgeois epoch in the fable of the bees by Mandeville, who was contemporary with the first projection of cla.s.sic economics.

And has not the politics of this morality been explained in cla.s.sic phrases that can never be forgotten by the first great political writer of the capitalist epoch Machiavelli, who did not invent Machiavellism, but who was its secretary and faithful and diligent editor. And as for the logical tourney between egoism and altruism, has it not been in full view from the time of the Reverend Malthus up to that empty, prolix and tiresome reasoner, the indispensable Spencer? Struggle for existence!

But could you wish to observe, study and understand a struggle more important for us than the one which has its birth and is taking on gigantic proportions in the proletarian agitation? Perhaps you would reduce the explanation of this struggle which is developing and working in the supernatural domain of society, which man himself has created in the course of history, through his labor, through improved processes and through social inst.i.tutions, and which man himself can change through other forms of labor, processes and inst.i.tutions,--you would perhaps reduce it to the simple explanation of the more general struggle in which plant and animals, and men themselves in so far as they are animals, are contending in the bosom of nature.

But let us return to our subject.

Critical communism has never refused, and it does not refuse, to welcome the multiple and valuable suggestions, ideological, ethical, psychologic and pedagogic which may come from the knowledge and from the study of all forms of communism from Phales of Chalcedon down to Cabet.[20] More than this, it is by the study and the knowledge of these forms that the consciousness of the separateness of scientific socialism from all the rest becomes developed and fixed. And in making this study who is there who will refuse to recognize that Thomas More was a heroic soul and a great writer on socialism? Who will not find in his heart a large tribute of admiration for Robert Owen who first gave to the ethics of communism this indisputable principle, that the character and the morals of men are the necessary result of the conditions in which they live and of the circ.u.mstances which surround them? And the partisans of critical communism believe it is their duty, traversing history in thought, to claim fellowship with all the oppressed, whatever may have been their destiny, which was that of remaining oppressed and of opening the way after an ephemeral success for the rule of new oppressors.