So, I am done now, although there is some chance that I will improve upon it in the future. Since I am done, I figured I may as well post the whole monstrosity here even though I can't imagine anyone reading it.
The Marxist Conception of History:
1.
How not to think about history (Part A)
Since this essay is about history, I thought I'd begin with the very first historical act: the creation of Adam by God.
We have it on good authority that in the beginning, Adam lived in idyllic isolation in Paradise and spent his time naming things – we have to assume he did this for his own amusement as there certainly wasn't anyone to use these newly invented names with. A 'Noble Savage,' he had inborn in him all the Natural Rights of Man undiminished in his isolation, just as God intended. Unfortunately, these rather abstract rights got in the way of more concrete luxuries like sex, conversation, and keeping the Garden of Eden in reasonable order. So, in the usual seek-and-you-shall-find fashion, God caused Eve to be born from the left side of Adam's chest. We don't need to get too much into the details of what happened next, suffice it to say, they were fairly tawdry and may or may not have involved an illicit affair with a snake; but eventually Adam and Eve were booted out of Paradise.
Things are pretty grim in this Post-Lapsarian world and nature can be rather uncooperative in terms of yielding the requirements for human subsistence, but one way or another, Adam and Eve managed to be fruitful and multiplied. All in all, however, it's pretty clear that Adam would have been better off had he just left well enough alone and never asked for a companion in the first place.
What happened next is the subject of some debate. Some argue that all of humanity's problems really started from there, and because quantity does not turn into quality, these problems have only multiplied but have not essentially changed. Others, Francis Fukuyama, for example, argue that things were indeed tough for a bit, but we eventually figured things out and all lived happily ever after. There has been history, there isn't any longer.
This is, of course, a fairly uncharitable version of certain variants of the Judeo-Christian view of history. It is meant to bring out what is absurd in the anthropology of certain readings of the Bible. But it is worth noting that this fundamentally mistaken and mysterious theory of human society informs even some of the most ardently secular social theories. Rousseau's Social Contract, for example, seems to imagine that society was invented when a couple of men – never women – in the wild happened upon each other and decided that it might be convenient to hang around. Subsequently, other thinkers complicated this theory by the realisation that if three rather than two noble savages should have entered into the Social Contract, then two could gang-up and oppress the one. That these social contracts were always entered into in odd numbers seems therefore be the root cause of oppression – the fact that the oppressed fairly often outnumber the oppressors should not get in the way of such neat philosophising. Engels demolishes this view with some humour in Anti-During.
Marxists, in spite of our scathing satirical wits1, have not really had the opportunity to engage everyone in reasonable, one-on-one conversation2 with the unfortunate result that there still exist the sort of rugged individualists who regard society as nothing more than a multiplication of individuals – some, rather more absurdly, regard it as nothing more than the multiplication of individual men.
2.
How not to think about history (Part B)
I started with a parody of some of the cruder religious conceptions of history because it contains in their original forms many of the errors that supposedly secular theorists of history develop – the same theorists who are often so smugly certain of their enlightenment but whose anti-clericalism and scorn of religious obscurantism often only highlights their own fetishes.
Perhaps the most common of these is that human history is the result of some immutable and inflexible human nature. If you think that this is only a common-sense crudeness, you have not read much 'evolutionary psychology'. What is rather embarrassingly called 'science' has proven that it is not necessary to have recourse to anything 'God-given': we can declare eternal and unchanging anything we please, so long as it exists today. It need not even exist among humans, the closest primate will do.
A common-sense understanding of violence, for example, is that it just stems from human nature. No essential difference is understood between the occasional violence among bands of hunter-gatherer's and the systemic wars of capitalism in the imperialist stage. According to this theory people today are neither more nor less rapine than we have ever been, only the technologies of violence have gotten more effective3. This perspective fails to see today's wars – in Afghanistan for example – in their particularity, it fails to see how the needs of American capital (and therefore the needs of American capitalists) have necessitated the war in Afghanistan and instead blame humanity's intrinsic evils.
The error is one of the 'level of generality' – in this case, information supposedly gleaned at the most general level of investigation (eternal human truths) are applied – miss-applied – to very concrete circumstances. The opposite error is also common: rather than human nature, Bush's particular eccentricity, stupidity, racism or corruption are blamed – of course since according to this theory such eccentrics always crop up, this error resolves into the first. This brings us to another error which it is necessary to guard against.
Capitalism is radically historicising. Every generation expects to live differently from the previous one, in fact, things change so quickly that I can expect my lifestyle today to be vastly different from what it might be ten years from now; I am also just old enough to remember when I had never heard of the Internet, something my younger sister would find as incomprehensible as living without a telephone. My father can remember at least four economic crises and his father could remember two world wars. History, more than ever, can seem not like the story of human nature bungling its way through time and every now and then getting better at it, but simply as chaos where change follows on change without reason or pattern. As Marx put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”
But if history is to be the study of both continuity and change in human society, it is surely necessary to be able to make differentiations on a sound basis. It is necessary to recognise that there are fundamental similarities between hunter gatherer societies and (for example) capitalist societies. At the very least, they are both examples of human society. And of course, there are considerable differences as well between the two. Put simplistically, they are both societies and share in common all things which must be true of any society; but any society A will have characteristics specific to the kind of society it is – which it will not necessarily share with any society B. Similarly, societies A1 and A2 will have in common all those characteristics which must be true of any society A but may still have important differences between them. In order to be able to make comparisons of this order, it is necessary to create nesting levels of generality.
3.
Marx's levels of generality
Bertell Ollman identifies seven levels of generality in Marx's conception of history, from the most unique to the most general, however, because Marx himself moves from the most abstract to the concrete4, I prefer to reverse the order – doing this, furthermore, highlights the way in which what is learned at the higher levels of abstraction can be brought to bear upon the lower ones. Ollman also includes two levels which we can omit for the purposes of this essay: [1] the level of the animal world which brings into focus everything we have in common with the animal world and [2] the level of generality “which brings into focus our qualities as material parts of nature.” (Ollman 56) With these changes in mind, Ollman's five remaining levels abstraction are [1] human society, [2] class society, [3] capitalist society as such, [4] contemporary capitalist society and [5] and “whatever is unique about a person or situation”. (55-56)
On the grounds however that historical materialism can be used to investigate other modes of production besides capitalism, and that in fact both Marx and Engles had things to say regarding classless societies, I prefer to revise levels two to four in the following manner:
Level 2 asks, “How is labour organised? Is it a classless society or a class society? What must hold true for such societies?” Doing so, and uncovering why a set of relations must be true for all classless societies allows us to make certain statements about communism as a classless society as well as primitive communism. The same process applied to class societies allows us to explain some of the continuity between the earliest forms of class society through to capitalism today (for example, the existence of a state).
Level 3 asks, “what sort of class society (slave, feudal, capitalist?)/ classless society (post- or pre- class?)? And what must hold true for any such society?” 'Capitalism' at the most abstract is treated in this level. It is here we identify its laws of motion and fundamental tendencies. For example, we can here identify the tendency for capital to become concentrated and centralised5 – what we cannot identify is the concrete development of that tendency, how it is being actually expressed, mitigated, resisted, realised. It is also here that we encounter proletarians and bourgeoisie as abstractions defined purely by how they relate to the means of production and to each other.
Level 4 allows us to bring more particularities into focus – proletarians can be concretised into engineers or waiters the bourgeoisie into CEO's or politicians. It asks what is true of a particular mode of production at any given moment of its development – the duration and scope of that moment must depend on the purpose of the investigation. It's also on this level where the inheritance of previous modes of production can most fruitfully be investigated (combined and uneven development in Russia6, for example – although this can then be generalised into a rule at the previous level).
And Level 5, once more, is “whatever is unique about a person or situation” (55-56).
Clearly the distinction between the last two levels can be blurred. Also, there are probably situations where it is useful to talk about humans as animals, animals as organisms, organisms as material things etc. (when dealing with ecology, for example) – but we can probably safely ignore these right now.
The skill and thoroughness with which Marx moved between these levels of generality accounts for the complexity, detail, and completeness of the Marxist conception of history. As a rule, Marx presents his analysis by moving from the general to the particular – this allows insights expressed at higher levels of abstraction to govern subsequent ones. However, these insights can themselves be acquired by generalising from information gathered at lower levels. It is by this system that Marx accounts for continuity and change, and by which he can identify and take account of transformation.
4.
Marx's anthropology
Many theories of history make use of different levels of generality, and even some of the crude theories I cited make of use at least two. Marx's approach is obviously not proven superior just because it has more than others, or because it has five (or seven, depending on who's counting) and not a different number.
Furthermore, we could make generalisations based on race, culture, climate, geology, religion or anything you like; it would still be necessary to justify the choice. Marx's levels arrange themselves fairly logically around a single organisational principle: production. The choice of production is based upon Marx's anthropology.
Any theory of history is simultaneously a theory of human society and human existence. Like any theory, it must make use of certain basic abstractions through which to understand the concrete world. But abstractions are not merely a cognitive tool for making sense of the complexity of the sensuous world, quite as easily, they can obscure it. In order to be of any use, the abstractions need to be valid. The basic abstraction of the Enlightenment was the Individual, Man, or the Monad. Somewhat later on, especially within the actual discipline of anthropology, the kinship group became a fundamental abstraction (it was not too long ago that the family was defined as 'the basic unit of society'). Outside of formal anthropology, it was after Hegel and especially after Marx that social theorists began to move away from a monadic view of society. Fairly soon after Marx, and in more or less direct opposition to him, Weber employed 'domination' as one of his central abstractions. Rather more recently, Habermans – supposedly updating Marx – has employed 'linguistic intersubjectivity'.
Some of these abstractions straightforwardly obscure our view of the real world, others are useful but incomplete. Marx's fundamental abstraction is 'Social Being'. It was a clear advance over the monadic view of society – the monad could never be the basic form of human existence, homo sapiens evolved from social animals to begin with and a human in isolation is not likely to survive or stay sane for very long at all.
Franz Mehring explains the importance of social being with admirable simplicity:
Historical materialism instead starts from the scientific fact that man is not simply an isolated animal, but rather a social animal, that he reaches consciousness only in the community of social groupings (tribe, gens, class) and can live in it only as a conscious human being, so that the material basis of these groupings determines his ideal consciousness and their progressive development represents the driving forces of human history.
(“On Historical Materialism” 77)
The concept is also empirically superior to the 'kinship group' for the obvious reason that the 'family' is no longer the all-important institution that it once was; for the opposite reason, it is also empirically superior to 'domination': we have considerable evidence that societies once existed that did not include domination. It is functionally superior to 'linguistic intersubjectivity' because, while communication is clearly intrinsic to any social animal, treating it as the basic category of human existence puts the cart before the horse: it is precisely because we are social animals that communication is necessary8. What is needed is a category that can include language but is not limited to it. As Marx puts it:
Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into "relations" with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.
(“The German Ideology” 11)
For Marx, humanity is social being because humans must consciously cooperate with each other in order to survive. More completely, humans work socially to transform nature in order to meet their living requirements. What is special about humans, what makes us different from a pride of lions or a hive of bees, is not simply the degree by which we can transform our environment but our ability to accumulate the results of our labour so that the very manner in which we interact with nature is transformed. Consciousness – which is always linguistic consciousness – is clearly a key factor in this process. Our ability to improve the means of production and to learn as a species new ways to live is what separates us from animals. Whoever said ideas were unimportant to Marx?
Conscious labour, for Marx, is a human activity of singular importance. It is the principle way by which we alter the material world in order to live, it is the very condition of our existence. But the category, 'labour', includes more than the work of the 'direct producers'; it includes the mental, cultural and spiritual work which – historically, anyway – has been the domain of the ruling classes. Because, however, this form of labour rests upon the work of the exploited classes, Marx includes it with a caveat:
Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.Such assertions can only stem from Marx's first premises. Unlike the premises of much of “'pure' theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.” these are not dogmatically or randomly selected, rather, they are given by the empirical facts of real human existence; they are the
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real individuals9, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity […] Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
(“The German Ideology” 6)
People make history – indeed, history is hardly more than the history of human activity – but people
must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.
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Marx says, furthermore, that the act of meeting existing needs is simultaneously the act of producing new ones, hence this is also 'the first historical act'. Furthermore humans who “daily remake their own life” are also making more humans – after all, the task of meeting our needs surely includes the need to reproduce. Hence “the production of life” – by which Marx understands both labour and procreation – is a “double relationship”: it is both a “natural” and a “social” relationship (10). The satisfaction and production of human needs is a social relationship because labour is always social labour: one way or another every act of labour exists in cooperation and exchange with others. Simply by living, people are forced to inhabit social relations which are historically given – or, in Marx's words: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (“The Eighteenth Brumaire” 11)
What can be seen from this account is that “making history” immediately and directly includes transforming historically given human society from the onset, it is the very first historical act.
5.
Marx's Problematic
The central problem to which Marx devoted his work and studies was “revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking10 and changing existing things. ” (19)
Marx's 'existing world' however offered him a unique opportunity to plumb deeply into the inner workings of human society. Capitalism was still emerging from its historic roots in feudalism but also steadily marching across the earth, battering “down all Chinese walls” and compelling “all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production” (“The Communist Manifesto” 6). It was not necessary to prove transformation: it was happening before his eyes.
The old assumptions of absolutism stood naked in their decadence but not yet completely defeated, while the revolutionary ideals and energy that had provided the rising bourgeoisie from Voltaire to Ricardo with such an incisive view of the old order and (to some degree) their place in the new one had already given way to the crass philistinism and shabby self-assurance which we have come to associate with the adjective 'bourgeois'. Moreover, the myths of universal liberation with which the first Napoleon had sold his wars had shown themselves in practice to have justified a new ruling class that was as brutal and savage as the old; capital came “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (“Capital” 482)
It was not necessary for Marx to prove that capitalism was a class society because capitalism itself had torn the veil of “religious and political illusions” that had masked feudal exploitation and “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ” (“The Communist Manifesto” 5). This truth is less obvious today where we are naturalised into an already existing and sophisticated ideological system and where working class resistance has managed to improve the lives of a considerable portion of workers.
Marx had already identified conscious social labour as the condition of human history, and, as we have already seen, makes the way in which humans produce the basis of his levels of generalisation. However, having already identified capitalism as the objective of his inquiry, he does not make the means and instruments of production the principle of his taxonomic system, but rather the division of labour through which these are activated. In a word, the class divisions of society:
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.
(“The German Ideology” 7)
There is clearly a link between asking the right questions (or rather, being confronted with them) and hitting upon the right methodology. But it is not simply that Marx's method is appropriate to dealing with the problem which he sets himself; Marx's method has rendered obsolete the very questions that came before him: sociology, history, anthropology, and to a lesser extent, philosophy – virtually every field of cultural inquiry has had their subject matter defined, either directly or through opposition, by the questions that Marx's method raises.
6.
The Mode of Production
Marx is concerned with transforming capitalist society into socialism. He didn't seek to do this through willpower or good intentions alone but instead searched for a dynamic endogenous to human society itself. At the same time, he had to come to grips with the obstacles that stood in the way of social transformation. To do this, he drew on an extraordinary wealth of historical knowledge – including of the bourgeois revolutions – and, quite as importantly, his own experience as a revolutionary. The classic summary of his investigations is in The Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
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.
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.
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.
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.
(“Preface to a Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy ” My italics)
Maintaining the mode of production is the necessary condition of maintaining a particular society. Hence the mode of production plays a double role: it makes possible existing society but at the same time sets a limit on what can be achieved within that society. It conditions the institutions, politics, and ideologies that maintain or strengthen the mode of production. Our very lives are lived around the necessity of labouring within the given mode of production. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
[The] mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.Marx defines his modes of production according to if and how surplus value is extracted – primitive communism, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society. But of course, different modes of production also imply certain levels of productivity. Slave society can only exist where labour produces enough to sustain both the slave and the slave owner, capitalism can only exist where there is enough surplus for general exchange. So the mode of production refers to how the transformation of nature to meet human needs – how the labour process – is organised and what it can achieve.
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The fundamental fact of the labour process is that it must occur on a self-sustaining level: it must at the very least be able to keep enough humans alive to continue working, otherwise we can't have history. But the mode of production is more than just a mode of subsistence, according to Marx it is a mode of life. I understand this to mean three related things.
First, we do not produce things merely to meet our subsistence needs. Winters require some protection from the cold, but what we wear also serves for aesthetic enjoyment, personal self-expression, it can signify identity or belonging in a community, and by signifying can actually help create that belonging. If our clothes are also uniforms they can be part and parcel of creating the awe and dread – or alternatively condescension – which a person in a uniform is meant to inspire. In just the same way, we do so much more with houses than take shelter, we do so much more with food than eat. What we can produce and consume conditions how we realise and express our lives: what art we can make, what games we can play, what thoughts we can think, it even conditions the state of our bodies.
Secondly, the very way production is organised conditions how we must organise our lives around it. It matters if at any particular stage of capitalism we work 8 to 10 hours a day doing jobs we don't believe in for bosses we despise to go home to households that don't function (or if we live alone) in neighbourhoods where we don't have any friends because we're too exhausted, alienated or atomised for healthy human interaction outside the workplace – these are not accidental attributes of capitalism, they are an integral part of it in its development.
Thirdly, the mode of production includes the class antagonisms which exist in any class society: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed ” (“The Communist Manifesto” 3). From these class antagonisms emerge the institutions of domination, compromise and resistance appropriate to them. Even the bourgeoisie might be willing to agree with this in some limited way. They might be willing to acknowledge, for example, that the state under capitalism roughly conforms to the needs of the capitalist class and from there proudly conclude that liberal democracy is the necessary product of bourgeois society. (This should also demonstrate the link between ideology and the mode of production!) But the contours of the class struggle are perpetually shifting: capitalism did indeed give us liberal democracy in many parts of the world; it has also given us fascism.
VII. The Forces of Production
The mode of production – whether it is primitive communism, slave, feudal, or bourgeois society– is defined primarily by whether or not exploitation is occurring and how. But this in turn is conditioned by the forces of production:
these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.
(“The Poverty of Philosophy” 61)
Of course, it does not necessarily follow from this that the industrial capitalist immediately gives you capitalism. More to the point, Marx's short hand should not be treated as more than what it is: if steam-mills could only give us capitalists, how would we get socialism?
The forces of production are everything we have at our disposal to change our environment in order to meet our historically developed needs. But these forces can only be worked in particular ways; in Marxist terms, concrete labour must correspond to the existing forces of production. But labour is always social labour, this means that labour becomes organised according to the requirements of the forces of production.
Chris Harman gives a striking example:
[The] heavy wheeled plough […] could deal with heavy soil instead of the light scratch plough of the ancient world. […] Its spread revolutionised both agricultural techniques and the relations among cultivators in manorial communities: the new plough was most efficiently used if peasants tilled strips of land rather than squarish fields, and, needing eight, rather than two, oxen to pull it, encouraged peasants to pool their resources through a new emphasis on communal cooperation.
(“From Feudalism to Capitalism” 56)
Engels gives an even clearer example in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:
To the barbarian of the lower stage, a slave was valueless. Hence the treatment of defeated enemies by the American Indians was quite different from that at a higher stage. The men were killed or adopted as brothers into the tribe of the victors; the women were taken as wives or otherwise adopted with their surviving children. At this stage human labor-power still does not produce any considerable surplus over and above its maintenance costs. That was no longer the case after the introduction of cattle-breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture. just as the wives whom it had formerly been so easy to obtain had now acquired an exchange value and were bought, so also with the forces of labor, particularly since the herds had definitely become family possessions. The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this purpose use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could also be bred just as easily as the cattle themselves.
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There is, however, some argument about what exactly constitutes the forces of production. Even within the relatively narrow circle of the Socialist Workers' Party there are at least three differing opinions.
Alex Callinicos, for example, makes a sharp distinction between the relations of production and the 'mode of co-operation' by which he seems to understand 'the social relations within which men work' – the way labour power is socially combined with the tools and materials in concrete labour (“Making History” 44-46). For Callinicos, the mode of co-operation is a subcategory of the forces rather than the relations of production; he justifies this by quoting from the German Ideology, “the mode of co-operation is itself a 'productive force'” (Qtd. in 44).
Callinicos is disagreeing directly with Harman:
It seems to me [Harman] to limit the notion of the 'social relations of production' far too much. Much of the power of Marx's account of history lies in the way in which it shows how small changes in the forces of production lead to small cumulative changes in the social relations arising directly at the point of production, until they challenge the wider relations of society. These small changes might involve new property relations, but in many, many important cases do not.
(“Base and Superstructure” 21)
Harman's formulation, which puts the forms of cooperation within the relations of production, like Callinicos' completely opposite interpretation, also makes sense if certain passages from Marx and Engles are taken rather than others. The Communist Manifesto, for example says, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ” (5) This is certainly correct, but it only makes sense if the category of 'relations of production' is broader than simply 'property relations' as Callinicos would have it and as the 'Preface' on its own would seem to suggest.
Finally, Colin Barker disagrees with both. In a previous publication (“Marxism and Philosophy” 112), Alex Callinicos argued that it was the relations of production which are independent and not the forces of production – Callinicos later amended this position – whereas Harman insists that it is the other way around. According to Barker:
To treat either as 'independent variables' implies a sharp distinction between the the two notions, such that the relations between them is one of external causality. Thus Chris [Harman] treats the productive forces as a 'first mover,' with changes in the social relations of production always as an effect of changed productive forces.
This conception won't do. To sustain the position, productive forces must be thought of as being quite distinct from the social relations. Yet, for Marx, it is clear that some social relations were themselves 'forces of production'. One obvious example is human productive cooperation, which is simultaneously a productive force and a form of social relations.
(“Comments From Colin Barker. Three Responses” 118)
I tend to agree with Barker. I think Callinicos and Harman are both treating the abstractions without enough flexibility. Although Marx's categories of analysis are based upon objective realities, precisely because they are mental abstractions, they can be used to bring into focus different aspects of that reality11 depending on the purposes of the analysis. It is clear that a mode of cooperation, the assembly line, for example, complete with a line manager to ensure maximum efficiency, is a piece of technology – a force of production – in that it enables industry to produce the commodities that it does. However in as much as the forms which concrete labour takes under capitalism place workers in particular combinations which affect everything from consciousness to the ability to organise, it may also be a relation of production. Relations of production understood at the level of 'capitalism in itself' (level 3) is an abstraction that only allows us to see 'property relations,' the actual relations arising at the point of production would be dealt with on the level of 'capitalism at a particular stage of development' (level 4) or even 'capitalism in a particular industry or workplace' (level 5).
But Barker continues:
[Harman] is correct, Marx's conception of human society and its development is centred on a key idea: production. But in Marx this idea is not limited to 'the action of human beings on their environment to get a living for themselves' (Harman p 17). Human production involves not only interaction with nature, but also the making of social relations and human character. Marx's brief formulation in the 'Preface' – 'men enter into definite relations' – is much better developed in Capital, where he emphasises how workers, in producing things, also reproduce the social relations of property and exploitation. The argument is an important one for Marxism: the very possibility of socialist revolution depends on the idea that the working class is the key force producing and reproducing the social relations of capitalist exploitation. What it makes one way it can also remake and change.12
(118-119)
In as much as Barker identifies labour power as a force of production, he is correct; and in as much he identifies the significance of conscious humanity among the forces of production, capable of laying hold of the accumulated heritage of their own labour in a revolution that totally transforms the relations of production – and with them, the rest of society – Barker is also correct. Nevertheless, his formulation obscures an aspect of the process that both Callinicos and Harman manage to capture quite well: the way in which labour power, as one element of the forces of production, develops within the context of all the other ones.
It is not simply that the exploited classes, as the producers of a society's wealth, can just choose to take command of the existing means of production and do with them as they please. If that were the case peasants might have established socialism, but they could not. For that to occur, two things had to be true: first, the forces of production had to be present to overcome scarcity (otherwise only an equality in poverty could have been established) and second, these forces of production had to require labour power to be organised in such a way that actually gave the labouring class sufficient social power – it had to throw them into what Marx and Engles, in The Communist Manifesto called “revolutionary combination”.
It is this which modern industry (Marx's “steam-mill”) has done; just as it has given us the industrial capitalist, so too has it given us the potentially revolutionary proletariat.
VIII. The Relations of Production
The forces of production play a determining role for the relations of production – that is, they make possible, impossible, likely or unlikely certain relations of production. These relations include those relations arising at the point of production, but, for Marx, what is decisive – what he uses as the basis for defining the different modes of production – are “the property relations.” That is not to say – as Alex Callinicos points out – that all we need to investigate is the “legal expression,” as Marx calls it; it is necessary to go beyond the 'metaphysical or juridical fiction' of the letter of the law and into the realities of effective control (Callinicos “Making History” 47). Relations of production, in other words, are class relations.
Understanding who has control over the conditions of production will also allow us to see how the relations of production act back upon the forces of production to be their “forms of development” or their “fetters”.
Chris Harman's works are a wealth of historical examples; in From Feudalism to Capitalism he explains that
The slave society of ancient antiquity which dominated the Mediterranean area until the 4th and 5th century AD collapsed through its inability to develop the forces of production after the 2nd century. The wealth of the Roman Empire was created by slavery and the ruling class of the empire sought to increase its wealth through increasing the number of slaves, to be obtained by warfare, rather than by any concern with increasing the productivity of labour. […]
But the point was eventually reached, as early as the the second half of the 2nd century, where the source of surplus for maintaining the urban civilisation began to run out: the supply of slaves began to decrease.
(52)
He also notes that in the beginning of the feudal period in Europe a lord could encourage “'his' serfs to use new techniques of production (often, in fact, old techniques known during antiquity but not used because they did not fit in with slave production).” (54)
There is a very definite limit, therefore, to the degree to which slavery can develop the forces of production. In a slave society where the source of labour power works underneath the whip of the slave master and is liable to be crucified at any moment, there is a disincentive to develop productive techniques that require skill or attention if it can at all be avoided – the principle source of accumulation is conquest whereby more slaves can be acquired and the most convenient developments are those that require more rather than better workers, or perhaps the capturing skilled prisoners.
Slave relations of production acted as a fetter upon the development of the forces of production because of the particular way in which these relations encourage the ruling class to reinvest their accumulated surplus. In this case, a considerable amount of the surplus must be invested in the means of warfare. Moreover, it would have been incredibly difficult to alter this dynamic: the expansion of the empire through conquest required it to go farther and farther for future conquest while having to defend a stretching boarder.
As Harman explains, the situation was entirely different for the first feudal lords whose principle source of wealth were the serfs who worked the land from which he extracted his tithes. He could increase his wealth by conquering the territories of rival lords but only on the condition that he could hold on to his new lands and protect the serfs who lived there. In such a situation, the lord had a good incentive to help the serfs within his control to develop better productive techniques that could yield a larger surplus and bring more land under cultivation.
But this incentive dwindled in proportion to the improvements which these superior productive forces made in the lifestyles of the feudal lords so that there came a point where the only incentive from above to develop the means of production came from the desire to conquer new lands from other lords and (the two are directly related) to protect those lands already had.
Franz Mehring provides an interesting anecdote which – with a little investigation – brings out another significant aspect of the relations of production:
In Danzig in 1529 Anton Müller discovered the so-called ribbon-loom (also called a small-wares loom), which produced from four to six pieces of cloth at the same time, but, since the City Council was afraid that this discovery could make paupers of a large number of the workers, they suppressed it, and had the inventor secretly drowned or strangled. In Leyden the same machine was used in 1629, but the lacemakers’ riots forced the authorities to ban it. In Germany, it was banned by Imperial Edicts in 1685 and in 1719. In Hamburg it was burned in public on the instructions of the magistrates. “This machine, which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and the power loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century.”
(13)
Such a thing is only conceivable where capitalism is not yet well developed. In 1764, the spinning jenny was invented; it's introduction into the labour process is one of the events that marks the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is not just forty-three years; it is the consolidation of capitalist social relations.
Where there exists a class who own nothing but their ability to work, where the dispossessed exist in such numbers to be a surfeit for the needs of investment, where there is such a glut of potential workers as to constitute a 'reserve army of labour', where there exists a class of people who control all the necessities for the production of material life and who can use that control to hire the labour power of others, where the market has spread to such an extent that it brings the bourgeoisie into irresistible competition with every other member of the class: there, in such circumstances, we cannot imagine that any advance in the means of production should be ignored simply because it could “make paupers of a large number of the workers.”13
And it is this last fact of capitalist relations – that every unit of capital is in competition with every other, that every capitalist is in competition with every other – that explains the fact that capitalism cannot exist without the
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned
(5)
But if the relation in which members of the ruling class stand to each other falls under the category 'relations of production,' the same is also true of the labouring classes. So for example, Marx analysis of the small-holding peasantry in France explains how their relations to their means of production conditions their relations to each other which in turn plays a role in structuring their relations to the other classes:
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
(“The Eighteenth Brumaire” 103)
In summary, class relations encompass [1] the relations of the ruling classes and the labouring classes to the forces of production, from there to [2] their relationship to each other and [3] to the other members of their own class.
9.
The Base and the Superstructure
Marx locates the motor of change in human society in our ability to improve the forces of production. He shows also that the relations of production which these forces entail can be both “the forms of their development” and “their fetters”. Successful revolutions burst the shell of the new society and allow “new superior relations of production” to take their place. Revolutions occur when there are insoluble conflicts between the “social forces of production” and the relations of production. The superstructure emerges from these two elements (the social forces of production and the relations of production), and therefore – in class societies – also from the class struggles which they entail. (Marx, “Preface”)
Chris Harmans writes that a newly established ruling class
creates a whole network of non-productive relations to safeguard the privileged position it has gained for itself. It seeks through these political, judicial and religious means to secure its own position. It creates a non-economic 'superstructure' to safeguard the source of its own privileges in the economic 'base'Harman understands the superstructure as fettering the base, right down to the forces of production. He ascribes the agency of the ruling classes to the political and ideological institutions, which, he seems to think, they alone create. He cites the example of ancient China where the dominant classes used their institutions to actually destroy “new productive means” in order to preserve existing social relations (14). It is certainly the case that ruling classes or sections of it can actively repress new technologies that might threaten their privileges (consider the way petroleum companies seem to have actively suppressed research in alternative sources of energy), but this is not the only way that relations of production can fetter the forces of production.
This very function of these 'non-economic' institutions means that they have enormous economic impact. They are concerned with controlling the base, with fixing existing relations of exploitation, and therefore in putting a limit on changes in the relations of production, even if this also involves stopping further development of the forces of production.
[…]
Old relation of production act as fetters, impeding the growth of new productive forces. How? Because of the activity of the 'superstructure' in trying to stop new forms of production and exploitation that challenge the monopoly of wealth and power of the old ruling class. Its laws declare the new ways to be illegal, its religious institutions denounce them as immoral, its police use torture against them, its armies sack towns where they are practised.
(“Base and Superstructure” 14)
In the previous section on relations of production, I already showed one other way: privileged groups acquire their privileges through the surplus that they take from the exploited classes; the very manner in which this surplus is generated for the ruling sects (whether through their control of slaves, their protection of serfs, their hiring of free wage-labour) directly conditions how this surplus is re-invested and their reasons for doing so.
Alex Callinicos, in turn, also disagrees with Harman, for different reasons:
[Harman] conceives of the superstructure as playing an essentially conservative, stabilising role. This follows from his treatment of it as those social relations ‘which are static and resistant to change’, but it doesn’t sit well with the stress he rightly lays on the role played by ‘superstructural’ factors – ideas, parties, etc. – in promoting revolutionary change (pp 24-42). It would seem better once again to follow Marx when he writes of ‘the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict [between the forces and relations of production] and fight it out.’ There is no implication here that ideology (and the superstructure of which it is part) necessarily play a stabilising role, freezing social relations, but only that ‘this consciousness must be explained from the contractions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.” (Selected Works, p 483)
(“Comments From Alex Callinicos. Three Responses” 124-125)
Harman's interpretation can be made to fit with certain statements of Marx taken in isolation, for example, “Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes [before the bourgeoisie].” (“The Communist Manifesto” 5), but Callinicos' seems to fit better with the more complete and explicit expressions of Marx and Engels.
More to the point, if the superstructure arises on the basis of economic production riven by class antagonisms, it must follow that it takes its form from every side of the class struggle – rather than, as Harman would have it, emerging purely out of the efforts of the ruling classes. (This is easy enough to demonstrate, see The Communist Manifesto: “This organisation of the proletarians into a class [...] compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.” (10))
Nevertheless, Harman's interpretation does bring out one important aspect of the base-superstructure binary:
So great is the reciprocal impact of the 'superstructure' on the base, that many of the categories we commonly think of as 'economic' are in fact constituted by both. So for instance, 'property rights' are judicial (part of the superstructure) but regulate the way exploitation takes place (part of the base).
(14)
The division between base and superstructure is a methodological one. The state, for example, can actually take part in economic production – the state education system is directly involved in the production of the single most important commodity: labour power. But by discussing the state in terms of superstructure, Marxists highlight the role it plays in the class struggle: “as the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonism” and perpetuating class oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes in favour of the ruling class (Lenin. “The State and Revolution” 7).
As Marx says, the concept of the superstructure is a way to focus on all the sites wherein people become conscious of and actually fight out the class struggle generated in the base. It is not necessary from this to claim that every cultural phenomenon is a direct result of the forces and relations of production, but ascribing such things to the superstructure allows us to locate them within the context of broader social formations, and places them in relation –even if very mediated relation – to the rest of class society.
Precisely because the superstructure is the arena in which the class struggle is fought, it interacts with the base – with both the forces and relations of production. They are in a relationship of mutual entailment; they are both, in a sense, each other's precondition and the result, even though in the 'last instance' it is the base that determines the superstructure.
It is important to understand both these concepts – determination in particular – as Marx makes frequent use of them. Burtell Ollman is very useful:
precondition and result is a double movement that processes in mutual interaction undergo in becoming both effects and makers of each other's effects simultaneously. For this, the two must be viewed dynamically (it is a matter of becoming a precondition and becoming a result) and organically (each process only takes place in and through the other).
(“Studying History Backwards” 134)
Determination on the other hand is used to give particular weight to one side of the relationship.
In his discussion of 'force' Engels makes it clear that the initial development of the state was required to safeguard the common interests of a society including its social production in the face of conflicting interests and therefore must have acted back upon the base in a process of mutual (if sometimes conflicting) development (“Anti-Duhring” 125-126). The reason that Marxists typically say that the “economic structure of society” forms the base of, or determines, such superstructural formations as the state is that in spite of the reciprocal relationship which they share, the state is only possible on the basis of production and furthermore is made necessary by the needs of (particular forms of) production itself.
The side on which the determination lands can shift depending on the circumstances. So, in The Civil War in France, Marx puts the determination on the side of the political formation of the commune, “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor” but notes that except “on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion.” (37)
However, even this is ultimately determined by the base: it is only capitalism that made the struggles of the workers in Paris possible.
10.
Capitalism and The Law of the Tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit
“The battles may be determined but not their outcome: victory requires a different... determination.”Compared with feudalism, capitalism represents a massive advance in the forces of production. In the crudest sense, the socialisation of labour in industry that develops under capitalism has made it possible to produce more use values (economic goods) than ever before. Furthermore, the development of the instruments of production has both allowed and necessitated a development in labour power in the same terms: economic reproduction has required an increase in the numbers of the exploited class and has dramatically increased labour power's ability to transform nature. In its own terms, capitalism rapidly develops its own ability to produce commodities as a result of the perpetual drive towards reinvestment necessitated by capitalist competition, and has expanded its market over virtually the whole of the earth. That is, capitalism has developed the forces of production in both the trans-historical sense of increasing the production of goods and in the specifically capitalist sense of commodities.
-Lev Davidovich in Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction
The expansion of capitalism has meant the increasing socialisation of labour. The vast majority of the commodities we consume are made of materials sourced from all over the world and even their component parts have been assembled and developed in workplaces across continents. The establishment of capitalism was the establishment of an entire class of people who own no productive force save their own ability to work, and who must sell this ability as a commodity in order to live. The mode of cooperation entailed by modern industry has involved large segments of that class in common industrial activity inside the relatively concentrated spaces of their workplaces, offices and factories. It has even allowed a common identity to develop outside of the workplace by pushing them into the same neighbourhoods and (often enough) slums. Capitalism has created its own gravediggers.
At the same time as it has developed a working class united by the reality of exploitation and the ability to organise against their rulers, it has developed the capitalist class whose members are forced into competition with each other by the very same fact which unites the proletariat: the fact that economic goods exchange as commodities.
Competition compels the bourgeoisie to improve their means of production the better to undercut their rivals. They do this by reinvesting the surplus value which they take from the labour of the working class into capital accumulation. To stay competitive, every capitalist must match the productivity and efficiency of their rivals – that is, they must match their level of investment. The result is a long term trend for the ratio of constant capital, or dead labour, to rise in proportion to living labour; a tendency to increase what Marx calls the 'organic composition of capital'. However, because it is the conscious living labour that produces the surplus value, the increase in the organic composition of capital tips the the ratio of profit to investment steadily in favour of investment – that is, there is a long term tendency for the rate of profit to fall (See Marx “Capital” Vol. 3 chapter 13). This leads to economic crises.
These crises slow commodity production and exchange and dampen investment – that is, they interfere with capital's ability to reproduce itself. What is central to crises however is not the damage it does to the pockets of the ruling class but the damage it does to workers and their ability to reproduce the level of consumption they had previously, and on the level of their ability to live and reproduce at all. Even in periods of relatively good average profits where the system seems to be healthy from the perspective of the rulers, the ability or inability of the working classes to live at the culturally established minimum is critical. But now the working class itself, its numbers, its potentially revolutionary combination, its immense social power, becomes a living, breathing and ever present danger to the very system which necessitates their existence. Capitalism lives upon the very force which alone is capable of working “out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” (Marx. “The Civil War in France” 37)
Clearly, the destruction of capitalism will not be effected by the introduction in every factory of a sufficiently costly machine. The central contradiction under capitalism is the antagonism between socialised labour and capitalist property relations. This leads to crises which have direct implications for socialised labour – or, more precisely, labourers – who must destroy capitalism in order to guarantee their own survival and improve the conditions of their development.
The absurdity of capitalism is that improvements in the means of making life should lead to the ruin of so many lives. But it is precisely the fact that it does this, and in fact cannot help but do this, that guarantees that workers will struggle – at times for their very survival. What is not guaranteed is that they will win.
For that to occur, the superstructural elements will have to be in place: there shall have to be socialists who are capable of and ready to lead struggle and to take them towards revolutionary heights. The working class shall have to be organised and the lessons of past struggles will have to be generalised. People, not things, not factories nor machines, make history. But we do so for the most part unconsciously and each striving towards disparate ends. But, precisely because history is nothing but the creation of real human beings, it is possible, through the organisation of the working class, for the immense majority to make history in pursuit of a conscious goal.
The working class can assign a telos to history.
11.
Dialectics
Dialectics is a bit of a floating signifier among Marxists, so I've generally avoided the word. Even some of its concepts – relation, negation, contradiction, etc. – have a tendency to be used carelessly. I have avoided them or only used them where I was fairly certain they were appropriate in the hopes that the content would be clearer for it, even if it may seem less precise to the grizzled dialectician. (Obviously, I could not avoid them in my choice of quotes.)
Nevertheless, I have tried to present Marx's conception of history in its dialectical complexity – even if the presentation itself is a bit eclectic. I do not believe it is possible to make sense of Marx's social theory unless it is understood dialectically, and so something needs to be said about dialectics itself.
Dialectics, as I understand it, is a theory of systemic transformation which regards the interacting parts of a system as internally related. In other words, each of a system's elements are defined functionally, that is, by how they work and develop with every other element of the system.
By definition, therefore, dialectics is a totalising outlook. Unlike a theory of external relations which sees phenomena as particular and defined in and of themselves, dialectics see phenomena as 'relations' within an over-arching system. The trick, therefore, is defining the limits of that system.
This very text, for example, has at least one obvious flaw. Right from the onset I excluded from the presentation those aspects of human existence which can be analysed on the level of humans as animals. But Marx's anthropology sees the production of human life as a 'double relationship', both natural and social. For convenience's sake, and due to the limits of my own understanding, I fractured that double relationship to focus almost exclusively on the social half of it; but – and Global Warming should make us all aware of this – no theory of human society and history could be complete without the other half.
The limits of the system are principally set by the objective of the study. A theory of the cosmos, for example, would not be particularly relevant to an analysis of human history even though a large enough comet striking the earth would have some serious consequences for history. That said, not all phenomena can be defined as unified systems no matter what the intentions of the investigation. The development of third world nationalism, for example, cannot possibly be investigated according to the rules of its own internal dynamics: it must be seen in its relation to the larger developments of global capitalism because its interactions with it are too constant to be dismissed as mostly irrelevant the way we would do of comets or sun spots.
But viewing a system as unified with its elements internally related to each other furnishes us with some descriptive and cognitive tools: ways of understanding the developments of the various relations within the system. It is not necessary from there to assume that all such developments (sometimes called movements) need to be described in terms of these tools. Actually, these tools are useful because they allow us to perceive and describe changes and relations that had not been clearly seen or well understood before the tools were developed. Many changes and relation exist which are easily enough seen and more or less well understood without the use of such dialectical concepts as 'unity of opposites', 'negation of the negation' or 'the transformation of quantity into quality'.
The problem with viewing the world as a total system is that, even when we set certain limits on that system for the purpose of study, it is still bound to be extraordinarily complex. Rather than simply dismissing that complexity as an inchoate mass of scarcely intelligible parts, Marx made use of abstractions that temporarily isolated phenomena from that chaos. Abstractions bring into focus certain aspects of a relation while putting to one side those other aspects which are not yet relevant to the study. 'Bourgeoisie' is a fairly good example of this. To be bourgeois is to occupy a class position that allows one to live off of the surplus created by the proletariat by virtue of that class' effective control over the means of production. But 'bourgeoisie' does not tell us anything about how a person actually functions within that class – whether she is a CEO, a majority share holder, a senator; whether he is involved in banking or manufacturing or politics – such aspects need to be brought in at a lower level of abstraction when the investigation requires it. We can move still lower: what firm, what bank, what government or party?
But even after we have moved to this very low level of abstraction, we would still be isolating the object of our study from other relations – family relations, gender, race, age, etc. So even a single abstraction can be pushed towards greater and greater concreteness. Fruitful investigation requires us to find out what aspects of a relation are relevant and what aspects are not.
But a systemic analysis requires more than the refinement of a single abstraction; it is necessary to make multiple abstractions and to make them relate to each other. Marx's law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit (LTFRP) is a law which operates at a high level of abstraction – it is true of capitalism as such. But Marx notes that there are 'countervailing factors' to this law which can effect the way it plays out: it is possible to increase the rate of exploitation, for example, and crisis itself, by wiping out capital, can decrease the organic composition of capital and restore the rate of profit. Furthermore the actions of different parts of the system also play a part in the expression of the law – war (an action of the state), of example, can also wipe out large chunks of capital.
Marx moves from the complex totality, to the abstract, to the concrete-in-thought; this movement both refines the starting abstractions and brings them all into relation with each other. The concrete-in-thought shows how the elements of the system, which have been analysed as sets of abstractions, determine the reality of the system being investigated.
Marxists have been accused, occasionally with some justice, of attempting to 'read Shakespeare off of production' – of being reductive. There has been so much prattle about Marxism seeing people as determined or 'over-determined' by this or that aspect of the system. The refusal to adopt a deterministic view of humanity has therefore coincided with a refusal to adopt Marx's method of analysing systems as totalities – as though simply surrendering to chaos guaranteed freedom. But consider the human subject:
It is clearly entirely silly to see the human subject as not being internally related to the 'external world' and by the same token the very idea of the 'external world' is impossible except as it relates to the subject. So the subject is always a historical subject determined by the external world and acting in it through time. This actually avoids the freedom/determinism debate because it suggests that the historically developing subjective agent cannot be understood – could not even exist! – except as internally related to all of its own particular determinations. Rather, the subject is in a 'dialectical' relationship with its external material conditions because by the very fact of living it changes these conditions and hence changes itself (it acquires history) and its own determinations – but its own nature as conscious subjectivity counts as one of those determinations.
One does not avoid being reductive simply by refusing to see how every element of a system determines both the reality of that system and every other element within it. Rather, it is necessary to assess as many of the determinations as possible: to move systematically and thoroughly from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought. This is the only way to approach reality. 'Determinism' really amounts to a failure to gather determinations – it is the result of moving too quickly from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought.
Marx's investigations of history have furnished us with an insight into the possible trajectory of human society (via the development of the forces of production) and with a clear object for future investigations (the relationship between social production and life). The skill with which he carried out his investigations has left us with an incredibly rich legacy of insights and knowledge, but they are not easy formulas. The work which Marx has done does not excuse us from the tasks of analysis. In the fresh application of Marx's method, it is still necessary to investigate all the various levels of determination and to attempt to measure their actual weight in concrete reality.
But consciousness must be practical consciousness: to understand reality in its richness we will have to approach it not scholastically but practically– we shall have to live within and be one of the determinations themselves, we shall have to come to grips with reality in practice. Or, as Marx put it:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth – i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
(“Theses on Feuerbach” II)
1Das Kapital is a real romp.
2Not really our goal at all.
3And just to prove that calling yourself a Marxist doesn't protect one from the errors of capitalist ideology, this is almost a direct quote from Terry Eagleton's Holy Terror. Somewhat ironically, Eagleton wrote another book, Ideology: An Introduction which is possibly among the most valuable contributions to the debates on this issue.
4For a detailed discussion of this see Brien, Kevin M. “The Dialectical Movement from the Abstract to the Concrete” in Marx, Reason and the Art of Freedom. (Templeton University Press, Philidelphia 1987) p.17-44
5This is the tendency for the units of capital to become fewer and larger. Another way of putting this is that as competition forces some capitalists to the wall they are either bought up or else the vacuum created by their death is filled by the expansion of the surviving capitalists. This occurs both horizontally (fewer and fewer capitalists competing within a single sector) and vertically (where multiple sectors of the economy come under the control of large 'umbrellas' or conglomerations). That is the very dynamics of capitalist competition lead to monopoly capital.
6This is the way in which two modes of production can intermingle – feudalism and capitalism existed cheek to jowl in Russia.
7Unless otherwise indicated, the page numbers of works by Engels, Marx or Mehring are as the .pdf files available from the Marxist Internet Archive show them.
8This is obviously not a full, or even completely fair, treatment of Habermas' social theory, any more than it is a full and fair treatment of Weber; my purpose is purely to bring out Marx's social theory, counter-posing it to aspects of other theories is only a useful way of doing that. I will however say that it is significant that Habermas pits his idea of linguistic intersubjectivity against Marx's work (labour) rather than social being as the 'motor' of social transformation; doing so obscures the particularly conscious and therefore linguistic way in which humans work. At the same time it dilutes Marx's twin insights: that consciousness is only ever the consciousness of real material existence (which is hardly limited to linguistic communication) and that ideas in and of themselves only bear upon the world when they find real material expression in it. For more detailed examinations of Habermas from a Marxist perspective, I recommend the works of Alex Callinicos.
9Note the plural.
10Merlin Press' translation is probably better here: MIA's “practically attacking” is rendered “practically coming to grips with ” p. 44
11I have used 'reality' here to avoid confusion. The more accurate term within the Marxist lexicon in 'relation'.
12Really, this is just a way to smuggle Brenner's version of historical materialism through the back door of dialectics, but that's a discussion far beyond the scope of this piece.
13And only in a society where commodity exchange is a matter of life and death could improved productivity lead to poverty!
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