Essays on the Materialistic Conception of HistoryLabriola, Antonio
Philosophy
Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History
Labriola, Antonio
History -- Philosophy; Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei; Materialism; Socialism
Wherever the means of production have developed, to a certain point,
wherever the artificial foundation has acquired a certain consistency,
and wherever the social differentiations and their resulting antitheses
have created the need, the possibility and the conditions of an
organization more or less stable or unstable, there, always and
necessarily, appear premeditated designs, political views, plans of
conduct, systems of law and finally maxims and general and abstract
principles. In the circle of these products, and of these derived and
complex developments of the second degree, spring up also the sciences
and arts, philosophy and learning, and history as a literary fashion of
production. This circle is what the rationalists and the ideologists,
ignorant of its real foundations, have called, and call, in an exclusive
fashion, civilization. And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens,
that some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical,
have found, and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed
circle of the reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that
they have been able and are able consequently to submit all the rest to
the subjective view which they have elaborated under these conditions;
that is, the origin and explanation of all the ideologies. Our doctrine
has definitely outgrown the visual angle of ideology. The premeditated
designs, the political views, sciences, systems of law, etc., instead of
being the means and the instrument of the explanation of history, are
precisely what require to be explained, because they are derived from
determined conditions and situations. But that does not mean that they
are pure appearances, soap bubbles. If they are things which have been
developed and derived, that does not imply that they are not real
things; and that is so true that they have been, for centuries, to the
unscientific consciousness, and to the scientific consciousness still on
the way towards its formation, the only ones which really existed.
But that is not all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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