Of course, as Engels explains in his Letter to Bloch, this is not to be understood in terms of a purely mechanistic materialist determinism. Men make their own history, but not in conditions of their choosing, and these conditions vary widely across the globe, so that, in each instance, the material conditions vary, producing nuanced responses to them. The institutions that arise, in each particular situation, will vary according to time and place, and specific conditions. Chaos theory demonstrates the way tiny quantum fluctuations, and the process of self-organisation, results in such variations. Everything in the universe came out of the Big Bang, and is subject to the same natural laws, but not every star or solar system or galaxy is the same. That does not invalidate the natural laws that underpin that development. They allow us to explain the general development, and from these the variations and specific development.
Moreover, once established, institutions and the ideas they represent and promote, also take on the force of material conditions.
“Materialism removed this contradiction by carrying the analysis deeper, to the origin of man's social ideas themselves; and its conclusion that the course of ideas depends on the course of things is the only one compatible with scientific psychology. Further, and from yet another aspect, this hypothesis was the first to elevate sociology to the level of a science. Hitherto, sociologists had found it difficult to distinguish the important and the unimportant in the complex network of social phenomena (that is the root of subjectivism in sociology) and had been unable to discover any objective criterion for such a demarcation. Materialism provided an absolutely objective criterion by singling out “production relations” as the structure of society, and by making it possible to apply to these relations that general scientific criterion of recurrence whose applicability to sociology the subjectivists denied.” (p 140)
Lenin refers again to the fact that people enter into social relations in the form of commodity exchange without realising that any such social relation exists, i.e. commodity fetishism. However, his presentation of the issue is somewhat misleading. Commodity fetishism really arises a consequence of money economy. Initially, value is measured directly, in terms of labour-time. As trade increases, via barter, this determination of the value of products by labour-time is the basis for the ratio in which they exchange. The quantity of one product that exchanges for another, becomes the exchange value of this latter product, so that its value is increasingly measured not directly by labour-time, but indirectly in terms of the quantity of other products that are its equivalent.
The most developed form of this is when one specific commodity, the money commodity, is singled out to act as this indirect measure of value of all other commodities, their universal equivalent form of value. But, its not right to imply, as Lenin does, that this social relation that lies at the heart of this exchange was not known. It was known, which is why these exchange relations could be calculated to begin with. Across the globe, anthropologists have found examples of the application of these calculations based on labour-time, as the basis for exchange.
Ruth Bunzel in Frank Boaz “General Anthropology”, p 346, says primitive people consider only labour “scarce”. The economy of the Indonesian village community is based on calculation of hours of labour expended. (J.H. Boeke – ‘De Theorie der Indische Economie’ p 39.) For further instances see Historical Proofs and Origins of The Labour Theory of Value
Indeed, Engels, in his Supplement to Capital III, sets out how, even in his own time, in German villages, it was the fact that people still knew how much time was required for the production of various articles that allowed them to make such calculations. Marx, in Capital I, referring to the peasant household, makes a similar comment. Its not that the basis of these relations were never known, but that the development of money economy, and money prices, increasingly hides these real relations. As Marx sets out, in Capital III, once capitalism arises, even this hidden relation disappears, because commodities do not then exchange in proportion to labour values. They exchange at market prices, which themselves revolve around prices of production, which are no longer directly determined by labour-time.
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