Antonio Labriola

“ The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human race from superstition, and even from religion, to make of each individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man ”

“ This ideology in its substance means that capitalism is the only form of production which is capable of extending all over the earth and of reducing the whole human race to conditions which resemble each other everywhere. If modern technique can be transported everywhere, if all the human race appear on a single field of competition and all the world as a single market, what is there astonishing in the ideology which, reflecting intellectually these conditions of fact, reaches the affirmation that the present historical unity has been prepared by everything which precedes it? ”

“ Capital, however produced, tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and, breaking every bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect master of society, as, in fact, it has become in the greater part of the world; hence it resulted, that apart from all forms of modern misery and the new hierarchy in which we live, there was realized the most acute antithesis of all history, that is to say, the existing anarchy of production in the whole of society, and an iron despotism in the mode of production in each workshop and each factory! ”

“ Thence come the incoherence and the inconsistency of the parties, the rapid oscillations from demagogy to dictatorship, the mob, the multitude, the infinite army of the parasites of politics, the makers of fantastic projects. This singular social spectacle of a development prevented, retarded, embarrassed and thus uncertain, is brought out in bold relief by a penetrating spirit which, if it is not always the fruit and the expression of a modern, broad and real culture nevertheless bears within itself as the relic of an excellent civilization the mark of great cerebral refinement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Economics, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and development as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed up with the illusion [Pg 224] of representing the absolute laws of all forms of production, has through the dear school of experience entered since, as everyone knows, upon a period of self-criticism. Just as this self-criticism gave birth, on one side, to critical communism, so on the other side it has given birth, through the labor of the calmest, the wisest and the most prudent of the academic tradition, to the historical school of economic phenomena. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The slothful, whose number is great even among the intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess, once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge, and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life! All the problems of ethics, æsthetics, philology, critical history and philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all difficulties! ”

“ But this unification of the social life, by the working of the capitalist form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and continues to develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans and designs, but, on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles, which in their sum form a colossal complication of antitheses. War without and war within. Struggle incessant among the nations, and struggles incessant between the members of each nation. ”

“ Why not imagine a fief which, remaining a fief all the while, should become a factory producing commodities exclusively? Why could not Michel de Lando have written the Communist Manifesto? Why could we not also believe that the discoveries of modern science could have proceeded from the brains of men of no matter what other time and place, that is to say, before determined conditions had given rise to determined needs, and before repeated and accumulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of these needs? ”

“ Nor again, was there an initiator of a new life, beginning with artificial means to create the first nucleus of an association proposing to make man over, as was the case with Beller, Owen, Cabet, and the enterprise of the Fourierites in Texas, which was the tomb of utopianism, marked by a singular epitaph: the dumbness which succeeded the fiery eloquence of Considerant. Neither is there here a sect which retires modestly and timidly from the world in order to celebrate in a closed circle the perfect idea of communism as in the socialist colonies of America. ”

“ In fact, in the most advanced countries it is subjecting the various older forms of production, either directly or indirectly, to the action and to the law of capital. And thus it simplifies, or it tends to simplify, the different class struggles of former times, which then obscured each other by their multiplicity, into this single struggle between capital which is converting into merchandise all the products of human labor indispensable to life and the mass of proletarians which sells its labor power,—now also become simple merchandise. The secret of history is simplified. ”

“ Why should one not fancy equally that the ancient city, in which arose Greek art and science and Roman law, remaining all the while an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at the same time acquire and develop all the conditions of modern technique? Why not believe that the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the while on its inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the world market without the conditions of unlimited competition, which actually began by its destruction and negation? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable, as that spiritual entity which has been called the moral conscience, one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of explanation. ”

“ To understand history became thenceforth the principal task of the theorists of communism. How could a cherished ideal be still opposed to the hard reality of history? Communism is not the natural and necessary state of human life in all times and in all places and the whole course of historic formations cannot be considered as a series of deviations and wanderings. One does not reach communism nor return to it by Spartan abnegation or Christian resignation. It can be, still more it must be and it will be the consequence of the dissolution of our capitalist society. ”

“ We have, in fine, to do with history, and not with its skeleton. We are dealing with narration and not with abstraction, with the explaining and treating of the whole, and not merely with resolving and analyzing it; we have to do, in a word, now, as always, with an art.
It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for example, of what the classes were at the moment when the French Revolution broke out, and to pass then to the classes that result from the Revolution and survive it. ”

“ In these last fifty years the generic foresight of a new historic era has become for socialists the delicate art of understanding in every case what it is expedient to do, because this new era is in itself in continual formation. Communism has become an art because the proletarians have become, or are on the point of becoming, a political party. The revolutionary spirit is embodied to-day in the proletarian organization. The desired union of communists and proletarians is henceforth an accomplished fact. ”

“ Many people believe that the constellation of Thermidor is destined never to disappear from the heaven of history, or to speak in a more prosaic fashion, that liberalism, that is to say a society where men are equal only in law, marks the extreme limit of human evolution beyond which nothing remains but a return backward. That is the opinion of all those who see in the progressive extension of the bourgeois form over the whole world the reason and the end of all progress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All this partial progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of man by man, has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which economic distinctions have engendered all the social distinctions; from the relative liberty of the few is born the servitude of the greater number, and law has been the protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen and clearly appreciated, appears to us as the moral and intellectual epitome of all human miseries and of all material inequalities. ”

“ What is the Renaissance, if not the joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refined by experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? ”