I
Labriola's criticism of method and conclusions of preceeding essays answered: His criticism merely destructive: Tendency of ether thinkers to arrive at like conclusions.
I have always discussed frankly the views expressed in the writings of my eminent friend Professor Antonio Labriola. I am therefore glad that he has taken the same liberty with me, and has subjected to a vigorous criticism (in the French edition of his book on Socialismo e la filosofia),[74] my interpretation of the Marxian theory of value.[75] Labriola has been impelled to this also from a wish to prevent my opinions from appearing, 'to the reader's eyes,' as a supplement, approved by him, of his own personal ones. And though I do not think that 'to the reader's eyes' (I will however add intelligent readers), this would be possible, since, I have always carefully indicated the points, and they are neither few nor unimportant, where we disagree: yet being convinced that clearness is never superfluous, I welcome his intention to make it still plainer that I am not he, and that he thinks with his mind whilst I think with mine.
Labriola rejects entirely the method adopted by me, which he describes variously as scholastic, metaphysical, metaphorical, abstract, formal logic. When I take pains to point out the differences between homo œconomicus and man, moral or immoral, between personal interest and egoism,[76] he shrugs his shoulders, he does not refuse a certain indulgence to this traditional scholasticism, and compares me to the man in the street who speaks of the rising or setting of the sun, or of shining light and warm heat. When I firmly maintain the theoretical necessity for a general economics in addition to the heterogeneous considerations of sociological economics, he taxes me with creating, in addition to all the visible and tangible animals, an animal as such. And he charges me, moreover, with wishing to attack history, comparative philology and physiology in order to substitute for all these the plain Logic of Port Royal, so that instead of studying examples of epigenesis which have actually occurred, such as the transitions from invertebrates to vertebrates, from primitive communism to private property in land, from undifferentiated roots to the systematic differentiation of nouns and verbs in the Ariosemitic group, it might suffice to register these facts in concepts passing from the more general to the more particular, in the series A a1 a2 a3 etc.
But I hardly know how to defend myself seriously from such accusations, because it obliges me to repeat what is too obvious, i.e., that to make concepts does not mean to create entities; that to employ metaphors (and language is all metaphor), does not mean to believe mythology; that to construct experiences in thought, and scientific abstractions, does not mean to substitute either one or the other for concrete reality; that to make use, when needful, of formal logic, does not mean to ignore fact, growth, history. When Marx expounds historical facts I know no way of approaching him except that of historical criticism, and when he defines concepts and formulates laws, I can only proceed to recognise the content of his concepts, and to test the correctness of his inferences and deductions. Thus I have followed this second method in studying his theory of value. If Labriola knows another and better one, let him state it. But what could this other one possibly be? Real logic? In that case let us boldly re-establish Hegel, it will be the lesser evil, at least we shall understand one another. Or a still worse alternative, what monstrous empirical-dialectic or evolutionist method may it be, which confuses together and abuses two distinct procedures, and lends itself so readily to the lovers of prophecy? Or is it merely a question of new phraseology by which we shall go on humbly working, more or less well, with the old methods, whilst detesting the old words? Or again, is this dislike for formal logic nothing but a convenient pretext for dispensing with any vindication of the concepts which are employed?
Marx has stated his concept of value; has expounded a process of transformation of value into price; has reconstructed the nature of profit as surplus value. For me the whole problem of Marxian criticism is confined within these limits:—Is Marx's conception substantially erroneous (entirely, owing to false premisses, and partially, owing to false deductions)? or, is Marx's conception substantially correct, but has it been subsumed under a category to which it does not belong, and has search been made in it for what it cannot supply, whilst what it actually offers has been ignored? Having come to this second conclusion I have asked myself: Under what conditions and assumptions is Marx's theory thinkable? And this question I have tried to answer in my essay.
What Marx wished to do, or mistakenly thought himself to be doing is, I think, of interest to criticism up to a certain point; although the history of science shows that thinkers have not always had the clearest and plainest knowledge of the whole of their thought; and that it is one thing to discover a truth, and another to define and classify the discovery when made. It may be allowed that he who confuses ideological with historical research thus best reproduces Marx's spirit; but in this case the work will be an artistic recasting or a psychological reproduction, not a criticism; and will gather up with the sound also the unsound portion of Marx's thought.
To go into details. Labriola tries to prove the emptiness or vagueness of some of my definitions and the falsity of some of my reasoning. I having asserted that capitalist economics is a special case of general economics, Labriola remarks, 'en passant,' that it is nevertheless the only case which has given rise to a theory and to divisions of schools; and I acknowledge that I do not understand the point of this remark, although it is said to be made 'en passant.' Both Marx and Engels lamented that the ancient and medieval economic systems had not been studied in the same way as the modern. Thus there are conceivable at least three economic theories, ancient, medieval and modern, and is it not lawful to construct a general economics; i.e. to study in isolation that common element which causes these three groups of facts to be all three denoted by a common name? Labriola then asks what this general and extra-historical economics can consist of, and whether it can never be of service to the conjectural psychology of primitive man: he jests after the manner of Engels, who in truth has sometimes joked too much during a discussion on serious matters. Is it incredible that I too should jest? But I do not think there is occasion to do so! He wonders at my insatiability, because having accepted the hedonistic theories, I wish to accept Marx's theories too: as though my entire proof was not intended to make it plain that the antithesis between these theories exists only in imagination; and that Marx's theory is not an economic system entirely opposed to other systems ('quelque chose de tout-à-fait opposé' are Labriola's own words), but a special and partial inquiry; and as though by hedonism I meant all the personal convictions, philosophical, historical and political, of those who follow, or say that they follow, its guidance, and not indeed only what follows legitimately from its axiom. When I call the explanation of the nature of profits, offered by the hedonistic school, an economic explanation, he inquires sarcastically: 'Could it possibly be non-economic?' But my statement contains no pleonasm: the adjective economic is added to mark off the hedonistic explanation from that of Marx, which, to my thinking, is not purely economic, but historical and comparative, or sociological, if it is preferred. He wonders that I speak of a working society, and asks: 'As opposed to what?' 'Perhaps to the saints in paradise?' But I have pointed out the opposition between a hypothetical working society,—i.e. such that all its goods are produced by labour,—and a society, economic certainly, but not exclusively working, because it enjoys goods given by nature, as well as the products of labour. The saints in paradise form another irrelevant jest.
I called Marx's concept of surplus-value a concept of difference; and Labriola reproaches me for not being able 'to say exactly what I understand by these words.' And yet I am not in the habit of speaking or writing when I do not exactly know what I want to say; and here I believe that I have clearly expressed a thought which I had exceedingly clearly in my mind. Let us take two types of society: type A consisting of 100 persons, who, with capital held in common and equal labour, produce goods which are divided in equal proportions; type B consisting of 100 persons, 50 of whom own the land and the means of production, i.e. are capitalists, and 50 are shut out from this ownership, i.e. are proletarians and workmen; in the distribution, the former receive, in proportion to the capital which they employ, a share in the products of the labour of the latter. It is evident that in type A there is no place for surplus value. But neither in type B are you justified in giving the name surplus-value to that portion of the products which is swallowed up by the capitalists, except when you are comparing type B with type A, and are considering the former as a contrast to the latter. If type B is considered by itself, which is precisely what the pure economists do and ought to do, the product which the 50 capitalists appropriate, i.e. their profits, is a result of mutual agreement, arising out of different comparative degrees of utility. Turn in every direction and in pure economics you will find nothing more. The expropriatory character of profit can be asserted only when to the second society, we apply, almost like a chemical reagent, the standard, which, on the other hand, is characteristic of a type of society founded on human equality, a type 'which has attained the solidity of a popular conviction' (Marx). Profit 'is surplus-labour not paid for', says Marx, and it may be so; but not paid for in reference to what? In existing society it is certainly paid for, by the price which it actually secures. It is a question then, of determining in what society it would have that price which in existing society is denied it. And then, indeed, it is a question of comparison.
The following of Labriola's assertions is not original, but is nevertheless quite gratuitous: 'Pure economics is so little extra-historical, that it has borrowed the data from real history, of which it makes two absolute postulates: the freedom of labour and the freedom of competition, pushed to their extreme by hypothesis.' If I open Pantaleoni's well-known treatise, I read in the very first paragraph of the Teoria del valore, Ferrara's fundamental theory that: 'value is above all a phenomenon of the economics of the individual or isolated person.' So little do the legal conditions of society enter into the necessary postulates of pure economics.
After which, Labriola ought not to be horrified if I have written: 'that Marx has taken his celebrated equivalence[77] "between value and labour from outside the field of pure economics." He will ask me: from whence then has he taken it? And I reply: from a special and definite type of society, in which the legal organisation and the pre-supposed conditions of fact make value correspond to the quantity of labour.
Labriola does not consider justified the comparison which I have drawn, (metaphor for metaphor), between the commodities which in Marxian economics are presented as the crystallisations of labour and the goods which in pure economics might well be called quantities of possible satisfactions for crystallised wants. 'Hitherto—he exclaims—only sorcerers have been able to believe, or to cause it to be believed, that by desires alone a part of ourselves might be glutinised into any goods whatsoever.' But what does glutinise mean? To obtain the commodity a costs us x labour of a given kind, this is Marx's congealed labour. Pure economics, using a more general formula, states that it costs us that body of wants which we must leave unsatisfied: this is the form of congealment which pure economics might supply. There is no question, in the one case, of an objective reality, as Labriola seems to think, or in the other of an imagined sorcery; but in both cases it is a matter of the literary use of imaginative expressions to denote mental attitudes and elaborations. In this connection Labriola, as if to limit their range, says that Marx, as an author, belonged to the seventeenth century. May I be allowed, as a humble student of literature, and the author of several investigations into the character and origin of seventeenth century style,[78] to protest. Seventeenth century style consists in ingenuity, i.e. in putting cold intellectuality into an æsthetic form; hence the forced comparison, the lengthy metaphor, the play on words and the equivocations. But Marx, on the contrary, misuses poetic expressions, which give the content of his thought with unrestrained vigour. We find in him just the opposite of seventeenth century style: not a lack of connection between the form and the thought, but such a violent embrace of the former by the latter that the unlucky form sometimes runs the risk of being left suffocated.[79]
The reader will be tired of these replies to a negative criticism; but negative criticism is nevertheless all that Labriola offers us. What is his interpretation of Marx's thought? Or which does he accept, out of those offered? Here Labriola is silent. It is true that on another occasion I believed that I discerned in his statement that 'labour-value is the typical premiss in Marx, without which all the rest would be unthinkable,' an agreement with my thesis. But I see now that I must have been deceived, and that the words must have another meaning; which, however, warned by the unlucky attempt already made, I shall not attempt further to specify. In the meantime Sombart has built castles in the air; Sorel has made hasty or premature elaborations; the present writer has not understood (see p. 224). Are we then faced by a mystery? Our friend, Labriola, relates (p. 50) a story of Hegel who is said to have declared that one only of his pupils had understood him. (The anecdote, I may add, is recounted by Heinrich Heine in a much wittier manner).[80] Is the same thing to be repeated with regard to Marx's theory of value?
In truth, though without wishing to deny the difficulty of Marx's thought and of the form in which he expresses it, I think that the mystery may be at length cleared up. And I say this, not only on account of my inward conviction of the truth of my own interpretation, but also on account of the agreement in which I find myself with several critics, who, almost at the same moment, and by independent methods, have arrived at results nearly similar to my own.
'Or, se im mostra la mia carta il vero,
Non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto....'[81]
A similar tendency shows itself in what has been written on the subject by Sombart, in 1894, by Engels in 1895, by myself in 1896, by Sorel in 1897, by myself more at length in 1897, and again by Sorel in June of last year (1898).[82] Certainly truth and falsehood cannot be decided by external signs, the intellect being the only judge of them, and a judge who allows scope for infinite appeals. But nevertheless it is natural that under the circumstances pointed out above, a feeling of hope and confidence must arise that the discussion is about to be closed, that the problem is at length ripe for solution.