Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt:... ANTONIO LABRIOLA AND JOSEPH DIETZGEN A Comparison of Historical Materialism and Monist Materialism. "Study historical materialism?" exclaimed a newly converted friend of mine in surprise. "Why, I think I know all about it. I have read Marx's introduction to his Critique of Political Economy and Engels' introduction to his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. What else is there to study about it? It's as simple as can be. Material conditions shape human thought and action. There you have it in a nutshell. Isn't that enough?" My friend is not the only socialist who believes he can meet all eventualities with his historical materialism in a nutshell. The overwhelming majority of socialists manage to get along on such homoeopathic doses of historical materialism. Indeed, if we want to be honest about it, we must admit that there is scarcely one among us who has so fully assimilated historical materialism and its most obvious conclusions that they have become natural parts of his conscious being, things to be lived in daily thought and practice. Every debate shows that. Slight differences of opinion on tactical questions, due to different individual development and changes in present environment, are magnified into great scientific controversies, or even pushed to the extreme of personal enmities. Psychological changes, such as frequently occur in our quicklived time, which gives us little leisure to digest new ideas, are condemned offhand as recantations of sacred pledges, without analysing to what extent alterations in the physical structure or social environment of such comrades may have caused the change of mind. The same men pronounce in the same breath moral sentence upon others without a careful investigation of facts, deliver themselves...