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1 See MEGA, I, v, p. 60. 2 See the definition given by Engels in his Outlines of a Critique of National Economy, 1844 (MEGA, I, ii, p. 394) and quoted with approval by Marx in Capital, I, pp. 41-42, footnote 28: "What are we to think of a law that can only establish itself through periodical revolutions ? Well, it is a law of nature resulting from the unconsciousness of the people concerned." 3 See Marx's letter to Kugelmann of 11.7.1868. 4 See Engels, L.c. 5 See Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1878. 6 See Marx, Capital, III, ii, p. 355. 194 NATURE AND SOCIETY However, just from the negative definition that the so-called "laws of nature" of the bourgeois economists are, in fact, not laws of nature at all, there derives the positive significance which the term of the "social" laws of nature assumes in the revolutionary science of Marx. The fact that the general conditions of bourgeois society which had been proclaimed as laws by the bourgeois economists, are restricted to a definite historical epoch, implies that in the further development of society all those apparent laws can be abrogated through the conscious social act of the class which is at present oppressed by them, to be replaced by another, a willed and planned form of the social activities of man. Thus neither of the two Marxian terms conforms with the perpetuation of the so-called economic laws asserted by the classical economists; even less with that further extension of the realm of "natural growth in society" which had been the dream of the early counter-revolutionary theorists in France and of the German and English romanticists. Marx, on the contrary, applies both terms for the purpose of extending the realm of history and society, i.e., of a conscious social action as against the so-called eternal necessities of an altogether inaccessible "realm of nature." Far behind the "immutable laws" invented and maintained by the bourgeois economists for the preservation of an order of production allegedly "natural" and "rational," but in fact ever more artificial, more arbitrary, and ever more dependent on force, and at the same time more hampering to the further development of society and more destructive of human life, stand those real necessities of nature which condition the whole life of man and which are also recognized by the Marxists as unchangeable facts and as natural presuppositions of all social development. Even this recognition applies to a given time only. There is, from the historical and social principle of Marxian science, no absolute and predetermined limit beyond which an apparently "naturwüchsige" foundation of all social 195 KARL MARX life might not in future be discovered to be no more than an historical and historically changeable form, and thus a form which can be modified and overthrown by a conscious action. "Even the naturally-grown variations of the human species such as differences of race, etc., can and must be abolished in the historical process."1 As with all other innovations embodied in the new materialistic theory, Marx's methodical extension of society at the expense of nature is proved mainly on the field of economic science. The Marxian critique of the fetish character of the commodity and of all other economic categories refutes once and for all those mystical ideas by which the earlier economists, had attributed economic phenomena to an immediate physical cause, be it some external force of nature, or the physical constitution of man or, finally, his so-called "innate" psychological qualities. There is, above all, no such thing as an immediate "natural basis of the surplus value." The only significance which can be claimed for physical conditions in the genesis of the socio-historical phenomenon of the exploitation of property-less wage-labourers by property-owning capitalists, is that of a natural limit or barrier fixing the points at which the labour-time necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the labourer ceases and thus "labour for others can begin." "In proportion as industry advances, those natural limits recede."2 The same applies to the so-called "natural basis of the State" which is asserted by a whole school of modern bourgeois sociologists. The political phenomenon of the State results, in fact, as little from unchangeable physical conditions as the economic phenomenon of the surplus value upon which it depends as a secondary and derived form. Just as things useful for human needs and produced by human labour are "commodities," and gold and silver are "money," under definite social conditions only and not by any inherent physical qualities,
2 See Capital, I, pp. 475-479. 196 NATURE AND SOCIETY so is the physically weaker individual or race the slave of the physically stronger not by any eternal necessity but through the accident of temporary circumstances. By a definite historical process the class which under the social conditions prevailing in the present epoch produces all social wealth, has been separated from the material means of production and is now ruled and exploited by the class which through the same historical process has monopolized for itself the means of social production as "capital." The apparently "naturalistic" theory which assigns such existing social and political facts to the Command of Nature is but a secularized form of those older theories which derived the same facts from the Command of God or, for that matter, from such intermediate agencies as the philosophical unfolding of an eternal Idea, Reason, or Humanity itself. 197 CHAPTER V PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS THE driving forces of the revolutionary development of society, according to Marx, are the potential powers of production inherent in a given epoch of the socio-economic formation. Like all other terms of the new social science, the concept of the "productive forces" is defined by Marx not a priori but empirically. It is described in terms of economics and history and in reference to a specific mode of production, not in terms of a general sociology; not dogmatically, but critically ; not from the view-point of a pre-established harmony, but from that of class opposition; not for the purpose of theoretical knowledge and contemplation, but with a view to social action or "revolutionary practice." Thus the productive-forces as conceived by Marx are much more than a mere philosophical concept of "matter" resulting from the "materialistic reversal" of the Hegelian "idea" and, like its predecessor, presupposed to all empirical knowledge. They form, together with the "production-relations" in which they function and develop, the real whole of the given "mode of material production" which can be determined "with the precision of a natural science." There is in this Marxian term nothing mystical and nothing metaphysical. A "productive force" is, at first, nothing else than the real labour power of working men ; the force incorporated in these living human beings by which, with definite material means of production and within a definite form of social co-operation conditioned by those material means of production, they produce through their labour the material means of satisfying the social needs of their existence, that is — under capitalistic conditions, "commodities." In a second and even more 198 PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS important sense, everything that increases the productive effect of the human labour power (and thereby, under capitalistic conditions, inevitably increases at the same time the profit of its exploiters) is said by Marx to be a "productive force." To the productive forces in that dynamic sense belongs the progress of technique and science; there belongs above all the social organization itself or the immediately "social" forces created by co-operation and division of labour. In this sense, Adam Smith had emphasized in his economic work the "proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour" occasioned by the division of labour under the conditions of modern industry,1 and we may say without exaggeration that the basic term of Marx's revolutionary theory, the concept of the "social" productive forces, originated just from that Smithian thought2 though the implications of the new term were but partially and one-sidedly described by Smith and were brought out in their full economic and social significance only by the new materialistic theory of the proletarian revolution. "The production of the human life," as stated by Marx in an early exposition of his new principle, "appears from the outset as a two-fold relation. It is, on the one hand, a natural relation and on the other hand a social relation, social in the sense of a co-operation between several individuals no matter under what conditions, in what way, and for what purpose. It follows that a definite mode of production or industrial stage always concurs with a definite mode of co-operation or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a productive force."3 So does the real point in all later developments of the revolutionary theory of Marx consist in the emphasis laid on that "new potential of productive force" which, increasing continually in the course of the development of human society, inexhaustibly flows from 1 See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, i. 2 See Marx's extracts from Smith on first reading his work in the unpublished Notes of 1844 (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 457 et seq.). 3 See Marx, German Ideology, 1845-46 (MEGA, I, v, p. 19).
KARL MARX the many single forces melted together into one united force Under capitalistic conditions this new force seems to spring from the productivity of "capital." In truth it springs from the growing productivity of social labour.1 From this derives a third and final sense in which the Marxian term is applied to the workers themselves who by a revolutionary action as a class set free the forces potentially existing in social labour to-day. That potential power will be fully actualized by the proletarian revolution which will break the restraints put on the productivity of society by the present capitalistic form of commodity production and unite the hitherto incompletely co-ordinated forces of the single labourers into an organized collective labour force. It is partially realized to-day wherever in the various forms of the proletarian class struggle, the strike, the stay-in strike, and the general strike, the united workers stand up against the oppressive forces of capital. Thus it may be said that under the present conditions of an ever increasing sabotage of the powerful capacities of modem industry by the existing capitalistic production-relations the new potential of productivity inherent in the working class reveals itself most clearly in those cases when, according to the isolating and static concepts of the bourgeois ideologists the labourers cease to function as a "productive force" at all, but in fact only cease to function as a "productive force of capital" and stand ready to realize that incomparably greater power of productivity which is potentially existent in the material means of production and in the hands and brains of the toiling masses to-day. "De tous les instruments de production, le plus grand pouvoir productif, c'est la classe révolutionnaire elle-même."2 It follows from the foregoing discussion that those recent Marx interpreters are quite mistaken who, by a direct inversion
2 See Marx, Anti-Proudhon, 1847 (MEGA, I, vi, p. 227). 2OO PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS of the order in which theory and practice were blended by Marx into a dynamic whole, wanted to degrade the opposition between the social classes to a temporary appearance of the underlying "economic" contradiction between the productive forces and production-relations as a larger and assumedly more '"material" entity. They inflate the scientific principle of Marx's economic research to a universal and eternal Dialectic pervading the whole development of nature and man and thus fall back not only far behind historical materialism, but behind the historical idealism of Hegel and his equally idealistic philosophical predecessors.1 On the other hand, the Marxian "contradiction of productive forces and production-relations" means much more than a lack of adjustment between technical results and their social application. The Marxian concept of "social" productive forces has nothing in common with the idealistic abstractions of the old and new "Technocrats" who imagine that they can define and measure the productive powers of society apart from all social conditions in terms of natural science and technology. There is no doubt that the productive forces include, along with the social nature of the labour engaged in material production, also the "improvements on the field of intellectual production, especially in natural science and its practical application."2 The "fettering character" of the existing capitalistic production-relations appears also in the frustration of intellectual labour, which results from the fact that the ruling class of present capitalistic society is interested in technical progress only indirectly, i.e., only in so far as it can thereby increase its profits. A scientific investigation into the definite forms of the growing repression of technical progress by the so-called necessities of the capitalistic production is a powerful indictment against the existing capitalistic system. But the conflict of technical and social possibilities is by no means the only form in which the struggle 1 See the author's contribution to the Symposium "Why I am a Marxist?" in Modern Monthly, April, 1935. 2 See Marx, Capital, I, pp. 350-51, and III, i, pp. 55-56. 2O1 KARL MARX between the progressive tendency of the material productive forces and the stagnation resulting from the fixed form of the social relations of production manifests itself in present society. Technical knowledge and "technocratic" prescriptions are not sufficient in themselves to remove the material obstacles which oppose any important change in present-day capitalistic society, and these can, indeed, not be removed by intellectual weapons alone. There is more power of resistance in the mute force of economic conditions and in the economically and politically organized forces of the class interested in the maintenance of those conditions than well-meaning technocrats have ever dreamt of. "Technocracy," said Trotzky in a bold forecast of The Future of Socialism in America,1 "can only be realized in a soviet régime when the barriers of private property have fallen." Even before Marx had discovered in the so-called "economic-law" of the accumulation of capital the ultimate material reason of the characteristic historical fact that capitalistic production cannot exist without a continuous progress,2 he had been aware of this fundamental law of modern society. The revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie determined by it is described in the Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing 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. A constant overthrow of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois from all earlier epochs. All stable, rust-fixed relations, with their train of ancient and venerable views and opinions, are swept away, those which are newly formed, 1 See Trotzky in Die Sammlung, June 1935, p. 522. 2 See Capital, I, xxi et seq., especially pp. 587 et seq. The theory of accumulation is further developed in Capital, II, Part III. 202 PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is established and has a status, evaporates, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real position in life and his actual conditions. In the first ascending phase of the bourgeois epoch this law of a society based on the capitalistic mode of production was naively and candidly formulated by its ideological supporters as a "law of progress."1 When afterwards, especially since Darwin, the simple concept of "progress" was supplanted by the more elaborate concept of "evolution" that change resulted at first only in a further development and wider application of the same fundamental principle. The concept of a permanent "progressive evolution" was raised to a fundamental principle of sociological science. In this sense, Herbert Spencer endeavoured to represent the study of sociology as "the study of Evolution in its most complex form."2 Later bourgeois sociology from the standpoint of its higher learning smiled at the unsophisticated belief in progress which had been characteristic of its own beginnings. Spencer himself although still adhering to the idea of a general progress involving as its inevitable consequence a higher moral development, formulated at the same time the far more neutral definition of development as "a progress from a simple to a complex form."3 Huxley emphasized the ethical indifference of the idea of evolution by pointing to the lack of a necessary connection, and even partial contradiction, between socio-economic and ethical progress.4 That "pluralist" approach was during the further development of bourgeois sociology transformed into a 1 See Perrault, Paralèlle des anciens et des modernes, 1688-97. For a modern discussion of the question first raised in that book, see G. Sorel, Les illusions du progrès, 1908. 2 See Spencer, Study of Sociology, 1874, PP- 384-85; see also M. Ginsberg, The Concept of Evolution in "Studies of Sociology," 1932, and J. Rumney, Herbert Spencer's Sociology, 1934. 3 See Rumney, l.c.; especially pp. 242 et seq., and pp. 272 et seq. 4 See T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893, pp. 31 et seq. 203 KARL MARX complete scepticism of progress, and finally into social pessimism, glorification of reaction and "Decline of the West." As the original idea of progress expressed the ascendant phase of capitalist production, its declining phase is manifested in the gradual transformation of that idea into the "neutral" and "non-evaluative" concept of development current among the modern bourgeois sociologists. With the further development of capitalistic production, with the increase of accumulated capital and wealth, the capitalist ceased to be a mere incarnation of that uninterrupted and uninterruptedly accelerated accumulation of capital which in the earlier phase had been reflected as a "fanaticism of progress" in the social consciousness of the time. A long hangover followed upon the previous state of rapture and intoxication with progress. The idea of progress abandoned by bourgeois science was kept alive by the class which represented the progressive tendency within the practical development of the new epoch. The criticism directed by the Utopian socialism of St. Simon and Fourier and by the materialistic communism of Owen and Marx against the bourgeois concept of "progress" is, in part, a restoration and further development of the rational kernel of that same early bourgeois idea. Socialism achieves in a changed form and in an enormously increased measure once more that unfettering of the material forces of production which capitalism had endeavoured to achieve in a form adapted to the time and in which ultimately it had more or less failed. The working class must adhere to the bourgeois principle of progress through all the phases of the long struggle in which it is still striving to work out its own emancipation and with it a new and higher form of society. Not until that phase of the communist society of the future, when the enslaving subordination of man under the existing system of division of labour and the resulting antagonism between intellectual and physical labour will have been finally conquered ; when labour will have developed from being
PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS a means of living to a spontaneous activity of man and, along with a development of all creative powers of the human individual the productive forces of society will also have increased; not till all springs of co-operative wealth are in full flow — not until then will the inhuman sacrifice of the present for the future of society become superfluous and the single-track idea of "progress" branch out into the universal development of free individuals in a free society1 Not till then will the modern working class, by its conscious action, realize the old dream of the oppressed classes of all times which already in Aristotle2 had been a mythical expression for the real goal of the revolutionary self-emancipation of the helot class. Until then the proletariat reproaches the ruling classes much less for realizing the productive forces only in a capitalist fashion and thus burdening the working class with the enormous costs and sufferings of this capitalistic form of progress than it reproaches them for carrying out that progress less and less efficiently, for adhering, in an ever increasing degree, to their own narrow class interests which become more and more irreconcilable with the further development of the social productive powers, and, for a direct and conscious sabotage of every social progress. The first result of the proletarian class-struggle is to force upon the bourgeoisie, against its own will, the continuation of its historical vocation as a capitalistic class. Long before the proletariat will overthrow the ruling bourgeoisie, and constitute itself a ruling class and the official bearer of social development, it does anticipate this great change by its own development into an independent revolutionary class, by the gradual growth of its class consciousness and by the multiple forms of a veritable class war waged against the existing capitalistic
3 Aristotle, Politics, I, iv. 205 KARL MARX production-relations and their political superstructure. Even the progress thus imposed upon the bourgeoisie is, from the viewpoint of the proletariat, no longer a bourgeois progress, but the workers' own affair. The progressive development of the social productive forces becomes the action of the proletarian class.1 The bourgeoisie had become conscious of the economic law of its own development in a mystified form only ; it had expended the accumulation of capital into a cosmic law of progress. The proletariat puts in place of that ideological mystification, a clear and scientific orientation of its own social theory and practice to a further progressive development of the hitherto evolved productive forces. In order to fulfil that progressive task, the proletariat will first find it necessary to tear asunder in a social revolution those strongest fetters of the productive forces which are formed by the capitalistic mode of production. "The real historical barrier of capitalistic production is capital itself."2 Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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