Marx elaborates on this further in his polemic against the idealism of Proudhon, in The Poverty of Philosophy. The development of technology, at different stages, determines the type of production that occurs, in that epoch, and that determines the social relations that are established. At a time when technology amounts to little more than the use of hands as tools, supplemented then by sticks and stones, it is a social division of labour, and cooperative labour, that plays the largest part in raising productivity. For example, Native Americans hunted bison by collectively driving them towards ravines into which the bison careened to their death. Various ancient peoples undertook large constructions by huge collective efforts to move stones. These collective forms of production also meant that they shaped the social relations in these societies as communistic and egalitarian.
But, there is also another factor, here, which is that a class society can only arise when society itself can produce a social surplus. This point is made by Marx in Capital and in Theories of Surplus Value, and by him and Engels in Anti-Duhring. If a labourer can only produce enough, in day, for their own reproduction, i.e. reproducing their own labour-power, no social surplus is possible, so owning a slave, for example, becomes pointless. In primitive societies that took captives from other tribes, the purpose was not to take them as slaves, but because the numbers in their own tribe were dwindling and needed to be supplemented, to provide wives or husbands and so on.
Even for slavery to exist, therefore, it requires that technology has developed to a level at which each labourer can produce more than is required for their own reproduction. Only then is it possible for some in society to abstain from work, and to live off a social surplus produced by their slaves. As Marx puts it in The Poverty of Philosophy.
“M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that 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, Chapter 2)
And so, it is The Law of Value that drives the need to raise productivity, which drives technological innovation, which brings about new productive forces and social relations. It is just the same way as The Law of Natural Selection drives biological evolution, as those members of species best adapted flourish, and their characteristics become further developed, which leads to the development of differentiation and the creation of new species.
As Lenin described in his own polemics against the petty-bourgeois idealism of the Narodniks, the whole point of Marx's materialist analysis, here, is that this social evolution, of different modes of production, proceeds automatically behind Men's backs, just as much as biological evolution takes place automatically behind the backs of biological species. In neither case is it the result of some conscious plan, the will of God, or the unfolding of The Idea, and although the change from one social system to another appears to be the work of human beings, who put into effect the ideas in their heads, the reality is that those ideas, in their heads, did not simply appear there, but are themselves only the reflection of the material conditions and social relations that have already been established in real life. The political revolutions they undertake to implement these ideas, the institutions they create, and the laws they establish, simply bring this superstructure into alignment with the already existing social relations.
That is why, as Lenin says, in his polemics against Mikhailovsky and the Narodniks, when Marx says that Socialism is inevitable, this is not a prediction of the future, but a description of existing reality. As Marx set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, the productive and social relations of Socialism already exist, in the transitional form of socialised capital – cooperatives and joint stock companies. Nothing more in terms of material conditions and social relations is required. The associated producers – workers and managers – are already, objectively, the collective owner of this socialised capital. All that is required is for the political superstructure, the institutions and legal forms to be brought into alignment with this reality, by the workers having legal control over what is already, now, their collective capital, and for that reality of their position, as ruling class, to be reflected in their political control over the state.
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