So you're a refugee (a word of honor in my vocabulary) from American's
preference for high living to treating with Global Warming . How did Che put
it? There'll be a lot of NO's in the not too distant future.
I see that you've sufficiently recovered to write, and that's a good sign.
My comments are below (labelled V2:)
Victor
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Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fettering - Restriction
V: "Marx most famous statement on the productive forces coming into conflict
with the existing relations of production" as Marx's great 'cop out' rather
than his greatest contribution to the history of the development of the
relation
between the forces of production and of the relations of production. It
represents Marx's almost desperate effort to find a way out of a serious
contradiction in his theory of development; the problem of accounting for
the impact of
material forces on a system (of the relations of production ) that is in
essence a closed, self-organizing, and self-developing organization in which
the
concepts that describe the organization are what facilitate its operation
and
growth, i.e. capital, profits, and all the rest of the nonsense of
capitalist
political economy.
WL: "Marx most famous statement on the productive forces coming into
conflict
with the existing relations of production" is no "cop out" but the
foundation
for what is the "science of society" and is better understood in connection
with his letter of December 28, 1846 to P.V. Annenkov.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm
V2: The Annenkov letter actually emphasizes the contradiction in his
explanation of the impact of material forces on the relations of production.
But first, let me clarify the basis of my critique:
Historical materialism (or the natural science of history) is a practical
science that involves development of the tools for social change through a
system of deductive analyis that models the historical process itself
(Lenin). The historical process involves the development of certain
particular material systems which necessarily must come into contradiction
with the universal natural conditions out of which it emerges. For example,
the forces of production, labour and the means of production, come into
contradiction with the definite relations whereby men produce their social
life. Now then, "the sum total of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness". The economic structure of society is itself a
closed, self organized and self-developing system hence its own development
cannot explicate the development of the forces of production. Within the
economic system, the forces of production remain sublated in abstract forms
relative to the concreteness of the social relations that comprise the
relations of production. So far, we are quite in agreement with Marx, so
where or what is the "cop out"?
What Marx fails to explain adequately is the emergence of the forces of
production, i.e. the conditions of the emergence of production. I qualify
my critique by use of the term, adequately, because Marx does provide a
general theoretical representation of the context of the forces of
production in his theory of labour as the specifically human form of the
self-perpetuating property of life in general. The concept of labour as the
particularly human practice of self-reproduction is tolerable as long as the
means and ends of labour activity remain intuitive (socially intuitive that
is). This condition can only persist, if at all, in the simplest kinds of
technical systems and economies. Where the means of production are complex
and the division of labour, manufacturing and then the factory system,
prevail, the intuitive social determination of social needs and the
intuitive comprehension of productive practice is totally inadequate for the
development of the forces of production.
In the Annenkov letter Marx accounts for the new developments of the forces
of production in several key paragraphs:
7. Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive
forces—upon which his whole history is based—for every productive force is
an acquired force, the product of previous activity. Thus the productive
forces are the result of man's practical energy, but that energy is in turn
circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive
forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him,
which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.
The simple fact that every succeeding generation finds productive forces
acquired by the preceding generation and which serve it as the raw material
of further production, engenders a relatedness in the history of man,
engenders a history of mankind, which is all the more a history of mankind
as man's productive forces, and hence his social relations, have expanded.
From this it can only be concluded that the social history of man is never
anything else than the history of his individual development, whether he is
conscious of this or not. His material relations form the basis of all his
relations. These material relations are but the necessary forms in which his
material and individual activity is realised.
Regarding the historical introduction of machinery Marx writes:
17. In passing I should also point out that, not having understood the
historical origin of machinery, Mr. Proudhon has still less understood its
development. Up till 1825—when the first general crisis occurred—it might he
said that the requirements of consumption as a whole were growing more
rapidly than production, and that the development of machinery was the
necessary consequence of the needs of the market. Since 1825, the invention
and use of machinery resulted solely from the war between masters and
workmen. But this is true only of England. As for the European nations, they
were compelled to use machinery by the competition they were encountering
from the English, in their home markets as much as in the world market.
Finally, where North America was concerned, the introduction of machinery
was brought about both by competition with other nations and by scarcity of
labour, i.e. by the disproportion between the population and the industrial
requirements of North America. From this you will be able to see what wisdom
Mr Proudhon evinces when he conjures up the spectre of competition as the
third evolution, as the antithesis of machinery!
In(P 7) Marx accounts for the social impact of the forces of production as
function of prior technical and SOCIAL developments and in (P17) he
describes the development of the historically concrete mechanization of
labour of the late 18th and 19th century as the product of the war between
masters and workmen (in England) and the war between English masters and
their foreign competitors in the industrialising world. So Marx regards the
forces of production of having a social origin (P7). Considering that the
relation of production are the basic condition for social life, does this
mean that the relations of production are in fact the cause of new forces of
production? The war between masters and workmen (in England) and the war
between English masters and their foreign competitors in the industrialising
world is exactly the truth of capitalist economics (written large). Indeed,
does Marx intend to account for the development of the forces of production
by seeking their origins in political economy?
The answer to both questions for reasons stated above and for the reasons
you give below must be a resounding, NO! Unfortunately, neither Marx nor
Engels ever give a truly satisfactory explanation for the emergence of new
forces of production. Lenin came close to formulating an explanation, but
never appreciated fully the inevitable outcomes of his own reasoning. For
orthodox Marxist theory, the development of the forces of production remains
some sort of constant outside the historical process itself that drags the
system forward much like a steam engine drags forward a train of cars.
There is a dialectical explanation, but it is not in the teapot model of
successive technological innovations working against a static social system
and eventually overthrowing the latter in explosive revolutions. The
explanation neccessitate our regarding the relations of production and the
whole superstructure they produce in constant contradiction with a system of
material knowledge that sublates the social relations of production and its
satillite social systems as abstractions relative to the concrete
development of the practical knowledge that serves to realize the new needs
produced by social life. In other words, science and technology are the
system of human activity emergent out of the relations of production that
accounts for the development of new forces of production. The schema:
forces of production - relations of production - science and engineering,
provides a full explanation for the historical process of the development of
men's material production of his social life.
The schema of "forces of production - relations of production - science and
engineering" explicates the development of the forces of production, and
accounts for the social component of this development, but at a price. If
the development of the forces of production are emergent (as a separate
system) out of the relations of production, then the historical development
of the forces of production are much more systematically related to the
relations of production and vice versa. That is, the model of the
historical development of the forces of production should be more like a
process of melting ice or fog lifting out a lake rather than of the boiling
teapot. Instead of occasional bursts of change from a social system under
pressure we have a continual state of revolutionary development, much of it
being managed by the masters instead of the mastered! Social life is to be
regarded as in a state of continual change most of it fairly gradual, even
if accompanied by what subjectively appears to be violent and dramatic
events of tremendous social significance.
Let's look at Marx most famous quote in its entirety. I have numbered the
paragraphs for points of reference only. Marx writes:
Karl Marx: 1). In the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,
relations of
production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their
material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
rises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness.
V2: dealt with
2). The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.
V2: dealt with
3). At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces
of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or —
what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property
relations
within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of
the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
V2: dealt with
4). Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the
economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly
transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always
be made
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production,
which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal,
political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms
in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our
opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can
we
not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on
the
contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the
contradictions of
material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive
forces and the relations of production.
V2: dealt with in part.
We should remember that Marx was living in exciting times; the English
industrial revolution, the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the
Revolutions of 1848 and the associated Charterist movement. Regarding these
events from the broader perspective of the 21st century these events were
hardly as clear-cut or as revolutionary as they appeared to him.
It turns out that the English civil wars of 1640 and of 1688 did not
represent the victory of capitalism over landed interests (the landed
aristocracy continued it absolute rule of England up to the great reforms of
the 1840s when the industrial proletariat and industrial capital united to
"democratise" the rule of parlement) and the French revolution at the end of
the 18th century was only the beginning of a long process of liberalization
of the French state which was only finally accomplished shortly before WWI.
In both these cases the capitalist bourgeoisie realized its path to
political power only long after they had taken over effective control of the
state economy and the remnants of feudal society were entirely based on
desperately maintained political control and social ritual. Even in the US,
it took the civil war (some 70 odd years after the American Revolution) to
realize the long held and fought for liberal objectives of N. America's
capitalist bourgeoisie.
The fact of the matter is that revolutions in social organization of
production occur when the forces for the new form are clear in their
objectives, united in their purpose, and, most importantly of all, strong
enough to make the change.
4). No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which
there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production
never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured
in
the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself
only
such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it
will
always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material
conditions
of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
V2: This is in my view in some parts a bit mystical, a remnant of the worse
aspects of Hegelian idealism in Marx's thinking. Social orders do not
perish, but change.
The development of the forces of production is invariably accompanied by
social change, even if that change involves only a subsector of the
universal social system. Thus capitalist modes of production emerge deep in
the Middle ages, long before the emergence of machine production. Even if
the guilds still maintained a certain degree of freedom of the more skilled
labour, the High Middle Ages sees a development of an urban proletariat of
sorts (apprentices, journeymen and poor workmen), the beginnings of conflict
of ideologies of individual choice and freedom vs the conservative social
ethic of the church, and the development of a very active commercial and
financial capitalist economic sector. The latter half of the history of the
European Middle Ages is one of continual development of manufacturing
processes, of social rebellion of the city against the rural based
aristocracy, and of the development of the financial organization that could
handle the kinds of capital necessary for the development of capitalist
modes of production.
The most dramatic form of this change is when a fully developed subsystem of
the relations of production replace the moribund older universal system.
This certainly occurred in England, the US and France where the development
of both capitalist masters and the proletariat working class develop within
the declining but still dominant feudal system and then take it over when
they are strong enough to push the latter aside. Among the most diagnostic
signs of this process of replacement is the historical fact that most of
these last phases of the decline and fall of old moribund systems are
accompanied by short but effective alliances between the capitalist
bourgoisie and the working classes followed by an almost immediate rise in
the intensity of the renewed conflict between them.
5). In broad outlines Asiatic[A], ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois
modes
of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic
formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last
antagonistic
form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of
individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of
life
of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the
womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of
that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of
society to a close.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm
V2: Let's hope so. The most recent attempts to establish such a society
didn't go so well, and I suspect that the form such a society will take if
and when it does take is still beyond our immediate capacity to design. In
this regard I fully concur with Marx. I also suggest, as did he, that such
a system will include neither the proletariat nor the capitalist.
WL: Marx accounts for the historical progression from one mode of production
to another, by first redefining history on the basis of the progressive
accumulation of productive forces, rather than God's will, and locating the
change
factor or change wave as a movement of antagonism arising from the
development
of the material productive forces of society.
Marx alledged "problem of accounting for the impact of material forces on a
system (of the relations of production ) that is in essence a closed,
self-organizing, and self-developing organization" seems to misstate Marx
meaning
because he states that social revolution arises from the development of the
material power of production or the productive forces, rather than the form
of
accumulation, i.e., capitalist profits, in regard to the bourgeois mode of
production and this is the case with every other mode of production. It is
the
spontaneous development of the productive forces and the human ingenuity
behind such
development that is the material force that impacts a given state of
development of the relations of production. Please tolerate another return
to Marx and
his letter of Dec. 28, 1846.
Karl Marx: Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive forces—
upon which his whole history is based—for every productive force is an
acquired
force, the product of previous activity. Thus the productive forces are the
result of man's practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed
by
the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already
acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not
create,
which is the product of the preceding generation. The simple fact that every
succeeding generation finds productive forces acquired by the preceding
generation and which serve it as the raw material of further production,
engenders a
relatedness in the history of man, engenders a history of mankind, which is
all
the more a history of mankind as man's productive forces, and hence his
social
relations, have expanded. From this it can only be concluded that the social
history of man is never anything else than the history of his individual
development, whether he is conscious of this or not. His material relations
form
the basis of all his relations. These material relations are but the
necessary
forms in which his material and individual activity is realised.
V2: Certainly the concept that Historical process is based on the
progressive accumulation of productive forces is a marked improvement on the
opaque assertion that history is a reflection of God's will, however, to
replace God's will with an explication of development as a function of
progress that does not account for the conditions of this progress is
minimal progress. Equally the analogy of historical process to the
whistling teapot is quaint, but fails to stand up to historical actualities.
There is no such thing as the spontaneous development of the forces of
production. Such an idea simply replaces God with the forces of production.
To the rational and practical analyst of history, the term, "spontaneous",
is as opaque as, "God's will".
The significance of the problem of accounting for the impact of material
forces on a system (of the relations of production ) that is in essence a
closed, self-organizing, and self-developing organization" is exactly what
Marx meant when he argues, correctly in my view that social revolution
arises from the development of the material power of production or the
productive forces, rather than the form of accumulation, i.e., capitalist
profits, in regard to the bourgeois mode of production and that this is the
case with every other mode of production.
The problem in Marx's argument is that he does not rationally and
practically account for the development of the forces of production, and not
in his attribution of social change (revolution if you will) to changes in
the material conditions of the production of social life.
WL: Marx does in fact indicate and accounts for the dynamic factor that
compels the bourgeois mode of production to undergo its evolutionary leap
and he
does not imply that it is capitalist profits. Nor is the issue of social
revolution during our present life cycle located in the mode of accumulation
or
capitalist profits but rather in the development of the productive forces.
Marx
states clearly, "at the same time the productive forces developing in the
womb of
bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that
antagonism."
V2: To switch analogies from the teapot to mammalian parturition does not
make them any less opaque.
Earlier you stated:
V): The problem with Marx's argument that at some point the development of
the forces of production somehow create conditions that so contradict the
extant mode of production that a revolution occurs and a new mode emerges
out of the old. Logically, dialectically this is tantamount to ditching the
dialectical argument in favour of an override that breaks the otherwise
unassailable system of relations of production (the dialectical properties
of which are self-organization and self-growth). Marx specifies how this
occurs only by example without providing a theoretical explanation how
developing forces of production overcomes the closed system of relations of
production. Engels, apparently aware of the logical-theoretical problems of
this hypothesis, twists and turns and finally mobilizes the dialectical
relation between quantity and quality to explain this jump. The problem
with the quantity to quality relation is that is impossible to determine
what 'temperature' must be reached before accumulated forces of production
overcome the relations of production.
WL: First, the issue of social revolution for today is not posed as whether
or not the bourgeois mode of production and accumulation facilitates the
bourgeois mode of production and accumulation. Social revolution comes about
as the
result of changes in the productive forces or today the revolution in the
technological under pin of our existing system of production. The evolving
social
revolution or evolutionary leap - transition, from electromechanical
production relations of production to electro-computer (advanced robotics
and
digitalized processes) production is the content of today's world.
Marx provides the precise tools to unravel this process for all time. A new
technology emerges within the existing relations of production. This
qualitative new ingredient is first grafted onto existing processes within
productivity
infrastructure, and begins alteration of the pathways of the infrastructure.
This is the material impact of the new qualitative ingredient. The pathways
of
the old infrastructure cannot contain the new qualitative addition to
production and in turn gives way to restructuring. The restructuring of the
productivity infrastructure - relations of production as a totality, passes
from
conflict to antagonism or rather the contradiction is replaced by antagonism
because
the old relations of production and their corresponding property forms block
the universal emergence of the new law system of production contained within
the new qualitative ingredients that have emerged in the womb of the old
society. For instance, the new productive forces in our society could be
run - worked
day and night, but this would quickly fill up the national markets and
immediately collide with the barrier - social contract, that requires labor
exchange
AND the sell of labor power as a basis for consumption. This is the fetter
or
the contradiction of the bourgeois mode of production. However this
contradiction is not sufficient for social revolution as described by Marx
above. This
contradiction has to be replaced by the antagonism that arises from the
revolution in the productive forces.
V2: Marx almost provides the precise tools to unravel this process for all
time, and, more importantly, he provides us with the tools to further
develop his work. In this case he provides us with the precise tools for
understanding how the forces of production serve as the conditions for the
relations of production. He also provides us with a paradigm for building
tools to understand and manage social processes by determining the relation
between material and ideal conditions and in rooting the paradigm deeply in
natural scientific theory and method. What he does not provide us with is
a tool for understanding and managing the development of new forces of
production, the development of the new technology that emerges within the
existing relations of production.
This does not mean that the communists should wait or not attempted to take
power when social upheaval and discontent boils over. We fight for our ideas
even when they are not popular or can be realized because of our
understanding
of the direction of society and our ideological belief system.
V2: It appears to me that in the light of recent history we must carefully
review the practical goals of Historical Materialism and to redesign, to the
extent we can, the aims and means of progressive action. It is my belief
that considering the state of the world today, the revolution is much more
complex and extended than was once thought and we have the time and
responsibility to rethink theory and strategy and tactics. The most
immediate problem on our hands is human survival under the conditions of
advanced capitalist development whose emerging power is as great as is its
designed obliviousness to the dangers it presents to human survival of any
kind. And, as you should well be aware, this needs immediate action.
In a sense Marx and Engels constructed the infrastructure of our
understanding of history as the progressive accumulation of productive
forces and why
society has moved in class antagonism.
Waistline
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