Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx | Page 7

everyone should link up the new ideas with the old as a development,
an amendment, an antithesis. In fact, Hegel's Ideas and Marx knew this
perfectly well -- are not human ideas, and to turn the Hegelian
philosophy of history upside down cannot give us the statement that
ideas arise as reflections of material conditions. The inverted form
would logically be this: history is not a process of the Idea, i.e. of a
rational reality, but a system of forces: to the rational view is opposed
the dynamic view. As to the Hegelian dialectic of concepts it seems to
me to bear a purely external and approximate resemblance to the
historical notion of economic eras and of the antithetical conditions of
society. Whatever may be the value of this suggestion, which I express
with hesitation, recognising the difficulty of the problems connected
with the interpretation and origin of history; -- this much is evident,
that metaphysical materialism, at which Marx and Engels, starting from
the extreme Hegelian left, easily arrived, supplied the name and some
of the components of their view of history. But both the name and these
components are really extraneous to the true character of their

conception. This can be neither materialistic nor spiritualistic, nor
dualistic nor monadistic: within its limited field the elements of things
are not presented in such a way as to admit of a philosophical
discussion whether they are reducible one to another, and are united in
one ultimate source. What we have before us are concrete objects, the
earth, natural production, animals; we have before us man, in whom the
so-called psychical processes appear as differentiated from the
so-called physiological processes. To talk in this case of monism and
materialism is to talk nonsense. Some socialist writers have expressed
surprise because Lange, in his classic History of Materialism, does not
discuss historical materialism. It is needless to remark that Lange was
familiar with Marxian socialism. He was, how ever, too cautious to
confuse the metaphysical materialism with which he was concerned,
with historical materialism which has no essential connection with it,
and is merely a way of speaking.
But the metaphysical materialism of the authors of the new historical
doctrine, and the name given to the latter, have been not a little
misleading. I will refer as an example to a recent and bad little book,
which seems to me symptomatic, by a sufficiently accredited socialist
writer, Plechanow.(4*) The author, designing to study historical
materialism, thinks it needful to go back to Holbach and Helvetius.
And he waxes indignant at metaphysical dualism and pluralism,
declaring that 'the most important philosophical systems were always
monistic, that is they interpreted matter and spirit as merely two classes
of phenomena having a single and indivisible cause.' And in reference
to those who maintain the distinction between the factors in history, he
exclaims: 'We see here the old story, always recurring, of the struggle
between eclecticism and monism, the story of the dividing walls; here
nature, there spirit, etc.' Many will be amazed at this unexpected leap
from the materialistic study of history into the arms of monism, in
which they were unaware that they ought to have such confidence.
Labriola is most careful to avoid this confusion: 'Society is a datum,' he
says, 'history is nothing more than the history of society.' And he
controverts with equal energy and success the naturalists, who wish to
reduce the history of man to the history of nature, and the verbalists,

who claim to deduce from the name materialism the real nature of the
new view of history. But it must appear, even to him, that the name
might have been more happily chosen, and that the confusion lies, so to
speak, inherent in it. It is true that old words can be bent to new
meanings, but within limits and after due consideration.
In regard to the tendency to reconstruct a materialistic philosophy of
history, substituting an omnipresent Matter for an omnipresent idea, it
suffices to re-assert the impossibility of any such construction, which
must become merely superfluous and tautologous unless it abandoned
itself to dogmatism. But there is another error, which is remarked
among the followers of the materialistic school of history, and which is
connected with the former, viz., to anticipate harm not only in the
interpretation of history but also in the guidance of practical activities. I
refer to the teleological tendencies (abstract teleology), which also
Labriola opposes with a cutting attack. The very idea of progress,
which has seemed to many the only law of history worth saving out of
the many devised by philosophical and non-philosophical thinkers, is
by him deprived of the dignity of a law, and reduced to a sufficiently
narrow significance. The idea of it, says Labriola, is 'not only empirical,