Its only in the 18th century that ideas of individualism take hold, and each individual, then, sees wider social formations as merely necessary means to the achievement of their personal requirements.
“But the epoch which produces this standpoint, namely that of the solitary individual, is precisely the epoch of the (as yet) most highly developed social (according to this standpoint, general) relations. Man is a Zoon politikon [political animal] in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society. Production by a solitary individual outside society – a rare event, which might occur when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness – is just as preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live together and talk to one another.” (p 189)
These petty-bourgeois, individualist notions were, however, central to the ideas of Proudhon, Bastiat and Carey, and were presented, necessarily, in idealist terms, in which history proceeds on the basis of a series of abstract concepts, one following another, in the mind, and, then, materialised in the real world.
“It is unnecessary to dwell upon this point further. It need not have been mentioned at all, if this inanity, which had rhyme and reason in the works of eighteenth-century writers, were not expressly introduced once more into modern political economy by Bastiat, Carey, Proudhon, etc. It is of course very pleasant for Proudhon, for instance, to be able to explain the origin of an economic relationship – whose historical evolution he does not know – in an historico-philosophical manner by means of mythology; alleging that Adam or Prometheus hit upon the ready-made idea, which was then put into practice, etc. Nothing is more tedious and dull than the fantasies of locus communis.” (p 189)
In discussing production, therefore, it cannot be discussed abstractly, but only in terms of the specific production, in different societies, as Marx sets out in The Poverty of Philosophy. That does not mean that there are not common features of production, in all societies. All production involves a combination of labour with Nature, and a transformation of the products of Nature, either in form or location. It involves the use of instruments of labour to facilitate such transformation. But, all of these components take on different characteristics, according to different social contexts within which the production itself takes place, and these different characteristics assume also the form of different types of property, upon which social classes arise, and new social relations between them. As Marx puts it,
“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 same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.
Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.
There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement – mors immortalis.”
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