Bourgeois society, based on commodity production and exchange does not arise as a process of metamorphosis out of feudalism, but as the evolution of a new species of social organism in competition with it. Both capital and capitalism does arise as an inevitable consequence of this bourgeois production, of commodity production and exchange. If commodity production and exchange is the frogspawn, private capital is the tadpole, which metamorphoses into the large-scale socialised capital of imperialism, as the transitional form between capitalism and socialism. In other words, Socialism does not arise as a separate species of social organism, by a process of evolution and natural selection, developing in the interstices of existing bourgeois society, but as an inevitable development and metamorphosis of that society into its mature form.
Once capitalist production arises, its metamorphosis into socialised capital, and, then, socialism, becomes as inevitable as the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs, and caterpillars into moths.
So, when it comes to these social laws, the idea that there can be any assertion of absolute or eternal truths, is less justified than when it comes to Nature. What can be identified, as Marx and Engels did in their theory of historical materialism, is that the evolution of social organisms can be just as much explained on the basis of adaptation to material conditions as can the evolution of biological organisms.
“What is more, when by way of exception the inner connections of the social and political forms of existence in an epoch come to be known, this occurs as a rule only when these forms have already by half outlived themselves and are nearing their decline. Therefore, knowledge is here essentially relative, because it is limited to the investigation of interconnections and consequences of certain forms of society and state which exist only in a particular epoch and among particular peoples and are transitory by their very nature. Therefore, anyone who here sets out here to hunt down final and ultimate truths, genuine, absolutely immutable truths, will bring home but little, apart from platitudes and commonplaces of the sorriest kind — for example, that, generally men cannot live without working; that up to the present they for the most part have been divided into rulers and ruled; that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, and so on.” (p 112)
Yet, Engels notes, its in this sphere that the idea of absolute ore eternal truths are most often encountered.
“That twice two makes four, that birds have beaks, and similar statements, are proclaimed as eternal truths only by someone who aims at drawing, from the existence of eternal truths in general, the conclusion that there are also eternal truths in the sphere of human history — eternal morality, eternal justice, and so on — which claim a validity and scope similar to those of the truths of mathematics and its applications.” (p 112)
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