In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all
historical events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any
significance? This question, whether it comes from the camp of the
idealists, or whether it comes to us from the mouth of the most
circumspect critics, certainly, and in all cases, demands our attention,
and requires an adequate answer.
In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from
which is derived the conception of _progress_ as an idea which incloses
and embraces the total of the human _processus_, it is seen that these
presumptions all rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of
attributing to one or more series of events a certain sense and a
certain signification. The conception of progress, for whoever examines
it carefully in its specific nature, always implies judgments of
estimation, and therefore, there is no one who can confuse it with the
crude and bare notion of simple development, which does not contain that
increment of clue which makes us say of a thing that it is progressing.
I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it
is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative
over the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men.
That is as intuitive as is the actual coexistence of peoples, of nations
and of states, which find themselves, at the same time, in a different
stage of development; so undeniable is the actual condition of relative
superiority and inferiority of nation as compared with nation; and again
so certain is the partial and relative retrogression which has been
produced several times in history, as Italy has exemplified for
centuries. Still more, if there is a convincing proof of how progress
must be understood in the sense of immediate law, and, to use a strong
expression, of a physical and inevitable law, it is precisely this
fact,--that social development by the very reasons of the _processus_
which are inherent in it, often leads to retrogression. It is evident,
on the other hand, that the faculty of progressing, like the possibility
of retrogressing, does not constitute, to begin with, an immediate
privilege, or an innate defect of a race, nor is either one the direct
consequence of geographical conditions. And, in fact, the primitive
centers of civilization were multiple, those centers have been removed
in the course of centuries, and finally the means, the discoveries, the
results and the impulses of a definite civilization, already developed,
are, within certain limits, communicable to all men indefinitely. In a
word, progress and retrogression are inherent in the conditions and the
rhythm of social development.
Now then, the faith in the universality of progress, which appeared with
so much violence in the eighteenth century, rests upon this first
positive fact, that men, when they do not find obstacles in external
conditions, or do not find them in those which result from their own
work in their social environment, are all capable of progress.
Moreover, at the bottom of this supposed or imagined unity of history,
in consequence of which the _processus_ of the different societies would
form one single series of progress, there is another fact, which has
offered motive and occasion for so many fantastic ideologies. If all
nations have not progressed equally, still more, if some have stopped
and have followed a backward route, if the _processus_ of social
development has not always, in every place and in all times, the same
rhythm and the same intensity, it is nevertheless certain that, with the
passage of the decisive activity from one people to another people in
the course of history, the useful products, already acquired by those
who were in decadence, have been transmitted to those who were growing
and rising. That is not so true of the products of sentiment and
imagination, which nevertheless are themselves preserved and perpetuated
in literary tradition, as of the results of thought, and especially of
the discovery and of the production of technical means, which, once
found, are communicated and transmitted directly.
Need we remind the reader that writing was never lost, although the
peoples who invented it have disappeared from historic continuity? Need
we recall again that we all have in our pockets, engraved on our
watches, the Babylonian dial, and that we make use of algebra, which was
introduced by those Arabs, whose historical activity has since been
dispersed like the sands of the desert? It is useless to multiply these
examples, because it is sufficient to think of technology and the
history of discoveries in the broad sense of the word, for which the
almost continuous transmission of the instruments of labor and
production is evident.
And after all, the provisional summaries which are called universal
histories, although they always reveal, in their aim and in their
execution, something forced and artificial, would never have been
attempted if human events had not offered to the empiricism of the
narrators a certain thread, even though subtle, of continuity.
Take for example the Italy of the sixteenth century, which is evidently
in decadence; but while it is declining, it transmits to the rest of
Europe its intellectual weapons. These are not all that pass to the
civilization which continues, but even the world market establishes
itself upon the foundation of those geographical discoveries, and those
discoveries in the naval art, which were the work of Italian merchants,
travelers and sailors. It is not only the methods of the art of war and
the refinements of political diplomacy which passed outside of Italy
(though it is only with these that men of letters ordinarily concerned
themselves), but even the art of making money, which had acquired all
the evidence of an elaborate commercial discipline, and one after the
other the rudiments of the science, upon which is founded modern
technique, and to begin with all the methodical irrigation of fields and
the general laws of hydraulics. All that is so precisely true, that an
amateur in conjectural theses might come to the point of asking himself
this question: what would have become of Italy, in this modern bourgeois
epoch, if, executing the project of the Venetian Senate (1504) of making
something which would have resembled in its effects a piercing of the
Isthmus of Suez, the Italian navy had found itself in a direct struggle
with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, at the very moment when the
shifting of historical activity from the Mediterranean to the ocean
prepared the decadence of Italy? But enough of fantasy!
A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial
sense of the transmission and the successive increase of the means of
civilization, is then an incontestable fact. And, although this fact
excludes all idea of preconceived design, of intentional or hidden
finality, or pre-established harmony, and all the other whimsicalities
in regard to which there has been such a deal of speculation, it does
not exclude, for all that, the _idea of progress_, which we can utilize
as an _estimation_ of the course of human development. It is undeniable
that progress does not embrace _materially_ the succession of
generations, and that its conception implies nothing categorical,
considering that societies have also been in retrogression, but that
does not prevent this idea from serving as a guiding thread and a
_measure_ to give a meaning to the historical _processus_. There is no
common ground for critics who are prudent, in the use of specific
concepts as in the method of their application, and those poor extreme
evolutionists, who are scientists without the grammar and the principle
of science, that is to say, without logic.
As I have said several times, ideas do not fall from heaven, and even
those which, at a given moment arise from definite situations with the
impetuosity of faith and with a metaphysical garb, carry always within
themselves the index of their correspondence with the order of the
facts, of which the explanation is sought or attempted. The idea of
progress, as the unifier of history, appears with violence and becomes a
giant in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the heroic period of
the intellectual and political life of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Just as this engendered, in the order of its works, the most intensive
period of history that is known, it also produced its own ideology in
the notion of progress. 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? Translating
this concept of pretended _preparation_ into the altogether natural
concept of _successive condition_, and there is opened before us the
road by which the passage is made from the ideology of progress to
historical materialism; and now we arrive at the affirmation of Marx,
that this form of bourgeois production is the last antagonistic form of
the _processus_ of society.
The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social
_processus_, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World,
Australia, Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us!
And the rebound in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in
Africa through conquest! In the presence of this universality and this
cosmopolitanism, the acquisition of the Celts and the Iberians to Roman
civilization, and of the Germans and that the Slavs to the cycle of
Roman Byzantine Christian civilization shrink into insignificance. This
ever-growing unification is reflected more every day in the political
mechanism of Europe; this mechanism, because founded on the economic
conquest of the other parts of the world, oscillates henceforth with the
flux and reflux which come from the most distant regions. In this most
complicated mingling of action and reactions the war between Japan and
China, made with methods imitated, or directly borrowed, from European
technique, leaves its traces, deep and far-reaching, in the diplomatic
relations of Europe, and still clearer traces in the stock exchange,
which is the faithful interpreter of the consciousness of our time. This
Europe, mistress of all the rest of the world, has recently seen the
relations of the politics of the states of which it is composed
oscillate in consequence of a revolt in the Transvaal, and in
consequence of the ill success of the Italian armies in Abyssinia in
these last days.[30]
The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the
economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the
tendency to a unification of history under a general view; and in this
fashion we find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which
fills so many books of the philosophy of history and of
_Kulturgeschichte_. The unity of social form, that is to say, the unity
of the capitalistic form of production, to which the bourgeoisie has
tended for centuries, is reflected in the conception of the unity of
history in more suggestive forms than the mind could ever have received
from the narrow cosmopolitanism of the Roman empire or the one-sided
cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church.
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. And the
interlacings of the deeds and the action of so many emulators,
competitors and adversaries is so complicated, that the co-ordination of
events very often escapes the attention, and it is a very difficult
thing to discover their intimate connection. The struggle which actually
exists among men, the struggles which now, with various methods, are
unfolding among nations and within nations, have come to make us
understand better in the midst of what difficulties the history of the
past has unfolded. If the bourgeois ideology, reflecting the tendency to
capitalist unification, has proclaimed the progress of the human race,
historical materialism, on the contrary, and without proclamation, has
discovered that these are the antitheses which have thus far been the
cause and the motive of all historical events.
Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were
oscillating;--or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that
it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it
seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself
far from the point of departure:--in an actual zigzag.
Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the
meeting of several societies on the field of competition (from the
ingenuous forms of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of
the elegant sport of the stock exchange) it is natural that every
historical result, when it is measured in the one measure of individual
expectation, appears very often like chance, and afterwards, considered
theoretically, becomes for the mind more inextricable than the track of
meteors.
Speaking of the irony which sits as a sovereign above history is not a
simple phrase; because, in truth, if there is no god of Epicurus
laughing above over human affairs, here below human affairs are of
themselves playing a divine comedy.
Will this irony of human destinies ever cease? Will that form of
association ever be possible which gives room for the possible complete
development of all aptitudes, in such a way that the ulterior
_processus_ of history may become a real and true evolution? And, to
speak like the amateurs of high-sounding phrases, will there ever be a
humanization of all men? When once in the communism of production the
antitheses which are now the cause and the effect of economic
differentiations are eliminated, will not all human energies acquire a
very high degree of efficacy and intensity in co-operative effects, and
at the same time will they not develop with a greater liberty of
self-expression among all individuals?
It is in the affirmative answers to these questions that consists what
_critical communism_ says, that is to say foresees, of the future. But
it does not say it and it does not foretell it as if it were discussing
an abstract possibility, or like him who wishes, by his will, to give
life to a state of things which he desires and which he dreams. But it
says and predicts because what it announces must inevitably happen by
the immanent necessity of history, seen and studied henceforth in the
foundation of its economic substructure.
"It is only in an order of things where there will no longer be classes
and class antagonisms that social revolutions will cease to be political
revolutions.[31]
"To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms
will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the
condition of the free development of all.[32]
"The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of
the social _processus_ of production--a form antagonistic not in the
sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds
from the conditions of the social life of individuals; but the
productive forces which are developing in the lap of bourgeois society
are creating at the same time the material conditions to terminate that
antagonism. With this social organization ends the prehistory of the
human race.[33]
"With the taking possession of the means of production on the part of
society, is excluded the production of commodities, and with it the
dominance of the product over the producer. The anarchy which dominates
in social production will be succeeded by conscious organization. The
struggle for individual existence will cease. Only in this way man will
detach himself, in a certain sense, from the animal world in a definite
fashion, and will pass from a condition of animal existence to
conditions of human existence. The entire sum of the conditions of life
which has thus far dominated men will pass under the rule and the
examination of men themselves, who will thus for the first time become
the real masters of nature, because they will be the masters of their
own association. The laws of their own social activity, which had been
outside of them like foreign laws imposed upon them, will be applied and
mastered by the men themselves, with full knowledge of their cause.
Their very association, which appeared to men as if imposed by nature
and history, will become their own and their free work. 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."
If Marx and Engels had been phrasemakers, if their spirit had not been
made prudent, even scrupulous, by the daily and minute use and
application of scientific methods, if the permanent contact with so many
conspirators and visionaries had not given them a horror of every
Utopia, opposing it indeed up to the point of pedantry, these formulas
might pass for good-natured paradoxes, which criticism need not examine.
But these formulas are, as it were, the close, the effective conclusion
of the doctrine of historic materialism. They are the direct result of
the criticism of economies and of historical dialectics.
In these formulas, which may be developed, as I have had occasion to
show elsewhere, is, summed up every forecast of the future, which is not
and is not intended for a romance or a Utopia. And in these very
formulas there is an adequate and conclusive response to the question
with which this chapter began: Is there in the series of historic events
a meaning and a significance?