The relationship between production (supply) and consumption (demand) is, then, driven by production, and by the scarcity of labour, as Marx sets out in describing The Law of Value. It is, also, what drives societies to seek to loosen that constraint by raising productivity. As Marx discovered, therefore, it is The Law of Value, which acts in the realm of social evolution, in the same way that the Law of Natural Selection works in biological evolution. Biological species do not change and evolve as a result of some conscious act of will of members of the species, as Duhring suggested, but as a result of adaptation, i.e. those whose characteristics are best adapted to the conditions survive and prosper, and those characteristics are passed down, in their genes, to their offspring and so become dominant.
Similarly, as Marx and Engels describe, and as Lenin noted, as against Mikhailovsky, the evolution of social organisms – societies/modes of production – does not arise as a consequence of an act of conscious will by members of those societies, but arises on the basis of a similar unconscious process, taking place behind their backs, by which those best adapted to the material conditions thrive and prosper, and their characteristics are, then, spread to other societies.
It is, for example, those best adopted to bourgeois commodity production and exchange that survive and become capitalists. It is capitalist production that, then, becomes dominant, and destroys feudal and other forms of production. But, as Marx and Engels, also, set out, in The Communist Manifesto, it is, then, not just in the one society, where this occurs.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
It is why today's “Reactionists” and “Barbarians”, such as the Brexiters, Trumpists and Starmerists, with their “intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners”, are an historical anachronism.
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