III

Rome, May 10, 1897.

To speak once more of the two founders of scientific socialism, I must confess that I use this term not without apprehension, lest the false use made of it in certain quarters might have rendered it almost ridiculous, particularly when it is supposed to stand for a sort of universal science. If these two men had only been, if not saints of the legendary kind, at least makers of schemes and systems, whose classic form and sharp outlines would have lent themselves easily to admiration! But no, sir! They were critical and aggressive thinkers, not only in their writings, but also in their method of doing things. And they never exhibited either their own personalities or their own ideas as examples and models. They proclaimed indeed the revolutionary nature of the things in the social processes of history, but not in the spirit of men who measure great historical events by the yardstick of their fantastic and impulsive personality. Hence the scorn of the many! Had they been at least like those loving professors, who descend occasionally from their pedestals in order to honor poor and sinful humanity with their advice and strut around among them in the garb of a protector and guardian of the social question! But they did just the reverse. They identified themselves with the cause of the proletariat, and they became inseparable from the conscience and science of the proletarian revolution. While they were in every respect thorough revolutionaries (although not impassioned or emotional), they never suggested any conspiratory plans, or political schemes, but explained the theory of their new politics and aided in its practical application, in the way which the modern working class movement indicates and requires as an actual necessity of history. In other words, incredible as it may seem, they were something more than simple socialists. And as a matter of fact, many who were not more than just simple socialists, or even still simpler makers of revolutions, often looked upon them, if not with suspicion, and least with contempt and aversion.

I should never get done if I tried to enumerate all the reasons which for many long years retarded an objective discussion of Marxism. You are well aware that certain writers of the left wing of the revolutionary parties in France treat historical materialism, not in the way that is customary in dealing with gifts of the scientific spirit, which are certainly subject to criticism like all of science, but as a personal thesis of these two authors, who, however notable and great they may be, remain for those people always but two among the other leaders of socialism, that is to say, two among so many other X's in the universe! To be plain, I will say that only such good or bad arguments have been advanced against this theory as are always obstacles and stumbling blocks in the way of new ideas, especially among professional wise men. Frequently objections arose also from a very special motive. The theories of Marx and Engels, namely, were regarded as opinions of comrades and measured according to standards of sympathy or antipathy aroused by these comrades. Such are the bizarre results of premature democracy that we are not permitted to exempt anything from the control of incompetents, not even logic! But there are other reasons. When the first volume of Marx's Capital appeared in 1867, it came to the professors and academic writers, especially of Germany, like a blow on their heads. It was then a period of great inactivity in economic science. The historical school had not yet produced those ponderous, and often useful, volumes which later appeared in Germany. In France, Italy, and even Germany, the very commonplace productions of that vulgar economy, which had obliterated the critical spirit of the great classic economists between 1840 and 1860, were leading a precarious existence. England had taken to John Stuart Mill, who, although a professional logician, was always suspended between the yes and the no in matters of importance, like one of the well-known characters on our comic stage. No one had then given a thought to that new economics which the Hedonists have lately produced. In Germany, where Marx should have been read first, for evident reasons, and where Rodbertus remained almost unknown, the mediocre spirits ruled the situation, prominent among them that famous writer of erudite and minute notes, Roscher, who loved to encumber quite clear passages with nominal and often senseless definitions. The first volume of Capital appeared just in time to disillusion the minds of the professors and academicians. They, the learned bearers of titles, especially privileged in the so-called land of thinkers, were expected to go to school! They had either been lost in the minute particulars of erudition, or had tried to make a school of apologetics of political economy, or had bothered their heads to find a plausible way of applying to their own country the conclusions of a science grown in the entirely different conditions of another country. And thus all those professors of the land of the learned par excellence had forgotten the art of analysis and critique. Capital compelled them to begin their studies from the bottom. They had to get an entirely new foundation. For this work, while coming from the pen of an extreme and determined communist, did not show a trace of subjective protest or scheming, but was a strictly and rigorously objective analysis of the process of capitalist production. There was evidently something more terrible in this revolutionary journalist of 1848 and exile of 1849 than a mere continuation or complement of that socialism which the bourgeois literature of all countries dreamed of having definitely overcome as a political expression since the fall of Chartism and the triumph of the sinister head of the coup d'�tat in France. It became necessary to study economics anew. In other words, this science opened once more a critical period. To give the devil his due, it must be admitted that the German professors after that date, that is to say, beginning with 1870, and still more since 1880, undertook the critical revision of economics with that diligence, persistence, good will, and laboriousness, which the learned of that country have always exhibited in all lines of research. Although anything written by them can hardly ever be fully accepted by us, it is nevertheless true that the field of economics was newly plowed by their labors in the manner customary among professors and academicians, and that now this science can no longer be committed to mind as easily as any lazy man's lesson. Of late the name of Marx has become so fashionable that it is heard in the lecture rooms of universities as one of the preferred subjects of critique, polemics, and reference, and no longer merely in terms of regret and vulgar invective. The social literature of Germany is now fully impregnated with memories of Marx.

But this could not take place in 1867. Capital made its appearance just when the International began to be talked about and make itself feared for a short while, not only on account of the thing that it stood for intrinsically, and what it might have become had not the Franco-German war and the tragic incident of the Commune dealt it heavy blows, but also on account of the blood-curdling mouthings of some of its members and the stupid revolutionary maneuvers of some intruders. Was it not notorious that the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen's Association (from which address every socialist may still learn much) came from the pen of Marx? And was there not good reason to attribute the more determined actions and resolutions of the International to him? Well then, if a revolutionist of such undoubted loyalty and acumen as Mazzini could not distinguish between the International to which Marx devoted his work and the Bakunist Alliance, is it a wonder that the German professors were disinclined to enter into a critical discussion with the author of Capital? How was it possible to get on terms of friendly discussion with a man who was, so to say, hung in effigy in all laws of exception made for the use of Favre and consorts, and was held morally responsible for all the deeds of the revolutionaries, even their errors and extravagances even though he had at the same written a masterly work, like a new Ricardo, who studied impassibly the economic processes after the manner of geometricians? This fact is to blame for that queer method of polemics which made the intentions of the author responsible for his conclusions. It was alleged that Marx had thought out his scientific analysis for the purpose of giving strength to certain tendencies. This led for many years to the writing of sensational articles in place of objective analyses.

But the worst of it was that the effects of this grossly false critique made themselves felt even in the minds of socialists, particularly in those of the young intellectuals who took up the cause of the proletariat between 1870 and 1880. Many of the fiery remodelers of the world undertook to proclaim themselves champions of Marxian theories, choosing as legal tender precisely the more or less spurious Marxism of our adversaries. The case is dearest in Germany where it left its traces in the party discussions and in its small literature. The most paradoxical point of the whole mistake is this: Those who incline toward easy inferences, as most newcomers do, thought that the theories of value and surplus-value, as ordinarily presented in popular expositions, contained here and now the canons of practical activity, the motive power, the ethics and legal basis, for all proletarian efforts. Isn't it a great injustice that millions and millions of human beings should be robbed of the fruits of their labor! This statement is so simple and so poignant that all the modern Bastilles ought to fall at the first scientific blast of the new trumpets of Jericho! This easy simplicity was strengthened by many of the theoretical errors of Lassalle, such as those which were due to his relative lack of knowledge, for instance the iron law of wages, a half-truth which becomes a total error when not fully explained, or those which in his case may be regarded as expedients of agitation, for instance his famous co-operatives with state help. Whoever is inclined to confine his whole socialist confession of faith to the simplest inference from the recognized exploitation to the demand for the emancipation of the exploited, which is inevitable only because it is just, has but to make another step on the slippery path of logic in order to reduce the whole story of the human race to a case of moral conscience and consider its successive development in social life as so many variations of a continued error of calculation.

Between 1870 and 1880, and a little after, a sort of new utopianism formed around this vague conception of a certain something entitled scientific socialism which, like fruits out of season, was very insipid. And what else is utopianism without the genius of a Fourier and the eloquence of a Considerant but a matter for ridicule? This new utopianism, which still flourishes here and there, has played quite a role in France. It has left its imprint in the struggles with other sects and schools fought by our brave friends in the Revolutionary Labor Party, who from the first endeavored to develop socialism along the lines of class-consciousness and the progressive conquest of political power by the proletariat. Only through the experience of this practical test, only by the daily study of the class struggle, only through testing and re-testing the forces of the proletariat so far as they are already organized and concentrated, are we enable to estimate the chances of socialism. Those who proceed differently are and remain utopians, even in the revered name of Marx.

Against these new utopians, against the outgrown representatives of the old schools, and against the various sidelines of contemporaneous socialism, our two authors continually applied the rays of their critique. In their long career they took their science as a guide for their practical work, and out of their practical experience they culled the material and received directions for deepening their science. They never treated history as though she were a mare which they could straddle and trot around, nor did they look for formulae by which to keep alive momentary illusions. They were thus compelled, by the necessity of circumstances, to measure swords in bitter, sharp, and relentless controversies with all those whom they considered as dangers to the proletarian movement. Who does not remember, for instance, the Proudhonists, who pretended to destroy the state by reducing it by stealth, as though it were closing its eyes and pretending not to see? Or the one-time Blanquists, who wanted to seize the powers of state by force and then start a revolution? Or Bakunin who sneaked surreptitiously into the International and compelled the others to throw him out? Or here and there the pretenses of so many different schools of socialism, and the competition of so many leaders?

From the time that Marx routed the ingenuous Weitling in a personal debate to his trenchant critique of the Gotha program (1875), which was not published until 1890, his life was one continual battle, not only with the bourgeoisie and the politics represented by it, but also with the various revolutionary and reactionary currents which wrongfully or spitefully assumed the name of socialism. All those struggles were fought out in the International, and I speak of the International of glorious records, which left its imprint to this day on all the present-day activity of the proletariat, not of its subsequent caricature. The greater bulk of the controversies with Marxism, a Marxism which the imagination of certain critics has reduced to a mere variety of political schooling, is due to the traditions of those revolutionaries who, especially in the Latin countries, recognised in Bakunin their leader and master. What is it that the anarchists of our day are repeating but the lamentations and mistakes of those past days?

Twenty years ago, the majority of the Italian public, with the exception of those scientists who masticated over and over, in their homes, the things which they had read in books, knew nothing of the two founders of scientific socialism but what had been preserved through recollections of the invectives of Mazzini and the malice of Bakunin.

And so critical communism, which has been admitted so tardily to the honor of discussion in the circles of official science, met in its own camp with the very worst of adversities, the enmity of its own friends.

All those difficulties have now either been overcome, or are at least for the greater part about to disappear.

Not the intrinsic virtue of ideas, which have never had any feet for walking, nor hands for grasping, but the sole fact that the programs of socialist parties, wherever such parties arose, assumed the same tendencies, induced the socialists of all countries, through the imperious suggestion of conditions, to place themselves at the visual angle of the Communist Manifesto. Don't you think that I wrote my essay in memory of this manifesto at an opportune time? The exploiting classes create for the exploited classes almost everywhere the same conditions. For this reason, the active representatives of these exploited travel everywhere the same road of agitation and follow the same points of view in their propaganda and organization. Many call this practical Marxism. Be it so! What good is there in quarreling about words? Even though Marxism reduces itself for many to mere words, or to the worship of Marx's picture, his plaster of Paris bust, or his features on a button (the Italian police frequently exhibit their deep feeling for such innocent symbols), the fact remains that this symbolical unanimity is a proof of the incipient unification in reality, and of the growing unity of thought and action in all proletarian movements of the world. In other words, the international solidarity is shaping itself at long range through material conditions. Those who use the language of the decadent writers of the bourgeoisie, mistaking the symbol for the thing, are now saying that this is a personal triumph of Marx. It is as though one had said that Christianity was a personal triumph of Jesus of Nazareth (or why not say outright his success?), of Jesus who divested himself of his quality of the son of a god that assumed human shape, and who, in the soft and weak language of your Renan, became a man of such childlike divinity as to seem a god.

In view of this intuitive shaping of socialist politics, which is tantamount to proletarian politics, the divergences of the old schools have fallen to the ground. Some of these were in fact nothing but distinctions of the letter and vain hairsplitting, which had to give way to such useful distinctions as arise spontaneously through the different ways of handling practical problems. In the concrete reality, in the positive and prosaic development of socialism, it matters little whether all its heads, leaders, orators, and representatives conform to one theory, or do not conform to it, whether or not they profess it publicly. Socialism is not a church, not a sect, that must have its fixed dogma or formula. If so many speak nowadays of the triumph of Marxism, such an emphatic expression, when stated in a crudely prosaic form, simply means that henceforth no one can be a socialist, unless he asks himself every minute: What is the proper thing to think, to say, to do, under the present circumstances, for the best interests of the proletariat. The day has gone by for such dialecticians, or rather sophists, as Proudhon, for the inventors of personal social systems, the makers of private revolutions. The practical indication of that which is practicable is given by the condition of the proletariat, and this is appreciable and measurable precisely because Marxism (I mean the thing, not the symbol) supplies us with a progressive standard by its theory. The two things, the measurable and the measure, are one from the point of view of the historical process, especially when they are seen at a convenient distance.

And you can actually see that to the extent that the outlines of the practical policy of socialism become distinct, all the old poetical and fantastic ideas are dispersed and leave but traces in phraseology behind them. At the same time the critical study of the science of economies has been growing in every respect in the field of academic research. The exile Marx has made himself at home, after his death, in the circles of official science, at least as an adversary who will stand no fooling. And just as the socialists have come by so many different roads to the understanding that a revolution cannot be made, but makes itself through a process of growth, so that public has been gradually developing for whom historical materialism is a true and distinct intellectual necessity. You have seen that many have stuck their noses into this theory during recent years, even though it was done badly or with evil intent. Now, if you take a good look, you will note that we have not gone backward. Since my young days I have often heard it related how Hegel had said that only one of his pupils understood him. This anecdote cannot be verified, because this one disciple has never been identified. But the same thing may repeat itself infinitely, from system to system, from school to school, for, as a matter of fact, intellectual activity is not due purely to personal suggestion, and thought is not communicated mechanically from brain to brain as such. Nor are great systems diffused unless similar social conditions dispose and incline many minds towards them at the same time. Historical materialism will be enlarged, diffused, specialized, and will have its own history. It may vary in coloring and outline from country to country. But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is, so to say, its whole philosophy. One of its fundamental theses is this: The nature of man, his historical making, is a practical process. And when I say practical, it implies the elimination of the vulgar distinction between theory and practice. For, in so many words, the history of man is the history of labor. And labor implies and includes on the one hand the relative, proportional, and proportioned development of both mental and manual activities, and on the other the concept of a history of labor implies ever the social form of labor and its variations. Historical man is always human society, and the presumption of a presocial, or super-social, man is a creature of imagination. And there we are.

Here I pause, mainly to avoid repeating myself, and to save you from a repetition of the things which I have written in my two essays. You certainly do not feel the need of such a repetition, and most assuredly I do not.