Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

by Antonio Labriola

Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history and we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation and of this development? The very ancient formations are not evident at first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has not yet reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its processus, and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process of birth before our eyes, as for example, in Japan. In so far as it is society which transforms all the products of human labor into commodities by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old proprietorship, to speak the language of the jurists. In one country it elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of sociology.

As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the class struggle were already implicitly contained in it.

This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of production had thrown light upon itself and its processus in creating the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.

Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was associated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to accumulate money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex sides of the problem of wealth; it developed in the passage from mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of the French Revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old forms of feudalism, the guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of “natural right” which developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the Constitution of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the Physiocrats.

In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed the elements and the forms of the processus of production, of circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories: money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It marched, sure of itself, accumulating its analyses from Petty to Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it illustrated was the natural order, and that private property in the means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic character of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his struggle against the income from land rents.

The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the “natural order” is overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security, education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social antitheses without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created by modern industry. The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This antithesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic constancy and unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical precision even into his thoughts of its details.

The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered, there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society by as many appropriate remedies.[22]

In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of the labor that they contain? Why not give the worker the entire product of his labor, etc.? These demands reduce the things, tenacious and resistant, of real life, into as many reasonings, and they have for their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and gearings.

The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of classical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these relations arise in certain historic conditions but they constitute a system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular one which returns to the buyer more than it costs him; and is not this commodity precisely the labor power of the wage worker? The economic system is not a tissue of reasonings but it is a sum and a complexus of facts which engenders a complex tissue of relations. It is a foolish thing to assume that this system of facts which the ruling class has established with great pains through the centuries by violence, by sagacity, by talent and by science will confess itself vanquished, will destroy itself to give way to the demands of the poor and to the reasonings of their advocates. How demand the suppression of poverty without demanding the overthrow of all the rest? To demand of this society that it shall change its law which constitutes its defense is to demand an absurd thing. To demand of this State that it shall cease to be the buckler and the defense of this society and of this law is plunging into absurdities.[24] The one-sided socialism which without being clearly utopian starts from the hypothesis that society admits of certain errata without revolution, that is to say without a fundamental change in the general elementary structure of society itself, is a mere piece of ingenuity. This contradiction with the rigid laws of the process of things is shown in all its evidence in Proudhon, who, reproducing without knowing it, or copying directly, some of the one-sided English socialists, wished to arrest and change history, armed with a definition and a syllogism.