The development of technology, itself, leads to different productive relations. At the most basic, class society could not arise until productivity rose to a level where a surplus product could be produced, i.e. the labourer could produce more, in a day, than required to reproduce their own labour-power for the day. Engels sets this out against Duhring's idealist and subjectivist “force theory”. And, as Marx set out, in The Poverty of Philosophy, it is these different productive relations that arise out of the development of technology that results in the evolution of different forms of property, and new, and different social classes resting upon them, and acting as the personification of that property. Such was the development of slave society, feudalism, and capitalism, as well as the Asiatic Mode of Production.
“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.”
(The Poverty of Philosophy, p 102)
And, the same development of technology, and its requirement for ever larger scales of production, ever larger single markets – rationally a single, global market and state – which develops via socialised capital, as the collective property of the associated producers, is, similarly, the basis of the new social relations, the new socialist society.
On the basis of their idealist and subjectivist ideology, the Utopians and moral socialists dealt in absolute truths, but, as with the multiplicity of the same moral-socialist, petty-bourgeois Left sects, today, each had their own set of absolute truths.
“At the same time, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different for the founder of each different school; and as each one's special brand of absolute truth, reason, and justice is in turn conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they grind each other down. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average socialism, such as in fact, has dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England up to the present time; a mish-mash permitting of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of the less striking critical statements, economic theories and pictures of future society of the founders of different sects, a mish-mash which is the more easily produced the more the sharp edges of precision of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.” ( p 22-3)
The achievement of Marx and Engels was to discard this petty-bourgeois moralism, and to place socialism on the same scientific basis as other sciences such as physics or biology, restricting themselves to explaining social evolution on the same basis of material conditions and natural laws. On this basis, human action, guided by ideas and principles is, indeed, required to bring about social and political revolutions, but these ideas and principles are no longer simply arbitrary or deriving from absolute truths, and moral principles existing outside society, or reality, but are themselves the product of the given set of material conditions, the productive and social relations existing in society, and which arise, not on the basis of some conscious act of will, but arise spontaneously behind Men's backs, as a result of The Law of Value, and its continual drive to raise social productivity.
As Marx puts it in Capital I, these human actors on the stage of history are merely the personification of the different forms of property, and, as he put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, emphasising this role of The Law of Value,
“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase.”
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