If the historic mission of capital were to be summed up in a sentence, it would be to prepare the necessary conditions for Socialism. Socialism is impossible without the means of production having been developed to a very high level, without them being brought together in socialised production, without the creation of an extensive social division of labour, of global markets, and a global economy. Capitalism creates all of these things. But, Socialism is also impossible without the social agent, which brings it about on the basis of these means of production. That is, without the industrial working-class. Capitalism also creates that, by the very process of dispossessing the mass of individual producers, and turning them into wage labourers.
As Lenin put it, describing the economic realities of state capitalism in Junker-imperialist Germany, as the material foundations required for socialism,
“Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution...
At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.”
According to Historical Materialism, the level of the productive forces determines productive relations, and productive relations determine the social relations that arise on the back of them, as well as the ideas that flow from these relations, which form the foundations of the political and ideological superstructure.
“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, Chapter 2)
The totality of the productive relations, social relations and superstructure constitutes the mode of production. New social formations evolve because of development of the productive forces, productive relations, and social relations. This evolution is driven by natural laws, therefore, in the same way that biological evolution occurs.
“... here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”
(Marx – Capital I, Preface to the First German Edition)
Because production is, therefore, the foundation of historical materialism, the fundamental natural law that governs it is The Law of Value, because it is the determinant of the how, what, where and when of production. Similarly, the driving force of historical materialism is the rise in social productivity, because it is that which acts to relax the constraints imposed by The Law of Value, but it is also that which brings about the changes in the productive forces, and in the relations of production. Only if society could raise social productivity to such a level whereby it no longer has to make choices about how to allocate resources, to obtain desired ends, i.e. where there was abundance, so that the principle of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” applied, could The Law of Value cease to operate, but, at that point too, the driving force of the evolution of social formations also ceases, because the material basis of class society ends along with it.
It is rising social productivity that means that the labour of the primitive commune becomes capable of producing a social surplus. A social surplus means that some members of society no longer need to work, but can live by consuming the surplus product of others. Hence, private property arises, as these individuals seek to also accumulate a part of the surplus product they appropriate, and they seek to transfer this private property to their heirs, which requires the development of the paternalistic, monogamous family unit, in place of the consanguineous forms of family. As such families form into a ruling class, it results in the formation of a state, whose purpose is to protect and advance the interests of this ruling class.
But, for Marx and Engels this original fall from grace of humanity, its eating from the tree of knowledge, which marks the onset of civilisation, is a great, progressive and revolutionising event. It is precisely, the fact that this small ruling class is able to act as a whip upon the producers, to increase the size of the social surplus that is the driving force of progress. It is because this small ruling class is able to appropriate an ever increasing social product that it is able to devote a part of its own time, and the time of society, to the development of knowledge, and of science itself, as well as of art and culture.
“...although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
(Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9, p 117-8)
This is a perfect summation of Marx's theory of historical materialism, as a theory of social evolution driven by purely natural laws. It is written as a tribute to Ricardo's scientific method, as against the moralism of Sismondi, but it is equally the quintessence of Marx and Engels' own scientific method, completely devoid of any tinge of morality or moralising.
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