The revolutionary ideas of the 18th century were, in fact, the revolutionary ideas of the rising bourgeoisie.
“... that this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealised realm of the bourgeoisie; that eternal justice found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the most essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, came into being, and could only come into being, as a bourgeois democratic republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were no more able than their predecessors to go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.” (p 20)
But, from its inception, this bourgeoisie is, also, confronted by its own nemesis, the industrial proletariat that grows alongside the growth of industrial capital.
“... in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the more or less developed forerunner, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War, Thomas Münzer's tend; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.” (p 21)
The schemas of future societies no longer rested upon demands for political rights and political equality, but presented images of equality of social conditions, often religious in origin, or else harking back to some supposed golden age, such as that of Sparta. The latter is, of course, relevant, because, even today, the moral socialists often frame their views in terms of some kind of requirement for an end to consumer driven society, usually linked to petty-bourgeois enviromentalism, and Malthusianism.
“One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, they want to emancipate not a particular class [to begin with], but all humanity [at once]. Like them, they wish to bring in the realm of reason and eternal justice, but this realm, is as far as heaven from earth, from that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” (p 21-2)
This reflects the continued dominance of idealism, when it came to social science, as against natural science. The Utopians could only conceive that the only thing holding back the implementation of what they saw as the rational organisation of society was the failure of philosophers to actually theorise that rationality. They could not understand that there was, indeed, a separate rationality for different classes, based on their own material conditions and interests, contrary to Kant's concept of an overarching, universalisable moral rationality, represented by The Categorical Imperative.
“What was wanting was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognised the truth. That fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognised precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.” (p 22)
But, of course, as Marx and Engels set out, this moralistic, idealist view could never have been realised. Not only could the ideas not have been developed 500 years earlier, but even had some “genius”, 500 years ahead of their time, had them spring into their mind, they could not have gained traction, because they were unrealisable, just as much as a primitive human could not have had the idea of a computer or capacity to build one. Social evolution is driven by, and, also, constrained by natural laws as much as biological evolution. Its fundamental law is The Law of Value.
Humans need to live and to procreate. To do so, beyond the smallest numbers, and most limited needs for food, shelter and clothing etc., as they separate from the animal kingdom, Nature alone is incapable of meeting those needs, which then requires production. The limits of that production are not only the existing material conditions presented by Nature, but the amount of social labour-time available for production. From the start, humans are driven by The Law of Value, to allocate that available labour-time to maximise the use values that can be produced, i.e. to raise productivity, which, itself, leads to particular forms of production, such as division of labour, as well as the development of technology.
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