University of Virginia Library

XII.

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 judgements 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 value 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 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 or 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.[3]

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.”[4]

“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.”[5]

“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.”[6]

“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?