ESSAYS

on the

Materialistic Conception
of History

by

ANTONIO LABRIOLA

Professor in the University of Rome

translated by

CHARLES H. KERR

Chicago

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
CO-OPERATIVE

Copyright 1908
By Charles H. Kerr & Company
Chicago

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

On the tenth of March, 1896, the same year that the last despairing revolt of the small producer against capitalism in America was to end in the overwhelming defeat of Bryan, an Italian scholar published in the city of Rome the remarkable work which is now for the first time offered to American readers.

To publish this book in America at that time would have been an impossibility. The American socialist movement was then hardly more than an association of immigrants who had brought their socialism with them from Europe. Today it numbers at least half a million adherents, and its platform is an embodiment of the ideas first adequately stated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and now first adequately explained and elaborated in this remarkable work of Labriola.

The central and fundamental proposition of socialism is not any scheme for reconstructing society, on a cut-and-dried programme, nor again is it any particular mathematical formula showing to what extent the laborer is robbed by the present system of the fruits of his labor; it is precisely this Historical Materialism, which Labriola has so admirably explained in the present work.

Some idea of the place accorded to this book by European socialists may be gathered from the preface to the French edition by G. Sorel, one of the most prominent socialists of France.

He says: “The publication of this book marks a date in the history of socialism. The work of Labriola has its place reserved in our libraries by the side of the classic works of Marx and Engels. It constitutes an illumination and a methodical development of a theory which the masters of the new socialist thought have never yet treated in a didactic form. It is therefore an indispensable book for whoever wishes to understand something of proletarian ideas. More than the works of Marx and Engels it is addressed to that public which is unacquainted with socialist preconceptions. In these pages the historian will find substantial and valuable suggestion for the study of the origin and transformation of institutions.”

The economic development of the United States has reached a point where the growth of the Socialist Party must henceforth go forward with startling rapidity. That the publication of this volume may have some effect in clarifying the ideas of those who discuss the principles of that party, whether with voice or pen, is the hope of the

TRANSLATOR.

ESSAYS ON THE MATERIALISTIC
CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

PART I

IN MEMORY OF THE COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO

ESSAYS

on the

Materialistic Conception of History

PART I

IN MEMORY OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.

I.

In three years we can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of the publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgments and all our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last fifty years. That date marks the beginning of the new era. This is arising, or, rather, is separating itself from the present era, and is developing by a process peculiar to itself and thus in a way that is necessary and inevitable, whatever may be the vicissitudes and the successive phases which cannot yet be foreseen.

All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and the moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the circumstances under which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which burst forth from Paris to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency toward socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.

Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its distinctive character?

We surely should be taking a false road if we regarded as the essential part the measures advised and proposed at the end of the second chapter for the contingency of a revolutionary success on the part of the proletariat,—or again the indications of political relationship to the other revolutionary parties of that epoch which are found in the fourth chapter. These indications and these measures, although they deserved to be taken into consideration at the moment and under the circumstances where they were formulated and suggested, and although they may be very important for forming a precise estimate of the political action of the German communists in the revolutionary period from 1848 to 1850, henceforth no longer form for us a mass of practical judgments for or against which we should take sides in each contingency. The political parties which since the International have established themselves in different countries, in the name of the proletariat, and taking it clearly for their base, have felt, and feel, in proportion as they are born and develop, the imperious necessity of adopting and conforming their programme and their action to circumstances always different and multiform. But not one of these parties feels the dictatorship of the proletariat so near that it experiences the need or desire or even the temptation to examine anew and pass judgment upon the measures proposed in the Manifesto. There are really no historic experiences but those that history makes itself. It is as impossible to foresee them as to plan them beforehand or make them to order. That is what happened at the moment of the Commune, which was and which still remains up to this day the only experience (although