Historical Materialism

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. - The term h. m. habitually designates the materialistic conception of history, founded by C. Marx and F. Engels, according to which the historical development of human society, and in particular the creations of the human spirit in the field of the State, of law, of morality, etc., are conditioned by the material circumstances of life. In Soviet terminology the term h. m. embraces both the materialistic conception of history and the entire social and economic doctrine.

It is not easy to define exactly the concept of h. m., because even within Marxism, indeed even on the part of its own founders, differing conceptions are maintained; here there will be considered first of all the most important formulations of Marx and Engels, then the conceptions of German social democracy and, finally, the formulation, today the most important on the political plane, of Leninism-Stalinism.

I. ORIGIN OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Historical materialism is the product of a spiritual process of detachment from Hegel, carried out by Marx in his youth under the influence of the left Hegelians, above all L. Feuerbach, and which unfolded essentially in the years 1838-45.

For Hegel (v.) the whole of reality was, according to its most intimate essence, Idea; the Idea is the substratum that determines the entire process of development: in Nature, as Idea externalized to itself; in the various spheres of Spirit, as Idea which from that externalization returns into itself. Feuerbach (v.) had overturned this order: it is not the Idea that is the fundamental reality, but Nature; idea and spirit are nothing other than self-externalization, the splitting-off of the rational material individual from himself: they are not essence, but a pale reflection of reality proper. Feuerbach applied this conception in a particular way to the field of the philosophy of religion: in the concept of God man externalizes his own essence and sets it before himself as an alien reality; in order to heal the weakening that results from this for man, it is necessary to destroy the illusion of religion and to restore to man his essence, which he himself has externalized.

This fundamental conception of Feuerbach is of decisive importance for the understanding of Marx's (v.) historical materialism. Marx too overturns the relation established by Hegel and sees primary reality in Nature and in man, its part; what is spiritual is only externalization. He, however, transfers this anthropological principle of Feuerbach from the field of the philosophy of religion to that of social doctrine. As, according to Feuerbach, man externalizes his own essence in the concept of God, so, according to Marx, society externalizes its own essence, collective life, in the State: from this results its present anomalous, pathological condition, which manifests itself in the constitution of private property with the egoism connected with it (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). With this externalization in the social and economic field, Marx intends to provide the explanation for the other one established by Feuerbach regarding the field of religion, that is, of consciousness. According to Marx society manifests, in religion, an inverted consciousness of the world (in which illusion becomes reality and reality illusion) precisely because it itself, under a regime of private property, is an analogous inverted reality. And here there resounds for the first time with sufficient clarity the fundamental motif of the materialistic conception of history, according to which the processes that unfold in the field of consciousness are nothing other than reflections of processes unfolding in the economic and social field (v. the article: Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right).

Moreover Marx examines more acutely the course of externalization as regards the economic and social basis. As primary reality is not the Idea, but Nature (and man as its concrete component), so too primary activity is not thought, but "praxis", that is, the concrete action of man upon nature for the purpose of creating means of material existence. This does not mean only transformation of nature: while man adapts nature to his own needs, he himself is changed. In praxis social man, to a certain extent, creates himself. As "knowing" in Hegel, so "praxis" has, in Marx, a dialectical character. In the production of material goods, in praxis, man externalizes his forces, that is, his I, in the goods produced. This externalization should be followed, as a further moment, by the reintegration of the essence of man externalized in the product: a reintegration that should consist in the overcoming of the "foreignness" of the product with regard to the producer. But this is not the case under a regime of private property, inasmuch as, in consequence of the private ownership of the means of production, the product becomes the property not of the worker himself who produces it, but of the capitalist. The failed reintegration of the essence of (social) man externalized in praxis is the deepest root of the pathological state of present-day society. Since in praxis what is ultimately at stake is social man, to the dialectic of praxis there corresponds the dialectic of the historical development of humanity. The impossibility of reintegrating the essence of man externalized in the product of labor, as occurs under a regime of private property, a regime of "externalized labor", leads to that pathological state of present-day society, to that weakening of man which has reached its extreme limits in the formation and the fate of the proletariat and which becomes the negation of true humanity. For this very reason a dialectical overturning in the process of development of social man becomes a historical necessity. In the social revolution the proletariat will destroy the social order built upon private property and will make possible the reintegration of the human essence (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).

This economic emancipation is necessarily followed by social and political emancipation. The healing of society will realize the true social man for whom the private sphere of interests of the individual coincides with the public sphere of interests of society: in consequence of this the State becomes superfluous and is condemned to disappear. As the necessary crowning of social and political emancipation, religious emancipation is immediately realized, of itself. Religion too will come to disappear once its roots have been cut.

II. MARX AND ENGELS

The first clear formulation of the materialist conception of history is already found in the Communist Manifesto. However, the fullest and clearest exposition of it was given by Marx in the introduction to his work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), which Kautsky called "classical": "In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations that are independent of their will, relations of production that correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions, in general, the social, political and spiritual process of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain point in their development, the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, that is, with the relations of property (which is the legal equivalent of that expression) within which these forces had hitherto moved. These relations, from forms of development of the productive forces, are converted into their chains. And then an epoch of social revolution sets in. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire gigantic superstructure is more or less rapidly overturned. When studying such upheavals, it is indispensable always to distinguish between the material upheaval of the economic conditions of production, ... and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms, that is, the ideological forms that allow men to conceive this conflict and to fight it out..." (from G. Stalin, Quest. del leninismo, Moscow 1946, p. 607). "In broad outline, the forms of production may be designated as progressive epochs of the economic formation of society: Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois. The bourgeois relations of production constitute the last antagonistic form of the social process of production, not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but in the sense of an antagonism that arises from the social conditions of life of individuals; but the productive forces that develop within bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to a close" (K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Stuttgart 1897, preface, p. x ff.).

This "classical" formulation manifests the fundamental idea clearly enough, but it is not distinguished by excessive conceptual precision. Substantial questions, beginning with the economic foundation itself, never found their definitive clarification in Marx and Engels; already in the passage cited Marx speaks indiscriminately of "relations," "mode," "conditions" of production; elsewhere he speaks of "material conditions of existence," of "relations of production and of property," even of "relations of production and traffic" ("modes of traffic," "conditions of traffic," "means of traffic"). Least clear of all, however, is how the mode of production "conditions" the social, political and spiritual process of life; is this a causal relation or a kind of parallelism? Marx's position on the question of "ideologies" is also oscillating and uncertain. At times, especially in the early formulations, he almost denies them any positive significance (only the conditions of production are "real"); then he considers them a mere reflection; later, however, he attributes greater importance to them: in the first volume of Capital he assigns a much more essential function to finalistic spiritual activity; in the third volume he even concedes that political power, determined by the economic form, in turn "reacts upon it in a determining manner." Equal uncertainty in Engels. In Anti-Dühring he posits as the basis production and, immediately afterward, the exchange of its products, the "mode of production and exchange"; in the work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, even "the production and reproduction of immediate life... On the one hand, the creation of the means of subsistence, of food, of clothing, of housing and of the tools necessary for this; on the other, the creation of men themselves, the propagation of the species."

Of particular importance, however, is the retraction that Engels carries out, around 1890, of the materialist conception of history in relation to objections raised from various quarters, by which the ideologies assume a far more essential importance. In a letter of 21 Sept. 1890 Engels admits that the production and reproduction of real life is the decisive factor in history only in the last instance, but is not the only one. The economic situation would indeed be the basis, but the various moments of the superstructure (political forms of the class struggle, constitutions, legal forms, even the reflections of these struggles in the brains of those who participate in them: political, legal, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their dogmatic developments) also exercise their influence on the course of historical struggles and determine in many cases, in a preponderant manner, their form. "It is a matter of an interaction of all these moments in which, in conclusion, through the infinite multitude of chance events... the economic movement asserts itself as necessity."

The materialist conception of history, as shaped by its founders, can therefore be summarized in the following propositions: the fundamental presupposition is philosophical materialism, the negation of the dualism (v.) of Spirit and Matter; true reality is Matter. On the social plane, the genuine reality that conditions the entire social development is to be placed in the material conditions of production: these are the only true reality or, at least, according to later formulations, what determines in the last instance historical development. From the varying rhythm of evolution of the economic base, on the one hand, and of the political and ideological superstructure, on the other, there derives, at determinate moments, a conflict between the evolutionary stage of the productive forces and the conditions of production (or the relations of property), which conditions the arising of the stage of social revolution. From this it follows that the history of the evolution of human society, divided into social classes because of private property, is a dialectical process of class struggles that, in the end, by means of the class struggle of the proletariat, leads to the abolition of private property and, with this, to the overcoming of class society itself.

III. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

The imprecisions noted in the formulations of the materialist conception of history by its founders made inevitable, immediately after their death, strong divergences of opinion among those who succeeded them in the leadership of German Social Democracy: divergences that often led to bitter polemics. Thus, within German Social Democracy, a revisionist current was formed, aimed first of all at overcoming the weak points of the philosophical formulation of Marx and Engels. Some wanted to free historical materialism from the philosophical materialism that lay at its base, and advocated a return to Kant (Bernstein, Vorländer, Max Adler...); others emphasized chiefly that the materialist conception of history did not intend to present itself as a theory of reality nor to offer the explanation of individual historical facts, but had to be regarded as a formal method of scientific elaboration and explanation of history (Cunow and others; also R. Stammler, who nevertheless raises important objections against this way of understanding it).

E. Bernstein rejected not only the philosophical materialism that lay at the base of historical materialism, but also the materialist conception of history in its intransigent form. "Any historical materialism cannot resolve the fact that those who make history are men, that men have a head and that the disposition of the head is not at all so mechanical as to be able to be dominated solely by the economic situation." For him economic conditions constitute neither the only nor the ultimate determining moment for the course of historical evolution; individuals and peoples can escape the "elementary" power of economic forces. Among the non-economic factors he recognizes the history of a country's political evolution, nature, the history of its parties and even of its religious communities, and especially the influence of ethics: "Moral concepts are more enduring than (economic) evolution and, up to a certain point, also independent of it." Even Kautsky, the most zealous defender of the materialist conception of history, understands the latter in a very broad sense, in which the spiritual factor enters amply into the concept of "economic conditions." According to him historical materialism is far from denying the driving force of the human spirit in society; the spirit does indeed move society, but not as master of economic conditions, rather as their servant. Ultimately economic evolution is, for Kautsky, nothing other than technical evolution, that is, the succession of inventions and discoveries; where by "technique" one must understand not only the creation of instruments and machines, but also chemical methods and even mathematics: the present state of mathematics belongs to the economic conditions of contemporary society just as much as the present stage of mechanical technique or of world commerce. In conclusion, Kautsky goes so far as to recognize, in contrast with the original doctrines of Marx, even morality and nationality.

IV. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN LENINISM-STALINISM

Already in the last years of Marx's and Engels's lives a Russian Marxism arose, at first abroad, in emigration, then, from 1890, also in Russia, where it was spread above all by two works: P. Struve's Critical Observations on the Economic Evolution of Russia (1894) and G. Plekhanov's On the Problem of the Evolution of the Monistic Historical Theory (v.; 1895). The first Russian Marxists, in polemic against the "subjective method" in the field of history and sociology defended by the Russian Narodniki (v.), understood the materialist conception of history in the sense of an extreme, almost fatalistic, economic determinism: economic conditions constitute the ultimate and sole foundation of all social and political evolution; the dependence of the superstructure (political institutions, law, philosophy) on the economic base must therefore be understood in a strictly causal sense. The character of necessity of historical evolution was then understood in so absolute a sense that the struggle against capitalism was considered downright senseless, inasmuch as capitalism, even without struggle, plunges toward destruction by force of its immanent contradiction. These considerations led some to the paradoxical formula: "the worse, the better": the more social conflicts sharpen, the greater the misery of the masses becomes, the better, the sooner evolution moves toward socialism.

Toward the end of the century, however, the influence of revisionism also began to operate in Russia. Like Bernstein in Germany, N. Berdyaev, P. Struve, and S. Bulgakov likewise wished to detach Marxism from philosophical materialism and return to Kant, or respectively to neo-Kantianism. Historical materialism was retained as a mere methodological principle, but no longer as an explanation of reality; the causal nexus between base and superstructure (law, philosophy) was denied. Economic conditions are certainly a factor of great importance in social evolution, but always and only one group of social facts among others. Against this critical tendency in Russian Marxism, the "unshakeable principles" of historical materialism were defended, taking the side of "orthodox" Marxism, above all by Plekhanov, in a series of articles collected in the volume Critique of Our Critics (1906), and by L. Akselrod. Plekhanov dealt with historical materialism in a separate writing, On the Materialist Conception of History (1897). These circumstances decisively influenced the idea that Lenin formed of the materialist conception of history. He adheres unconditionally to orthodox Marxism against the revisionists, including the philosophical presupposition of dialectical materialism (v.), especially in the form that had come to him from Engels, which he also defended with a special writing: Materialism and Empirio-criticism, above all against the infiltration of empirio-criticism into the ranks of the Russian Marxists. Since then one of the fundamental dogmas of Bolshevik theory is that dialectical materialism and historical materialism form an inseparable unity, a "monolith."

Of no lesser importance for the formation of the Leninist concept of historical materialism was the struggle he conducted against "economism," a continuation of that extremely fatalistic formulation of historical materialism which moved within the ambit of an absolute economic determinism. Economism wished to renounce the political struggle against absolutism, abandoning it to the liberal bourgeoisie, and to let the "elemental" power of economic conditions provide for the building of socialism (theory of stikhiinost'; cf. BOLSHEVISM; LENIN). Lenin, in a passionate struggle against this passive attitude, elaborated his theory of "consciousness" (soznatel'nost'), in which conscious activity, the struggle directed toward the goal of realizing socialism, assumes essential importance (v. LENIN) for historical and social evolution. Linking himself to the late rectifications of historical materialism contained in Engels's letters of the period after 1890, he assigns dominant importance to the subjective factor of the revolutionary initiative of the masses, to the socialist consciousness of the proletariat, to Marxist theory and to political institutions, above all to the party as the longa manus of the direction of the workers' movement. Characteristic of the Leninist conception of historical materialism is a passage from the article Against the Boycott (1907): "Marxism is distinguished from all other socialist theories by the admirable unification of a wholly scientific sobriety in the analysis of objective facts and of the objective course of evolution with the most decided recognition of the importance... of the revolutionary initiative of the masses and also, naturally, of individual persons, groups, organizations, parties that know how to trace and realize the connection with this or that class. From all of Marx's historical views in their totality there results a high appreciation of the revolutionary periods of human evolution: precisely in these periods the numerous contradictions that slowly accumulate in periods of so-called peaceful evolution find their solution. Precisely in these periods the immediate function of the various classes in determining the forms of social life is demonstrated in all its force, and the foundations are laid of the political 'superstructure,' which then maintains itself for a long time on the basis of the renewed relations of production" (Works, 4th ed., vol. XIII, p. 21 ff.). With regard to particular problems, Lenin's importance in the elaboration of historical materialism is connected by the Soviets with the formulation of the law of the uneven evolution of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism, a law according to which this uneven evolution of capitalism in the various countries makes possible its breakthrough at one point and justifies the possibility of the victory of socialism in a single country and the impossibility of its simultaneous victory in all countries. Moreover, Lenin's importance for historical materialism lies in the discovery of the system of soviets as the form most suited to the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat (v. BOLSHEVISM).

Stalin further develops historical materialism in the direction indicated by Lenin, and precisely by shifting its center of gravity so far onto the "reactive influence" of the superstructure on the base as to arrive finally at an almost total overturning of Marx's original conception. First of all it must be noted that Stalinist historical materialism, today the sole and undisputed dominator, not only in the Soviet Union and the satellite states, but also among its adherents of world communism, is not merely methodology, but a theory of reality and, as such, can in no way be detached from its philosophical presupposition: dialectical materialism. "Historical materialism is the extension of dialectical materialism into the field of social life" (F. V. Konstantinov, Historical Materialism); historical materialism is certainly a methodology of the social sciences, but it is so precisely because in the first place it represents a scientific theory of social evolution; the contrary opinion would mean the separation between theory and practice that is typical of the "Second International" (cf. Great Soviet Encyclopedia, XXIX, col. 709 ff.). There are above all three points on which Stalin further develops historical materialism: namely those concerning the essence of the base and of the superstructure and their reciprocal relationship; the importance to be attributed to the national element; finally the motive forces of social evolution in socialist society, in which class struggle can no longer exist. In the writing On Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) he indicates "the mode by which the means of subsistence necessary for the life of men are obtained, the mode of production of material goods" as the "principal force" in the system of the conditions of the material life of society and that which represents the determining cause of social evolution. The aforementioned "mode of production", which Stalin here also gives as a synonym of "production", comprises "both the productive forces of society and the relations of production among men"; the "productive forces", in turn, comprise: "the instruments of production with the aid of which material goods are produced, the men who set these instruments of production in motion and produce material goods, thanks to a certain experience of production and habits of labour: these are the elements which, taken all together, constitute the productive forces of society" (Quest. del leninismo, pp. 595-96). In this way Stalin here already introduces spiritual activity into the basic material definition of historical evolution. In his more recent writing, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics (1950), Stalin sharply distinguishes between production and "base". The latter is defined as: "the economic structure of society at a determinate phase of its evolution" (op. cit., p. 3); it therefore now comprises solely the conditions of production, no longer the productive forces and production. By "superstructure" Stalin means, in this writing, "the political, juridical, religious, artistic and philosophical conceptions of society and the corresponding political, juridical, etc. institutions" (ibid.). The superstructure is therefore not connected with production directly, but through the base. The changes that occur in production determine first of all changes in the base, which then, in their turn, bring in their wake changes in the superstructure. In this way Stalin has made room for social phenomena (such as, for example, language) which belong neither to the base nor to the superstructure and which, therefore, do not have a class character, but must serve the whole of society, represent its unifying bond, are immediately connected with production and, in their evolution, do not follow the dialectical-leaping development of base and superstructure, but the continuous one of production. As regards, further, the problem of the relationship between base and structure, Stalin, adhering to the Leninist doctrine of "soznatel'nost'", places emphasis with particular intensity on the "importance of the organizing, mobilizing and transforming function of new ideas, new theories, new conceptions, new political institutions", and develops a whole theory of the reactive influence of the superstructure on the base: "Thus it happens that social ideas and theories, political institutions, aroused by the urgent tasks posed by the development of the material life of society, by the development of social being, act, in their turn, upon social being, upon the material life of society" (Sul m. dialettico e s., in Questioni del leninismo, p. 592). The denial of the active part of the superstructure on the part of the "professorial socialists" (Bernstein, the revisionists and Russian economists, Mensheviks, etc.) destroyed the revolutionary spirit of Marxism and made social evolution depend on the force of a fatalistic, automatic, elemental process. In his linguistic letters Stalin develops this proposition so thoroughly as to speak of a "revolution from above", by which term he means the collectivization of the Russian countryside in 1930, whose initiative originated from above, from the State: it is therefore the political superstructure that creates its own economic base.

Another point of importance in the Stalinist conception of historical materialism is the significance that Stalin recognizes in the national element. It is indicative that already Lenin in his last months of life accused the Georgian of pan-Russian chauvinism. The Stalinist formula regarding national cultures is famous: national in form, socialist in content, the highest degree of development of national cultures in the present while keeping one's eye fixed on their fusion in the future (v. BOLSCEVISMO). Correspondingly, a strong patriotic accent was also introduced into Soviet internal policy, in particular from 1934, which, the stronger it becomes the longer it persists, reveals not only a character of Soviet patriotism, but an ever more specific character of Russian national patriotism: this manifested itself with particular evidence after the Second World War with the well-known tendency to claim Russian primacy and priority in all fields of human activity, with the explicit campaign conducted against "rootless cosmopolitanism", etc.

The most important element in the Stalinist formulation of historical materialism is the doctrine of the driving forces of social evolution in the classless society of socialism: and this is also the point at which Stalin's departure from Marxism manifests itself most openly. Marx's doctrine, according to which the class struggle represents the mainspring of the dialectical evolutionary process of a society divided into antagonistic classes, posed the problem of what the mainspring of social evolution could be after the abolition of classes; unless one held that, with socialism, each and every social evolution would come to an end. Stalin enumerates four impelling forces: the moral-political unity of the Soviet people, Soviet patriotism, the friendship of the nationalities that compose the Soviet Union and finally criticism and self-criticism: therefore absolutely moral and spiritual factors. Consequently, the closer one comes to communism, the greater becomes the importance of the spiritual factor: under capitalism economic necessity operates; in the period of the struggle Lenin recognizes in "soznatel'nost'" a dominant importance: this idea is expressed by Stalin with the formula of the "reactive influence", of the "organizing, mobilizing and transforming function" of ideas and political institutions, arriving as far as the "revolution from above" with which the new proletarian superstructure itself posits, "reacting", the economic base that it still lacks. Once the socialist society is realized, only purely spiritual forces remain to serve as the impulse of social evolution.

V. EVALUATION

The positive significance of historical materialism lies in the fact that, starting from the conviction of a regularity that dominates and pervades history, it represents the first attempt to elaborate a methodology of the social sciences. Even though it exaggerates the concept of historical necessity, it receives consideration, as a method or heuristic principle, from non-Marxist and non-materialist scientists such as, for example, W. Schmidt and W. Koppers. Historical materialism has helped to bring about an appreciation of the importance of the economic factor alongside the other factors of historical becoming.

The critique of historical materialism must proceed differently according to whether historical materialism itself is considered as a method or as a theory of reality. In the first case, R. Stammler considers ineffective the arguing from individual historical facts and demands a critical-gnoseological examination of historical materialism considered as a method. From this point of view he reaches the conclusion that historical materialism presents substantial errors even as a pure method: it is incomplete because it does not clearly determine and elaborate the fundamental concepts that it employs (for example, the concept of economic phenomena, that of social evolution); moreover it is not carried through to the end, inasmuch as it is satisfied with the assertion of the necessity of a social movement without examining its intrinsic justification, which constitutes an exchange between the genetic and the systematic point of view: astronomy arose in Egypt, according to Marx, because of the necessity of computing the periods of the Nile; but from this fact there does not follow the correctness of the doctrines of Egyptian astronomy as regards their content.

Above all, however, historical materialism must be considered in its claim to be not only a methodology, but a theory capable of explaining historical reality. On this point it is necessary to note that: a) at its base lies a false philosophical presupposition; b) it implicitly presupposes the primacy of spirit; c) it is an a priori speculation that does violence to historical facts.

The philosophical foundation of historical materialism, contrary to what the revisionists coming from the ranks of German social democracy affirm, is philosophical materialism. The fundamental intent of historical materialism is, in substance, to drive the spirit from its last refuge: the field of sociality. The founders of historical materialism are moreover declared materialists. For Engels this is beyond discussion, inasmuch as he is the creator of the system of dialectical materialism (v.). But Marx too occasionally manifests (in the preface to the 2nd ed. of Capital) his profession of materialist faith: "For me... the ideal is nothing other than the material transposed and translated in the heads of men." According to historical materialism, the products of man's spiritual activity, "ideologies," are nothing other than "reflections," "images" and the like, of material economic relations; men "derive" their political, philosophical and religious conceptions from the relations of production. If all this is to be something more than an empty metaphor, only one possibility remains, namely the admission in the "heads" of men of a principle substantially different from the material one. The difference between economic processes and ideas such as: truth, error, first cause, action, relation, good, bad, just, unjust, etc., is so radical that one cannot understand how these could be "mirror images" of those, or how they could be "derived" from those, if in the "heads" of men there did not operate an immaterial principle, such as to be able to effect so radical a transformation.

Historical materialism presupposes, moreover, implicitly the primacy of the spiritual. It considers, that is, as fundamental reality the social process of production, which means an externally coordinated collaboration of men: but something similar occurs always, in history, only on the basis of juridical norms. The same primacy is presupposed also by the affirmation that every historical development has its root in changes of the conditions of production. The problem then arises as to what these changes are in turn founded upon. The evolution of the conditions of production certainly does not represent a process developing according to a blind necessity of nature, but presupposes, as Marx himself and, even more, the German Marxists pointed out, the spiritual, creative activity of man. And this is recognizable with particular clarity at the beginning of the economic process as Marx conceives it. Man would have become man from the ape-like state inasmuch as he would have begun to use and even to produce tools, in the course of the activity directed at procuring for himself the possibility of living. But precisely in the use and production of tools there is revealed man's thinking activity, finalistic, that is, spiritual. It is demonstrated therefore also that a materialistic conception, insofar as it is materialistic, of history, is not possible.

Finally, the accusation must be directed at historical materialism of constituting an unjustified generalization of individual historical facts and of leading, therefore, to doing violence to historical phenomena. Historical materialism has, indeed, rightly ascertained the continuous evolutionary change of social, political and even spiritual life; it has also rightly recognized that changes in the mode of production often also determine, especially in modern history, changes in social and juridical life. It is, however, an unjustified generalization, contradicted by undeniable historical facts, to assume the economic moment as the determining, or at least decisive, moment, in the last instance, of historical and social development. Already as regards the primary social structure, the family, it must be affirmed that it is not the economy that founds the family, but on the contrary it is the family that founds the economy. The instinct of self-preservation as well as the sexual instinct, the desire to prolong one's existence in one's children, imperiously drove man to economic activities aimed at procuring (through hunting, fishing and agriculture) what was necessary for life and for the maintenance of the family. Equally ill-suited is the schema of historical materialism to the rise of feudalism. There is in this historical fact no new means of production, no oppressed class struggling for its own liberation, but rather free peasants led, by the burdensome conditions due to political insecurity and the continuous struggles of the great, to give themselves voluntarily into feudal vassalage. Feudalism therefore arose predominantly for political causes, associated with ideas belonging to Germanic law. Mention must then at least be made of the importance, often very great, that other factors had, such as, for example, Christian ideas (abolition of slavery, Crusades), national character, often also accidental historical facts, the free decision and free activity of individuals, on the course of history.

Even greater is the violence done to historical facts when it is a question of the "ideological" superstructure; when science, philosophy, morality, and religion must be shown to derive from the contemporary economic order. It can certainly be granted that subjective interest, both personal and collective, may often have had a certain influence on the subjective knowledge of truth; not infrequently there arise systems devised to serve particular economic or political interests. But this does not remove the fact that there exist objective, immutable truths endowed with the character of absoluteness. That the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles does not depend on any economic system, nor can it be changed by one. With regard to morality, it may be granted that the ethical practice of peoples often suffers greatly from economic conditions (one need only think of the moral decay brought about by wars); it may also be admitted that, often, even the moral conscience of entire populations and epochs can be shaken on particular moral questions, and that interest, in this case too, influences moral judgment. But none of this removes the fact that there exist objective, immutable moral norms, valid in every age and for any economic and social condition. The communist philosopher himself presupposes such moral norms, valid in equal measure for proletarians and for capitalists, when he feels himself morally wounded by the "unjust" exploitation of workers by capitalists.

Entirely fantastic, moreover, are the constructions with which, on the basis of historical materialism, an attempt is made to explain the rise of religions. When Marxism traces the rise of Christianity to the need felt by the Roman Empire to have a world religion, it forgets the simple fact that Christianity came into such violent conflict with the dominant ideas of that time that it had to sustain a bloody struggle lasting centuries before it could finally establish itself.

Gustavo A. Wetter

VI. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN ITALY

In Italy Marxism had encountered, in its first steps, Mazzini's ethical preaching, conscious of the importance of the social problem, but profoundly anti-materialist and ardently patriotic. The subsequent anti-Mazzinian polemic, developed by Bakunin in the name of anarchist communism and internationalism, is at the same time an anti-Marxist polemic, dominated by libertarian individualism (v.), addressed to backward masses and to "artisans" rather than to modern "proletarians". Garibaldi held an oscillating position, dominated predominantly by impulses of sentiment, both in his adherence to internationalist socialism (proclaimed the "sun of the future") and in his criticisms and reservations with regard to this current of thought.

Between 1891 and the end of the 19th century (roughly) Marxist socialism spread through Italy (with the daily Avanti! and with various polemical-cultural journals, of which the most important may be considered Critica sociale, directed by Turati [v.] and by Kuliscioff).

Antonio Labriola ([v.], 1843-1904) was without doubt, among the first Italian Marxists, the exponent of greatest intellect and greatest philosophical preparation; his activity as a theorist in fact left its mark even outside Italy: it suffices to recall Leon Trotsky, who in his youthful years came under his influence. Labriola brought out, through his writings and his polemics against Loria, Ferri, etc., the differences existing between historical materialism and the eclectic currents then in fashion (which were often a mixture of evolutionism, of compromise between socialism and "bourgeois" economics, of positivism and of "vulgar" materialism). Marx's hints (taken from Vico) about History as "the work of men" appear underlined and developed by Labriola. Great was his constant irritation with those "Marxists" who, in the name of schematic little formulas, were not in the least capable of understanding the originality of the historical developments of each individual nation. Having passed from Hegel to Marx, Antonio Labriola was constantly hostile to political-economic dogmatisms and to closed systems: if economics was for him like the "guiding thread" of historical events, this nevertheless appeared to him as "history of human labor". Labriola's work had developed, in the last years of the past century, with the collaboration of B. Croce, who increasingly revealed himself as at once a scholar and a critic of Marxism (to which he devoted works that had wide resonance even outside Italy). Among the Italian scholars and critics of Marxism one must finally recall, in this same span of time, G. Gentile (v.) for his youthful work La filosofia di Marx (Pisa 1899), remembered by Lenin himself as a work worthy of note.

On the properly political plane, Labriola did not have much prominence: he was nevertheless an advocate, at the end of the past century, of the colonization and expansion of Italian labor in Abyssinia, and he championed the occupation of Tripolitania about ten years before the event actually took place. Between 1896 and 1900 he had given a notable contribution to Italian theoretical Marxism which subsequently declined in tone. Against passive fatalism and the crudest forms of determinism (v.), against rhetorical and empty "progressive" schemas, Labriola liked to repeat that "the future must be produced by men", so that it is not given to foresee the future nor to consider historical materialism as a magic key that opens all doors.

Not without influence on individual Italian Marxists (and on various scholars of Marxism), the thought of the Frenchman Georges Sorel (1847-1922) stood out; he had accepted Marx's classism, translating it however into predominantly ethical terms (the ancient and by then extinguished bourgeois-Jacobin "virtue" was discerned by him, under new aspects, in the proletariat, which, having freed itself from "charlatans" and from "embourgeoised reformists", would have had to lead it back to a grandiose heroic tension, practicing intransigence and violence and marching toward insurrection). For various reasons and under various aspects, Sorel interested in Italy Marxists and syndicalists, the philosopher Croce and the revolutionary socialist Mussolini.

Rodolfo Mondolfo, a scholar of problems of modern philosophy and of various socialist thinkers of the 19th century, took up certain philosophical and cultural problems already posed or hinted at by A. Labriola. Against old and new "fatalists", against evolutionists and positivists who sometimes qualified themselves as Marxists, he insistently emphasized how man himself develops and creates the conditions of his life (but these react upon the one who has produced them, conditioning his work, albeit in an always unforeseeable manner). His "critical-practical" conception of history appears animated throughout by a vigorous demand for the freedom of the human person and denotes in Mondolfo a broad culture.

Finally, a mention is indispensable of the periodical (later become a daily) Ordine nuovo, which, after the First World War, believed it could discern in the "factory councils" the "Italian national form" of a proletarian and socialist revolution. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was the most prominent figure in this movement; influenced by the incipient Russian revolution and, on the cultural plane, by the thought of Piero Gobetti (an interesting, though sometimes paradoxical, intermediary between certain aspects of Italian idealist culture and the Marxist field). Ordine nuovo fought the more passively deterministic and politically reformist tendencies within Italian Marxism, ideologically anticipating the constitution of the Communist Party.

While democratic socialism, in Italy as in other countries, has been more or less detaching itself from Marxism and from historical materialism interpreted as dogmas (and thus opening the doors to revisions, to discussions of new problems, to the theoretical and practical questions connected with the defense of freedom), in the communist camp historical materialism has been able only to bring back from Eastern Europe, in less profound and more heavily dogmatic forms (oscillating, moreover, according to the practical necessities of the day), ideas and discussions that had had an interesting flowering, from whatever side one judges it, in Italy, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wolf Giusti