Notes from Antonio Labriola's Socialism and Philosophy

Section 1-3

Part 1

Historical materialism demands of those who wish to profess it consciously and frankly a certain queer humility, that is to say, as soon as we realize that we are bound up with the course of human events and study its complicated lines and tortuous windings, it behooves us not to be merely resigned and acquiescent, but to engage in some conscious and rational work. But there is the difficulty. We are to come to the point of confessing to ourselves that our own individuality, to which we are so closely attached through an obvious and genetic habit, is a pretty small thing in the complicated network of the social mechanism,

Indeed, if we are to accept that as humans we are governed by the law of causality, then we must grasp the idea that our very being as an individual is the result of the external reality imposing it's self in the particular instance of the individual and nothing else. Individuals can not claim that their faculties are expressions of their uniqueness since this uniqueness isn't theirs but rather belongs to the external which expresses itself through the individual. The internal consciousness only represents the various contacting tendencies that form various "wills" and compete for expression. Thought therefore is simply the mental reflections of the material conditions as experienced through the subject.

The closest thing to self mastery is self awareness. Rejecting the freedom of the will allows a person to understand himself as the result of his environmental factors, as opposed to understanding things in metaphysical terms such as "good" or "bad" and assuming that the behavior of those around us is based in this essence of "goodness" or "badness". However, if a person grasps determinism and understands the factors motivating his own actions, then with the tool of self awareness he/she/ze ought to have little excuss for actioning without reason because he is presicly aware of the irrational motivators that propel him to poor courses of action.

We are to adapt ourselves to the conviction that the subjective intentions and aims of every one of us are always struggling against the resistance of the intricate processes of life, so that our designs leave no trace of themselves, or leave a trace which is quite different from the original intent, because it is altered and transformed by the accompanying conditions. We are to admit, after this statement, that history lives our lives, so to say, and that our own contribution toward it, while indispensable, is nevertheless but a very minute factor in the crossing of forces which combine, complete and alternately eliminate one another. But all these conceptions are veritable bores for all those who feel the need of confining the universe within the scope of their individual vision. Therefore the privilege of heroes must be preserved in history, so that the dwarfs may not be deprived of the faith that they are able to ride on their own shoulders and make themselves conspicuous. And this must be granted to them, even if they are not worthy, in the words of Jean Paul, of reaching to their own knees.

Faith, acts as a method of escaping reason which alienates man from his emotion as well as alienating his sentimentality from his experiences in life. While reason acts as a wedge between humanity and it's sentimentality, faith acts as a bridge. More specifically, the motivation of faith acts as a bridge between the conscious act of thought and the human act of feeling. As Marxists we ought to be concerned with alienation this alienation while at the same time realizing that faith is not reason and can serve to direct us away from our interests.

In fact, have not people been going to school for centuries, only to be told that Julius Caesar founded the empire and Charlemagne reconstructed it? That Socrates as much as invented logic, and Dante created Italian literature by a stroke of his pen? It is but a very short time that the mythological conception of such people as the creators of history has been gradually displaced, and not always in precise terms, by the prosaic notion of a historical process of society. Was not the French revolution willed and made, according to various versions of literary invention, by the different saints of the liberalist legends, the saints of the right, the saints of the left, the Girondist saints, the Jacobine saints? Thus it comes that Paine has devoted quite a considerable portion of his ponderous intellect to the proof, as though he were a proofreader of history, that all those disturbances might eventually not have occurred at all. By the way, I have never been able to understand why a man with so little appreciation for the crude necessity of facts should have called himself a positivist. It was the good fortune of most of your saints in France which enabled them alternately to honor one another and to crown one another in due time with their deserved diadem of thorns. For this reason the rules of classic tragedy remained gloriously in force for them. If it were not so, who knows how many imitators of Saint Juste (a truly great man) would have ended through the hands of the henchmen of the scoundrel Fouché, and how many accomplices of Danton (a great man who missed his place) would have donned the felon's garb at Cambaceres, while others might have been content to pit themselves against the adventurous Drouet, or that pitiful actor Tellien, for the modest stripes of a petty prefect.

The very act of recording history reflects the bourgeois mode of thought process that is hegemonic under capitalism. To combat it is an act of class struggle.