Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

by Antonio Labriola

Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were oscillating;—or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself far from the point of departure:—in an actual zigzag.

Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the meeting of several societies on the field of competition (from the ingenuous forms of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of the elegant sport of the stock exchange) it is natural that every historical result, when it is measured in the one measure of individual expectation, appears very often like chance, and afterwards, considered theoretically, becomes for the mind more inextricable than the track of meteors.

Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus laughing above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of themselves playing a divine comedy.

Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of association ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete development of all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior processus of history may become a real and true evolution? And, to speak like the amateurs of high-sounding phrases, will there ever be a humanization of all men? When once in the communism of production the antitheses which are now the cause and the effect of economic differentiations are eliminated, will not all human energies acquire a very high degree of efficacy and intensity in co-operative effects, and at the same time will they not develop with a greater liberty of self-expression among all individuals?

It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what critical communism says, that is to say foresees, of the future. But it does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing an abstract possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give life to a state of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it says and predicts because what it announces must inevitably happen by the immanent necessity of history, seen and studied henceforth in the foundation of its economic substructure.

“It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political revolutions.[31]

“To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.[32]

“The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of the social processus of production—a form antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds from the conditions of the social life of individuals; but the productive forces which are developing in the lap of bourgeois society are creating at the same time the material conditions to terminate that antagonism. With this social organization ends the prehistory of the human race.[33]

“With the taking possession of the means of production on the part of society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the dominance of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates in social production will be succeeded by conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence will cease. Only in this way man will detach himself, in a certain sense, from the animal world in a definite fashion, and will pass from a condition of animal existence to conditions of human existence. The entire sum of the conditions of life which has thus far dominated men will pass under the rule and the examination of men themselves, who will thus for the first time become the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters of their own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had been outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied and mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause. Their very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature and history, will become their own and their free work. The foreign and objective forces, which till then dominated history, will pass under the care of men. Only from that moment will men make their own history with full understanding; only from that moment will the social causes which they put in motion, be able to arrive, in great part and in a proportion ever increasing, at the desired effects. It is the leap of the human race from the reign of necessity into that of liberty. To accomplish this action emancipating the world, such is the historic mission of the modern proletariat.”

If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and application of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many conspirators and visionaries had not given them a horror of every Utopia, opposing it indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas might pass for good-natured paradoxes, which criticism need not examine. But these formulas are, as it were, the close, the effective conclusion of the doctrine of historic materialism. They are the direct result of the criticism of economies and of historical dialectics.