But, the fundamental factor that determines material conditions is that described by Marx in his Letter to Kugelmann outlining The Law ofValue. That is, to live Man must produce. In every mode of production the things that must be produced require labour for their production, and that labour is relatively scarce. Labour used to produce one thing cannot be used to produce another.
“Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”
The Law of Value plays the same role in Marx's theory of historical materialism, and the evolution of society, that the Law of Natural Selection plays in Darwin's theory of biological evolution. As Marx says, it does not matter whether it is a primitive community, a peasant economy, a feudal society, capitalism or communism, this Law of Value applies as a Natural Law. It is the basis upon which the process of social evolution, of the development of the forces of production, and from it the development of new social relations occurs.
The simple basis of that is that, for any mode of production, to produce more use values, for each member of society, it must raise labour productivity. Put another way, it must reduce the unit value of each use value. It can do that via a social division of labour, and subsequently by trade, but the most effective means is by revolutionising the instruments of labour themselves, and these developments bring with them changes in the social relations between human beings, and the institutions they create. The Law of Value, in every mode of production necessitates a rise in labour productivity, and so a development of technology.
“The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (p 20-1)
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