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