Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

by Antonio Labriola

The immediate, direct and appreciable material is given by France and England which had already had since 1830 a working-class movement which sometimes resembles and sometimes differentiates itself from the other revolutionary movements and which extended from instinctive revolt to the practical aims of the political parties (Chartism and Social Democracy for example) and gave birth to different temporary and perishable forms of communism and semi-communism like that to which the name of socialism was then given.

To recognize in these movements no longer the fugitive phenomenon of meteoric disturbances but a new social fact, there was need of a theory which should explain them,—and a theory which should not be a simple complement of the democratic tradition nor the subjective correction of the disadvantages, thenceforth recognized, of the economy of competition: although many were then concerned with this. This new theory was the personal work of Marx and Engels. They carried over the conception of historical progress through the process of antitheses from the abstract form, which the Hegelian dialectic had already described in its most general features, to the concrete explanation of the class struggle; and in this historic movement where it had been supposed that we observed the passage from one form of ideas to another form they saw for the first time the transition from one form of social anatomy to another, that is from one form of economic production to another form.

This historic conception, which gave a theoretic form to this necessity of the new social revolution more or less explicit in the instinctive consciousness of the proletariat and in its passionate and spontaneous movements, recognizing the intrinsic and imminent necessity of the revolution, changed the concept of it. That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which might be favored, sustained and assisted. The revolution became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. And this because the proletariat is not an accessory and auxiliary means, an excrescence, an evil, which can be eliminated from the society in which we are living but because it is its substratum, its essential condition, its inevitable effect and in turn the cause which preserves and maintains society itself; and thus it cannot emancipate itself without at the same time emancipating every one, that is to say, revolutionizing completely the form of production.

Just as the League of the Just had become The Communist League by stripping itself of the forms of symbolism and conspiracy and adopting little by little the means of propaganda and of political action from and after the check attending the insurrection of Barbès and Blanqui (1839), so likewise the new doctrine, which the League accepted and made its own, definitely abandoned the ideas which inspired the action of conspiracies, and conceived as the outcome and objective result of a process, that which the conspirators believed to be the result of a pre-determined plan or the emanation from their heroism.

At that point begins a new ascending line in the order of facts and another connection of concepts and of doctrines.

The communism of conspiracy, the Blanquism of that time, carries us up through Buonarotti and also through Bazard and the “Carbonari” to the conspiracy of Baboeuf, a true hero of ancient tragedy who hurled himself against fate because there was no connection between his aim and the economic condition of the moment, and he was as yet incapable of bringing upon the political scene a proletariat having a broad class consciousness. From Baboeuf and certain less known elements of the Jacobin period, past Boissel and Fauchet we ascend to the intuitive Morelly and to the original and versatile Mably and if you please to the chaotic Testament of the curé Meslier, an instinctive and violent rebellion of “good sense” against the savage oppression endured by the unhappy peasant.

These precursors of the socialism of violence, protest and conspiracy were all equalitarians; as were also most of the conspirators. Thus by a singular but inevitable error they took for a weapon of combat, interpreting it and generalizing it, that same doctrine of equality which developing as a natural right parallel to the formation of the economic theory, had become an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie which was winning step by step its present position to transform the society of privilege into that of liberalism, free exchange and the civil code.[5]

Following this immediate deduction which at bottom was a simple illusion, that all men being equal in nature should also be equal in their enjoyments, it was thought that the appeal to reason carried with it all the elements of propaganda and persuasion, and that the rapid, immediate and violent taking possession of the exterior instruments of political power was the only means to set to right those who resisted.

But whence come and how persist all these inequalities which appear so irrational in the light of a concept of justice so simple and so elementary? The Manifesto was the clear negation of the principle of equality understood so naively and so clumsily. While proclaiming as inevitable the abolition of classes in the future form of collective production, it explains to us the necessity, the birth and the development of these very classes as a fact which is not an exception, or a derogation of an abstract principle, but the very process of history.

Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter cannot exist without the former. And both are the result of a process of formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether upon the manner of economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. To describe the origin and the progress of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to explain its successes in the colossal development of technique and in the conquest of the world market, and to point out the political transformations which followed it, which are the expression, the defense and the result of these conquests is, at the same time, to write the history of the proletariat. The latter in its present condition is inherent in the epoch of bourgeois society and it has had, it has, and will have as many phases as that society itself up to the time of its extinction. The antithesis of rich and poor, of happy and unhappy, of oppressors and oppressed is not something accidental which can easily be put on one side as was believed by the enthusiasts of justice. Still further it is a fact of necessary correlation, once granted the directing principle of the present form of production which makes the wageworker a necessity. This necessity is double. Capital can only take possession of production by converting laborers into proletarians and it cannot continue to live, to be fruitful, to accumulate, to multiply itself and to transform itself except on the condition of paying wages to those whom it has made proletarians. The latter, on their side, can only live and reproduce their kind on the condition of selling themselves as labor power, the use of which is left to the discretion, that is to say, to the good pleasure of the possessors of capital. The harmony between capital and labor is wholly contained in this fact that labor is the living force by which the proletarians continually put in motion and reproduce by adding to it the labor accumulated in the capital. This connection resulting from a development which is the whole inner essence of modern history, if it gives the key to comprehend the true reason of the new class struggle of which the communist conception has become the expression, is of such a nature that no sentimental protest, no argument based on justice can resolve it and disentangle it.