Labriola as forerunner of Gramsci: second set of notes

Notes, continued, on Labriola’s “Socialism and Philosophy”.

PHILOSOPHICAL “SUPPLEMENTS” TO MARXISM

Chapter V: “We need not be surprised… if the generic similarity of historical materialism to so many other products of the contemporaneous thought and knowledge has led many, who deal with science in the style of literary men or magazine readers, into… flattering themselves that they could make the Marxian theory more complete by this or that addition. We shall have to put up with such tinkering for a while…”

Comment: This “tinkering” is a big theme of Gramsci’s: he argues that not only the neo-Kantians and such of the Second International, who thought to round out Marxism by adding, for example, Kantian ethics, but also the “orthodox Marxist” opponents were guilty of it. The “orthodox”, declares Gramsci, actually tacked “traditional materialism onto Marxism. Here, Labriola is concerned with those who sought to round out Marxism by reconstructing it as an offshoot of Darwinian evolutionary theory. “Since everybody is talking about evolution, the inexperienced and superficial think that everybody means the same thing”.

THE MERGER OF PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND HISTORY

Chapter V: “Whoever considers historical materialism in its full significance, will find that it presents three lines of study. The first corresponds to the practical requirement of the socialist parties… The second… a revision of the methods of writing history… The third consists in the treatment of the directing principles… It is certain that these three lines of study were combined into one in the mind of Marx, and not only in his mind, but also in his works… His politics were, in a way, the practical application of his historical materialism, and his philosophy was incorporated in his critique of political economy, for this was his method of dealing with history… The perfect identification of philosophy, or of critically self-conscious thought, with the material of knowledge, in other words, the complete elimination of the traditional distinction between philosophy and science, is a tendency of our times…”

Comment: Labriola adds the qualification, “the distinction between science and philosophy will always be maintained as a provisional element, in order to indicate that science is always in process of growth and that this growth is largely accompanied by self-critique”. In a footnote Labriola remarks wryly on a book whose “object is to demonstrate that Philosophy has reached its end. The pity of it is that the book is philosophical from cover to cover”.

But here again we have a theme which Gramsci evidently took from Labriola, the merger of philosophy, politics, and history. Gramsci, however, suggests a tendential merger “into” philosophy, whereas Labriola suggests a tendential merger “into” science. Labriola, chapter VII: “Marxism… is one of the ways in which the scientific mind has freed itself from philosophy as such…” Labriola also decries “the chase after that universal philosophy, into which socialism might be fitted as the central point of everything”, but in some passages at least Gramsci suggests that “the philosophy of praxis” is indeed that “universal philosophy”, for a “present era” measured in hundreds of years.

Labriola, on the other hand, has, at a certain level, a “meta-philosophy”, a “general approach”, which stands above particular science. “Historical materialism… solves the problem of cognition differently from all other philosophies and declares: There are no fixed limits, whether a priori or a posteriori, to cognition, because human beings learn all that they must know by an infinite process of labor, which is experience, and of experience, which is labor… Socrates was the first to discover that understanding is a process of labor, and that man knows only those things well which he can do”. (Chapter VIII).

I would guess that Labriola would reconcile these thoughts by stating that Socrates first sketched the thought which, after centuries of accumulated investigation by scientists, Marx was able to develop to the point of a theory of society which could be free of any speculative and abstract philosophy standing above it, and instead merge with politics and with the making of history.

LABRIOLA ON MONISM

Chapter VI: “If I had to give some sort of an outline… the philosophy, which historical materialism implies, is the tendency toward monism. And I lay a special stress upon the word tendency. I say tendency, and let me add, a formal and a critical tendency…”

The critical and tendential character of the “monism” differentiates it from the thinking which claims “a universal diagram for all things”, like “the imitators of Hegel, with their everlasting rhythm of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”.

“The main principle of critical cognition, by which historical materialism corrects monism, is this: It takes its departure from the practice of things, from the development of the labor process, just as it is the theory of man at work, so does it consider science itself as work. It impresses the empirical sciences definitely with the implicit understanding that we accomplish things by experiment, and brings us to a realisation of the fact that things are themselves in the making”.

Comment: In the next paragraph Labriola acknowledges his debt for the term “monism” to the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, who was also the main promoter of Darwin’s ideas in Germany. Labriola’s warnings against dissolving historical materialism into a grand philosophy extrapolated from Darwin’s biology clearly have Haeckel in mind. One of the strands in Haeckel’s thinking was to use a “monism” extrapolated from Darwin to give “scientific” credence to racism. He would eventually, in 1906, found a “Monist League”, a quasi-political movement.

Plekhanov also used the term “monism” in the title of his 1895 book, The Development of the Monist View of History. He had the term “monism” in the title only in order to make it sound obscure enough to get past the censor, and scarcely used the words “monist” or “monism” in the text at all. What he meant by it was opposition to “dualist systems of one kind or another [as in Descartes] which recognise spirit and matter as separate and independent substances”.

Here we also have Labriola’s characteristic idea that scientific cognition is an active, not a contemplative, process; that knowing the world is inseparable from interacting with it. This idea can be overdone, and perhaps is overdone by Gramsci: our knowledge of the Earth before human history, and of the cosmos beyond the solar system, can scarcely be other than “contemplative”, since we have no way of actively engaging with the object of knowledge. But for knowledge of social affairs, Labriola’s idea has force.

LABRIOLA’S “HEGELIANISM”

Chapter IV: “I remember… the Hegelians of Naples, among whom I lived in my earliest youth… a training hall, and I am not sorry for it. For years my mind was divided between Hegel and Spinoza. With youthful ingenuity I defended the dialectics of the former against Zeller, the founder of neo-kantianism. The writings of Spinoza I knew by heart, and with loving understanding I gave expositions of his theory of affections and passions. But now all these things seem as far away in my recollection as Primeval history”.

Comment: Labriola is described in Trotsky’s My Life as “the old Hegelian-Marxist”. Perhaps uniquely in the Second International, Labriola had a long and intense education in Hegelian philosophy before he came to Marxism. But here he describes his “Hegelianism” as something superseded and rejected. “For twenty years I have detested systematic philosophy”, writes Labriola. And for Hegel philosophy is nothing if it not systematic. “Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature” – Science of Logic, Introduction.

“LIFE UNDER SOCIALISM WILL NOT BE EASY, I HOPE…”

Chapter IX: “Whether the people of the future, of whom we socialists often entertain such exalted ideas, will still produce any religion or not, I can neither affirm nor deny. And I leave it them to arrange their own lives, which will not be easy, I hope, in order that they may not become imbeciles in paradisian beatitude”.

Comment: Gramsci is, very unusually for a Marxism, concerned to construct from Marxism a sort of “philosophy”, or “ethical basis of the state”, for the future society of working-class rule (until the distant time when the state withers away). Marx and Engels always limited themselves to the thought that the citizens of the future would know much better than we, struggling within capitalist society, can, and will sort things out for themselves. Labriola expresses the same thought in chapter X: “The people of the future will not lay aside their human nature to such an extent as to be no longer comparable to us of the present… they will have enough of the dialectic joy of laughter left to crack jokes over the prophets of today”.

Lenin and Trotsky after 1917 disavowed any claim to be building a new working-class culture: it was a big enough task, they argued, to bring the best of bourgeois culture to the mass of the population, and by the time that could be done, the future citizenry could develop its own new culture.

Labriola here puts a similar thought sharply, with the laconic wish that the lives of the people of the future “will not be easy, I hope”, i.e. that out of new problems and conflicts they will develop new systems of thought.

PEDAGOGY

Chapter X: “Teaching is not an activity which produces a bare effect by means of bare objects. It is rather an activity which generates another activity. In teaching we !earn to understand that the first germ of all philosophic thought is always planted by the Socratic Method, that is, by the accomplished talent of generating ideas…”

Comment: This thought of Labriola’s seems to have influenced Gramsci’s conception of how a revolutionary party must “teach” the working class, in its differences from Bordiga’s views.

THE INEVITABILITY OF SOCIALISM

Chapter X: “[Some] continuously harp on the dogma of the necessity of evolution, which they confound with a certain right to a better condition. And they say that the future society of collectivist economic production, with all its technical and pedagogic consequences, will come because it should come. They seem to forget that this future society must be produced by human beings themselves in response to the demands of the conditions in which they now live and by the development of their own aptitudes”.

Comment: In his In Memory of the Communist Manifesto, Labriola writes of the inevitability of socialism. In this text, around the same time, he makes much less of “inevitability”. He also, pretty much against the grain of contemporary socialist thought at the very end of the 19th century, I’d have thought, argues strongly against expectations of quick and easy socialist victories. “The development of the new era will have to be measured by a standard of time considerably slower than that first assumed by the early socialists who were still tainted with Jacobin memories. It is evident that we cannot look forward across such long stretches of time with very great certitude. We must take into account the enormous complexity of modern life and the vast expansion of capitalism, or of bourgeois society. Who cannot see that the Pacific is now taking the place of the Atlantic Ocean, just as the Atlantic once upon a time took the place of the Mediterranean Sea?”