Antonio Labriola Quotes
Only in a communistic society will labor be no longer exploited, but rather rationally measured. Only in a communistic society will a hedonistic calculation become practicable, unimpaired by the private exploitation of social forces.
Antonio Labriola, 1843-1904, Italian Historian & Philosopher, Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, 1896
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Alexander Dubcek, Communist leader of Czechoslovakia, had pushed reform so far that 5 Soviet armies invaded. Dubcek was brought to Russia where he tried to persuade the Russian premier that the invasion was contrary to the principles of socialism.
The issue of public or private ownership and control of technology is not only a product of the information age where equal access to computers, the Internet were argued as a political necessity. But there were those who made the same argument a century earlier about the new technology of the times—machines.
This was the basic document issued after the Russian Revolution establishing the basic legal and economic structure of the new Soviet State.
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
Socialism in its then pure form had the state owning and controlling all the major assets of the nation. In this sense it was contradictory to individual freedom and hence democracy. However, in the years after Tocqueville’s quotation and the industrial revolution, socialism has gradually moved away from state ownership and operations of all institutions and resources. Democracy has tended to adopt a more regulatory view to control the excesses of unbridled capitalism. The range of democratic nations by the 21st century encompassed differences but some were described as “social democracies” and had some state ownership but were basically capitalistic economies. Even the self-described Communist nations had become heavily capitalistic albeit with less political freedom. At the same time, even the United States—the epitome of 21st century capitalism, owned and controlled a few of the resources and means of production and tended to regulate the others—a substantial difference from the American democracy which Tocqueville studied.
He was a major critic of Socialism but he did acknowledge that the Socialist Movement had made major contributions.
Antonio Labriola was an Italian Marxist theoretician and philosopher. Although an academic philosopher and never an active member of any Marxist political party, his thought exerted influence on many political theorists in Italy during the early 20th century, including the founder of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. He also influenced Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist Leon Trotsky.
