The Social Contradiction: Leopardi Contra Marx

Is History Predetermined?

Lancelot Kirby
Jul 25, 2017 · 6 min read

With the arrival of each new year, we are led to a sense of the structured progression of time, of the certainty of the calendar year. This, we have come now to accept, is only an illusion. History is not inevitable we are now taught to believe. There can never be confidence in how human affairs will develop. In one sense this is perhaps true, but examined in a qualified sense it is still on the table for discussion.

Is history predetermined? I will seek to argue that it is, but need not be. Building upon ideas developed in the Zibaldone of Giacomo Leopardi, I hope to clarify this confusing distinction by a comparison with the relative optimism of Marx and Marxist theory more generally.

Leopardi, influenced by the thought of Rousseau and Vico, was greatly interested in the development and decline of cultures. He shared with Rousseau a conviction that man in his original state had attained a level of moral perfection which, with the development of society, we have been moving steadily away from ever since. However, unlike Rousseau, Leopardi concluded that this process once begun could never be made a legitimate state of affairs to which we might comfortably learn to acquiesce. In addition, Rousseau thought it possible to use religion as an external authority which might persuade the people to subordinate their self-interest to the common good, something that the atheist Leopardi could not have endured, and modern secular democracies will not accept.

In contrast, Karl Marx, although not a determinist per se, saw history developing through slavery and subservience into greater and greater levels of freedom until at last reaching the apogee with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the proletariat over the means of production, a development constrained by material and economic conditions. Capitalism, the shape that that material and economic constraint has taken in, and come to dominate the modern world, Marx viewed, we may assume, as but a momentary setback. Something I will contend Leopardi would have viewed as less a detour then the inevitable consequence of social development.

I begin with a long, but unavoidable, excerpt from the Zibaldone:

In society man loses as far as is possible the impress of nature. Once this is lost, which is the only stable thing in the world, the only thing that is universal, or common to the race or species, there is no other rule, strand, precept, type, form, which might be stable and common, to which all individuals by matching themselves to it, all conform among themselves, etc. etc. Society does not just make men different and unequal among themselves, as they are in nature, but unlike. From which through this argument also one concludes that the essence and nature of society, especially human society, contains contradiction within itself, since human society naturally destroys its most necessary element, means, tie, bond of society, which is equality and mutual parity between the individuals who compose it; or we can say which increases through its own properties the natural disparity of its subjects, and it increases it to the same extent that it renders them completely incapable of mutual society, of that very society which has made them so different, in fact of every society, even the one which by nature would be possible and ordained for them and proper to them; in short, to return to the beginning of this discourse, it renders its subjects like those among whom there can naturally be “no society,” in fact it does more, because if society, according to Milton, is impossible between unequal beings, it makes them unlike each other. And in truth no animal less than man has any reason to call the individuals of its own species its like, nor has it more reason to treat them as unlike, and as individuals of a different species. Which man never fails to do. And the fact that he does it, as he ordinarily does, especially in society, is an extremely effective proof of what I have said above…

In effect what Leopardi is describing is not only the slow death but the eventual impossibility of community. The more society develops the more it takes us from our original state in nature, a process I will refer to as denaturing. Before property, before the concept of fame or the rise of social caste, all men started on an equal footing. However, society evolves by increasing exclusion, not inclusion and, borrowing from Milton, Leopardi reminds us that society, i.e. community, cannot exist between groups which are perceived or are in fact, unequal.

Thus, the development of society or civilization, rather than being a process of increasing progress ironically nurtures the very qualities that lead to its dissolution: the contradiction of inequality. The same drive to come together and work for mutual benefit is the very same drive that, having established peace and prosperity, leads those groups that have benefited most to kick out the ladder of inclusion behind them, the drive of self-interest.

It is here that we return to Marx. Although Marx, contrary to many popular views, did not see history developing in one inevitable direction, he did believe that history is constrained by the material conditions in which we live, a concept he termed historical materialism. For Marx, a student of the Enlightenment, basic human nature was fundamentally good. Optimism was the byword by which he lived. Once the material conditions that governed life were altered the true and shining substance of humanity would be allowed to break through the dross of industrial labor.

But, as Leopardi suggests, it is the condition of society itself that, rather than acting upon our true nature, instead merely aids in fulfilling it. For example, our societies over preoccupation with material wealth. Materialism, in one form or another, arose in part with society out of society’s demand we find some means to demonstrate our ‘unlikeness’ from everyone else. In this view then our materialist obsession is not so much due to the incitement of corporate advertising priming the pump of consumerist desires but, rather, the pump needed little priming to start. It is the inevitable result of social development, which pushes away community as it emphasizes the individual over the many, and increases inequality as it grows.

This continuing growth of inequality, the social contradiction, reveals both the reasons for the great successes of capitalism and, at the same time, its inevitable collapse. Marx too wrote of capitals various contradictions, but these were objective to man, not sourced in man himself but elicited from the forces of capitalist production in which he lives. For example, the suppression of worker’s wages. An excellent demonstration of capitals greed, corporate forces lower the average worker’s wage. However, this only benefits them in the short-term. In the long term, this suppression in pay ultimately reduces the consumer’s ability to buy, which in turn undermines the very profits that corporations were seeking to increase. Of course, at the present time the consequences of this contradiction has in part been slowed by the widespread use of credit, the end result of which we will not explore here.

Yet Marx, as I said above, was only half right. As Leopardi might argue, the many contradictions of capital all have a single unifying source — — that of human nature itself. If not blinded by Enlightenment optimism in progress and human reason, he may have come to the realization that the increasing inequality of his own time, which today has become even more apparent, was almost completely independent of any economic process. Instead, the much deeper process of denaturing has been steadily at work driving us further and further from our more cooperative beginnings. Rather than a setback, modern capitalism appears as the consummation of societies, and thus humanities, true and logical path of development.

To answer the question then is yes, history is predetermined, at least in the qualified sense that it is determined by our revealed true nature, a nature only able to reveal itself by the same mechanism that is at the same time killing it.

The future could be bright but, in viewing our lack of moral progress through time, in comparison to our technological and economic development, suggests it would require a universal change of our fundamental human character if we are to live to see it.

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https://lancelotkirby.wordpress.com/

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