Book Review: An Economist on Marx. (1915)

Book Review from the August 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historic Materialism and the Economics of Marx, by Benedetto Croce. Geo. Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 5s. nett.

One of the advantages of being a University Professor, or a Lecturer at a College, is that one may write arrant nonsense and pass it off for great wisdom on the uncritical reader.

The net result of the various essays forming the above volume is to leave the student with the conviction that the elder Weller’s statement can still be applied with force when he asked whether “it was worth while going through so much to learn so little.” Words, words, words, my masters, but little of real ideas or thoughts represented by these words and still less of any real criticism of Marx’s works.

The essays dealing with “Historical Materialism” are in the main an attempt to criticise Labriola’s writings on this subject. Labriola has replied to some of them in a new edition of his work, Socialism and Philosophy, so we need not cover the same ground here.

In their attempts to answer certain questions, Marx and Engels found that all the old theories and explanations taught at the Universities failed to give any satisfactory reply. Hence they were forced to re-examine the basis for themselves. And note the result. For this re-examination compelled them to abandon all their early training in philosophy, including their Hegelianism, as these furnished no answer.

It was in the facts of history they had to look for, and finally found, the answer to their questions. This was that the conditions of production and distribution of wealth formed the basis of, and gave the explanation to, the general form and structure of society. Now it should be evident that if there is a “structure of society” on a given basis, the factors of this structure will have a modifying effect upon the direct movement of the base. Perhaps an illustration may make this clear. Due to the fact of Gravity water will descend from a hill-top to a valley. The Gravity is the basic factor. The actual path will depend upon the kinds of soil, and obstacles met upon the way down. The stream seldom follows a straight course, but it still remains true that the only explanation of the water’s main movement is the force of Gravity.

In the case of social development the matter is of course not only more complex in itself, but we are far more ignorant of the factors and their properties than in the case of the soils in our illustration. The interest of the ruling class in hiding or falsifying certain of these factors is no mean stumbling-block in our way.

The discovery of Marx and Engels was independently rediscovered by Lewis H. Morgan from the Ethnological side. But in neither case was it pretended that it gave an automatic answer to every petty little incident in history. At best  it only supplied the answer to the question of fundamental changes in society, and as Lafargue pointed out, it became a splendid instrument of research into history, not a ready answer to little puzzles. Marx himself applied the discovery twice with conspicuous success—first in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon III, and secondly in the pamphlet on the Commune of Paris, called The Civil War in France. But Marx was at a serious disadvantage compared with our ”professors.” He had to work for his living—often a poor one—in the midst of his other labours. Hence the incompleteness of many of his writings, particularly on this subject.

Yet how do his critics deal with those writings? At first they ignored them. Then it became the fashion to treat them as nonsense easily disposed of by a sneer. Unfortunately for these beautiful methods the working class is taking up the study of Socialism in steadily increasing numbers, and, despite the admitted difficulties of the form in which Marx wrote, are more and more reading his  books.   So the “latest and lovliest” method is to adopt the attitude of “revising” and “improving” Marx. It is now admitted that he was a giant intellect—hence the greater credit in “putting him right”—and that his works are important contributions to our knowledge—or rather they will be when properly “revised.”

Just here, however, the student finds himself laced with a pretty problem. No two of these “critics” are agreed upon what is wrong in Marx’s writings, if we leave out the question of value for a moment. Who is he to follow ? Many of these “critics” are Professors or Fellows of Colleges. They have written in some cases ponderous tomes, more difficult to understand than Marx and for a sufficiently obvious reason. In the volume under review the author claims that “Historical Materialism” is a “mass of new data, of new experiences, of which the historian becomes conscious.” (p. 12.)

Indeed! what are these “new experiences” and “data” thus supplied? Croce cannot tell us because they don’t exist.  On page 77, however, he tells us “Historical Materialism if it is to express something critically acceptable . . . must be simply a canon of historical interpretation.” This “canon” he describes as an aid in seeking results—an utterly nonsensical definition to English readers, as they understand the word  “canon” to mean a standard  for measuring or comparison.

By far the most audacious claim of this Italian critic is his discovery that Marx was really a metaphysician and idealist! True! this was charged against Marx when his Critique of Political Economy first appeared, so let us look at Croce’s grounds for this claim.

On page 50 he says: “the capitalist society studied by Marx is not this or that society, historically existing, in France or in England, nor the modern society of the most civilised nations, that of Western Europe and America. It is an ideal and formal society, deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred as actual facts in the course of history.” If it were not for the fact that the phrase might seem discourteous we should feel inclined to call this statement an absurd fabrication; instead we merely remark that every line of Marx’s works flatly contradicts Croce’s claim.  Indeed, on page 79 he says “Marx was addicted, in short, to a kind of concrete logic”! ,

His general view may be stated as that Marx only examined one fact in history and this is so overlaid and interconnected with other facts that though it may be important it is not a dominant one.  It may be “rich in suggestion”; it may be the road “along which the solution must be sought of some of the greatest problems of history,” but it is only a metaphysical abstraction. From his high and pure position he can look down and smile at both the Marxians who regard the research into so-called “pure economics” as absurd, and at the various critics who have all failed to see in Marx what was left for Croce to discover.

If it were possible the essays dealing with’ .Marx’s economics are worse than those dealing with historical views. Once more the “abstract”  and “metaphysical” charges are made without the slightest evidence to support them. Croce agrees with the “utility theory” of value formulated in its modern form by Jevons and appropriated by the so-called “Austrian School” without, apparently, being aware of how completely the theory was crushed by Marxian criticism, in the land of its birth. In the only chapter in which Croce attempts to come to close quarters with Marx’s economics—the one on “The fall in the Rate of Profit,” he attempts to build up a case by maintaining that, according to Marx, when a number of labourers are displaced by improved methods of production, they are not discharged but kept on and production increased accordingly. Croce says that usually the production remains the same, the men are discharged and therefore profits rise with the alteration in the composition of capital. As the base of his criticism is false—for of course Marx has worked out the result of such a condition— his house of cards collapses.

According to the publisher’s note, a Mr. A. D. Lindsay has written an “illuminating introduction.” The thing most illuminated by this introduction is Mr. Lindsay’s ignorance of Marx’s writings. For he refers to “the laws of supply and demand which alone affect all things that have economic value” and says that the pure economist “finds little difficulty in refuting Marx’s theory,” in complete ignorance that Marx had shattered the so-called “Law of Supply and Demand” in Value, Price and Profit as well as in Capital. His reference to Socialism as an “automatic working out of economic laws” is too childish for farther consideration to-day.

However, as he admits at the end of his introduction that his knowledge of Marx and of economics is too small to allow him to judge Croce’s appraisement of Marx’s work, we may be thankful for small admissions.

Despite Croce’s attempt to forestall the criticism he feared would come when he states (p. 64) that he does not consider an explanation adequate and appropriate “which resolves itself into accusing a large number of students of allowing themselves blindly and foolishly to be overcome by passions alien to science; or, what is worse, of knowingly falsifying their thought,” it still remains the only explanation of these various falsifications of Marx under the cloak of “criticising” or “revising” his works. Unless, indeed, he would desire us to flatter their honesty at the expense of their intellects.    

Jack Fitzgerald

Letters: Abolishing money (2010)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abolishing money

Dear Editors

Why on earth should there be cuts in any or all of the public services, as intimated by the main three political parties vying for votes in the forthcoming general election? These public services are essential to our health and social wellbeing. At the same time each party advocates and provides support to the very institutions that sap the lifeblood of the nation and spawn malpractices.

The N.H.S, Education, Housing, Old Age Pensions, Transport, Childcare, Single parents, Care of the elderly, are among the most obvious worthy of ongoing and increasing investment and support yet these are being targeted for reductions or, at best, stagnation. This need not be the case. A change is needed, indeed a change is essential and long overdue. And not a weak-kneed Barack Obama style change.

This is an extremely wealthy country in terms of development, infrastructure, skilled technology, inventiveness, art, theatre, sport, social cohesiveness and friendliness etc. but it is gradually losing its way on the altars of greed and possessions and a me-first doctrine. So much of all the wealth derived from the pluses is dissipated and wasted. We have a nation that is engulfed and at the mercy of a monetary system. So many of our recent generations have been persuaded that the pursuit of personal financial advancement is the requisite lifestyle (in the Thatcherite mode of devil take the hindmost) that whatever may be their preferred interests occupationally they gravitate to those which patently offer the greatest scope for achieving fast and vast income providing your scruples are on a back burner and there is no consideration for general wellbeing.

Thus we now have a potentially actively and productively caring and sharing extremely wealthy society based on a powerfully intellectual platform becoming a downgraded self-seeking one that is willing to be antisocial and wasteful and, if need arises adopt criminality, in reaction to an overbearing self important administration which has lost any plot to which it might have once aspired.

The answer, the only feasible answer, is to remove those institutions referred to above by removing the tools of their trade. Abolish money and in doing so recover the personnel space and resources which rightly belong to the people of this country. Consider the beneficial knock on effects of such a move. If you need me to itemise them my phone number is 01793 82XXXX.

E. W. Reynolds, 

Swindon

Reply: 

We agree that money is a barrier to getting things done but we don’t simply want to abolish money. We want socialism – the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources – where money will be unnecessary. And we don’t think that this could be done, as you seem to be suggesting, just in one country –Editors.

No Alternative

Dear Editors

I’d like to contribute to the debate/discussion on globalization.

Marx wrote ‘The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord and the steam mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist,’ and if writing now he might well say that the microchip gives you society with the global capitalist – in accordance with the materialist conception of history as formulated by Antonio Labriola in 1897.

As Marx wrote and as anyone who has made a sustained study of capitalism knows, the centrifugal expansionism of the capital system’s dynamic will drive the system to its ultimate limits.

What the capitalist class and their administrative arm (Maggie Thatcher, Frederick Von Hayek, Francis Fukuyama et al.) want most to instil in the minds of the working class is that capitalist production and distribution of life’s necessities and wants is a natural and, above all, moral system. It is their heart’s desire and ‘wet dream’ that capitalism is viewed as an entelechy, developing itself in a process of self-realization, thereby reducing history to a process without an active, creative, doing subject; an automaton driven by the dead laws of history and nature, i.e., There Is No Alternative.

Globalization, I suggest, is not a tendency nor a phase of capitalism, but the logical progression of the system. Capitalism is almost at its non plus ultra – the only move left it is either to turn and eat out its own guts, devolving into barbarism, or to be replaced with socialism. Our message surely must focus on the planetary destruction and global warming resulting from production for profit that will annihilate the only liveable world we know to exist.

There Is No Alternative – to socialism

J.R. (by email)

This Month's Quotation: Antonia Labriola (1939)

The Front Page quote from the April 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "The laws of economics  . . . . . .  have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be the directing power of social life ”

Labriola.

This Month’s Quotation

The quotation on the front page is from Labriola’s “Essays on the Materialist Conception of History” (p. 167).

Antonio Labriola: A Strict Marxist? (2016)

Antonio Labriola
(1843-1904)

From the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We examine the life and political approach of this Marxist political thinker.

The Italian political thinker, Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) was described by Friedrich Engels as ‘a strict Marxist’. However, he approached Marxism quite late in life and first mentioned Marx in 1883 in a review of Bärenbach’s book on the social sciences (Die Socialwissenschafte).

Labriola started corresponding with Engels in 1890 and in the same year, with Filippo Turati, founder of the ‘Italian Socialist Party’, he wrote an address to the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party Congress in Halle. When the ‘Italian Workers’ Party’ was founded at the Congress of Geneva two years later, Labriola was critical of its platform, and when that organisation became the ‘Italian Socialist Party’ in 1894 under the leadership of Turati, Labriola complained to him in the following terms:

‘Socialists must … be clear… they have to stop being little Jacobins and politicians…You want to make propaganda amongst the bourgeoisies, you want to make socialism nice. God help you in such a philanthropic feat, because in my view the bourgeoisies are only fit to be hanged. I will not be lucky enough to do that myself, but I do not want to do anything to contribute to a delay in that happening.’ 

According to Labriola the Party of the working class should have ‘Masters’ (in the sense of Teachers), and he seems to have had in mind people like Marx, Engels and himself. But he was clear that the Party should not have what he called ‘a Jacobin ruling minority’. Furthermore he saw Turati as reformist, as he explained in 1891:

‘[Turati’s] eclecticism is not a consequence of [his] intelligence, neither of [his] immaturity, but it is a necessarily reflection of the world in which we live, where everything is subjective, arbitrary, incidental, and therefore there is not space for the organised science, for party discipline.’

In 1892, in a letter to Engels, he repeats this concept:

‘Eclecticism will not disappear soon. It is not only the effect of an intellectual confusion, but it is the expression of a situation. When just a few more or less socialist individuals address themselves to ignorant proletarians who are apolitical and largely reactionary, it is almost inevitable that those individuals will be thought of as utopians and demagogues.’

But Labriola also thought that, via a combination of education and the necessity for workers to overthrow capitalism, this eclecticism (taking the form of opportunistic revisionism and reformism) would disappear in the longer term. In this sense Labriola was an optimist and is distinguished from other revolutionaries such as Lenin and Gramsci who held the pessimistic view that working-class self-determination was impossible and only coercion would be able to guide the masses.

Labriola became Engels’s ‘favourite’ source and, in response to a bitter Turati, Engels wrote:

‘As for (....) Labriola, the malicious tongue which you attribute to him may have a certain justification in a country such as Italy, where the socialist party, like all the other parties, has been invaded, like a plague of locusts, by that “classless bourgeois youth”, of which Bakunin was so proud.’

In October 1892 Labriola had informed Engels about a banking scandal in the Banca Romana involving some members of the Italian Socialist Party, who he referred to as ‘locusts’. The following year Labriola was heavily critical of the Party for its unsupportive position concerning the uprising of peasants, artisans, and industrial workers in Sicily, known as the Fasci Siciliani. It described this event as ‘a poor souls’ revolt’, whereas Labriola saw in it the first example of Italian socialism in action.

The main contribution of Labriola to Marxist thought did not come until several years after this when, in 1895, he published his first important work on the philosophy of historical materialism: In Memory of the Communist Manifesto. In this Labriola wrote:

‘We must insist on the expression ‘democratic socialisation of the means of production’ because the expression ‘collective ownership’ mixes up legal expression with economic fact. It conjures up in many people’s minds an increase in monopoly (...) and an ever resurgent State Socialism, whose effect is to augment the economic means of oppression in the hands of the oppressing class (...) The proletarian mass either knows already or will understand that proletarian dictatorship, which will have to prepare the socialisation of the means of production, cannot proceed from an uprising created by a few, but it must be and it will be the result of the proletarians themselves, who will have for a long  time been a political organisation.’

Following this, Labriola published a further analysis of historical materialism from a philosophical standpoint (The Materialist Conception of History, 1895) and in 1898 he replied to the views of the French writer George Sorel in Speaking on Socialism and Philosophy. He also carried on actively criticising Turati’s ‘eclectic’ politics and his PSI, writing for example that ‘in Italy there is no working class organisation and so the class struggle and the political party with a workers’ base are premature’.

In this era of ‘revisionist’ politics, Labriola was active in combating, for example, Enrico Ferri who tried to define Marxism as a derivative form of Darwinian evolutionism, and the German social-democrat Eduard Bernstein who took a similar position to Turati.    

Labriola had already anticipated that Russia’s so-called ‘agrarian communism’ could not be a path to socialist revolution and, in agreement with Engels, that Russia had to first go through a bourgeois phase of development (commodity production) before it could host a real emergence of socialist ideas. His views on Russian under-development, however, led to what many have seen as a kind of moral stain in his thought - his position on colonialism. He saw under-development as being resolved via colonisation by developed nations, so bringing under-developed nations to a material level at which socialist ideas could begin to have some resonance. It should be said that he changed his mind several times on this and seemed, before Engels’s death in 1895, to agree with Engels that governments were too corrupt and bound to financiers and to the stock market to prevent investors taking over colonies and exploiting them rather than the lot of the masses there being improved.

However, in 1897, on the question of colonisation of Libya, Labriola seemed to fall back to his previous position, arguing that socialists should support the Italian government’s attempts to colonise Libya on the grounds that ‘there cannot be progress of the proletariat where the bourgeoisie is incapable of progress’. This was anathema to the Marxists of the time.

After his death Labriola was read by and influenced Italian idealist philosophers such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile as well as by others claiming to be in the Marxist tradition such as Rodolfo Mondolfo, Antonio Gramsci and Lelio Basso and, outside Italy by Trotsky, Lenin and Plekhanov.

English translations of some of his writings can be found here:

www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/index.htm

Cesco

Re: Are you an optimist or a pessimist? (1999)

A bit of a departure for the page. The following is a contribution to the WSM discussion forum on yahoo, and dates from the summer of 1999.
I thought it was worthwhile posting because I've always admired the knowledge and writing style of the author, but also because it addresses questions that I'm sure many regular readers of the page have asked themselves down the years.

It also doesn't let the political tradition that the Socialist Standard is a part of off the hook, by asking the pointed question of what we as socialists can we do in the here and now, and also acknowledging that at times our longstanding commitment to revolutionary socialism can sometimes lay us open to the charge that we are unnecessarily off putting to those workers were are trying to reach out to.

For the record, at the time of writing, Len Wallace was a long standing member of the Socialist Party of Canada, but in recent years has been a supporter of the World in Common group. Then, as now, he was an activist in the IWW.
- Darren

From the World Socialist Movement Forum, Wed Jun 16, 1999 6:04 am
Hello comrades!

Thought I'd put a few words in concerning optimism and pessimism.
I consider myself a "cynical optimist". Cynical about the way the world stands and the so-called "solutions" and reforms proposed to supposedly change it. I am optimistic that, in the end, workers will make the right choice and choose Socialism.

I understand the depression one can feel by not seeing things move fast enough, arguing with other workers, feeling they haven't and indeed sometimes cannot grasp the issues.

The problem with being a Socialist is that we view the world differently. Once one becomes a Socialist it is as if a "click" happens, a light comes on and that viewpoint or understanding colours everything we look at. And, too often, we are alone. Simply, there are too few of us right now and we have to build the movement, make it vibrant so that we can at least have a community of like minded people around us to share views, meet, communicate our ideas. Alone and isolated, it is a struggle.

I spend a lot of my time studying the movement, its early years and historical formation. Every time I do this, I see the need for more organisation, more members so that we can carry on our important work.

It is essential that more people are brought into the movement. In Canada at least there are too few and the space between members so geographically far. I would give my eye teeth to have ten people in my hometown of Windsor, Ontario who are party members so that meetings could be held, publicity worked out, more contacts made. It is in that kind of work that people can feel optimistic.

As far as "world politics" is concerned, I do indeed see signs of hope. Of course workers worldwide demonstrate for reforms, hold many illusions, have seemed to accept the wage system as "natural", but my feeling is even though they have not yet become politically (socialistically) conscious, their very acts of resistance indicates that they are grappling to seek ways out. They may not understand the system, but many do learn to understand that they need not accept the world the way it is. And we have to be there with them - at the demos, at the rallies, on the strike lines, talking with them, handing out leaflets, publications, listening to what they have to say.

I feel that sometimes we almost speak as if from an ivory tower, talking down to the workers. We cannot get our ideas out to the working class unless we are there with them. They won't buy our publications off a news stand or wherever by the mere fact that we call ourselves Socialist.

I am a musician and am often called to perform for workers on strike lines. Almost every time, I come away feeling a sense of hope. One example - a few years back the Public Service Employees went on strike here in Ontario and were out for many weeks.

Here in Windsor, the strikers were predominantly women, never really involved in the union, never really thinking of themselves as "working class", thinking workers and employers were "friends", never ever having been on a picket line or thought much about other workers ever being on strike.

I sang to them on the line and spoke to them. Although far from becoming socialists, I can recall so many telling me - "You know, I never thought it
would come to this . . . but I look at things a bit differently now. I realize I'm a worker like every other. I will never cross a picket line again in my life. I understand the need to support the union and other workers."

You could almost see a lightbulb light up above their heads as they talked this out. Again, they did not become Socialists, but it was a small victory. I may have seen it as only a small step forward in becoming class conscious, but it was a big step for them.

I have also written in this past year for the University of Windsor student newspaper. Twenty years ago, as a student there I wrote a similar column and was consistently seen as someone from another planet because of my explicitly socialist views. Twenty years later, I am amazed at how many people have come up to me and exclaimed that "Ya know, I never looked at the world in that way before! There's some stuff that I really have to think about, but I agree more and more with what you have to say!"

People are searching for answers . . . Our role is to provide them. And I agree that they have to be done in a positive way.

And that positiveness means we cannot put forward the idea that offers no hope for the workers. I myself am turned off by those articles which hold no hope for the working class - We do offer hope - and that is to join in the fight for Socialism.

We simply have to get the word out again and again. Workers have to hear our ideas. Doing it once won't do it, it means consistently being there with them. We understand that our ideas make sense. We have to prove it to them. That means prying through the muck of ideas they've been taught all their lives.

To reiterate one last point, I think we can present things in a positive light. Much too often I feel that we look upon worker's struggles as hopeless to the point that it almost appears as if we are saying - "Sorry, there is no hope for the working class as long as you don't agree with us. And, you're struggle is laughable."

We don't have to agree with the movement for reform, or hold out illusions - our role is to explain in a way that it supportive of them as a class and as individuals, to help them understand. That help cannot be done in a negative way as if we come from an ivory tower of superior knowledge.

Let me end with these two quotations:

"Critical communism does not manufacture revolutions, it does not prepare insurrections, it does not furnish arms for revolts. It mingles with the proletarian movement, but it sees and supports the movement in the full intelligence of the connection which it has, which it can have, and which it must have, with all the relations of social life as a whole. In a word it is not a seminary in which superior officers of the proletarian revolution are trained, but it is neither more nor less than the consciousness of this revolution and especially the consciousness of its difficulties." - Antonio Labriola, "In Memory of the Communist Manifesto", from his Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, Charles H. Kerr, 1908
"Let us develop new principles for the world out of its own principles. Let us not say to it 'Cease your nonsensical struggles, we will give you something real to fight for.' Let us simply show the world what it is really fighting for, and this is something the world must come to know, whether it wishes it or not. The reform of consciousness consists only in the world becoming aware of its own consciousness, awakening it from vague dreams of itself and showing it what its true activity is . . . Then it will be seen that the world has long been dreaming of things that it only needs to become aware of in order to possess them in reality." - Karl Marx to Ruge, 1843

For the cause that never dies,

Len Wallace

Further Reading:

Socialist Party of Canada

Len Wallace's Personal Website