s.artesian wrote:
I understand that, but Smith is wrong, particularly where he states: "He makes this change in the "passions" dominant in agriculture a significant contributor to "the improvement and cultivation of the country." That change in passions requires is a change in class; and the economic, property, social change precedes that.
Marx also makes a change in passions (the "new passions" having developed within the preceding class relations) a cause rather than a consequence of changes in class relations, as in his account of the destruction of the "petty mode of production." "At a certain stage of development, it [the 'petty mode of production'] brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self- earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1 How could the non-capitalist "passions" of the feudal lords - their "most slothful indolence," their "prodigality," their propensity to "perpetual and senseless wars" resulting in "uninterrupted, senseless devastation" - have led by themselves to the transformation of feudal into capitalist relations of production? Engels has the development of capitalist relations occurring through the substitution of the "burghers" and their "passions" - e.g. "the thirst for gold" - for the "nobility" and theirs. "the nobility became ever more superfluous and ever more of an impediment to development, the burghers became a class which embodied the further progress of production and commerce, of education, and of social and political institutions." Ted
