Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

by Antonio Labriola

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 participated 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 passed. 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 illustrated in several works the history of the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850 and especially the class 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 passion, 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 passed and this was precisely true in the countries which constituted 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 assist, (through the elaboration of programmes, and through their participation 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 assume or will assume to re-constitute anything like it.