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Even the bourgeois revolution of the preceding epoch which was described one-sidedly by its ideological supporters as a change of civil constitution, the laws, and the State, in short, as a "political" revolution only, was in fact an overthrow of the whole socio-economic formation. The historical blindness of the bourgeois revolutionaries which persists in the bourgeois conception of the revolutionary process to-day lies, above all, in the fact that they considered the change in the economic conditions of life not yet as a direct task, but as a "natural" consequence resulting, as it were, spontaneously from the essential achievement of the political revolution. The proletarian criticism of the traditional bourgeois concepts of progress, evolution, and of a merely political revolution, is
2 See Capital, III, p. 231. 206 PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS based on the materialistic discovery that the social "production-relations" corresponding to each stage of the development of the material productive forces do not develop either in an independent economic "evolution" or as a "natural result" of a merely political revolution. They have to be changed by man. Nay more, the new political and ideological conditions temporarily achieved by a mere political revolution can only be upheld against the powers of reaction by a radical social revolution reaching down to the very roots of the existing order of society, that is, right down to material production. The only "evolution" that is possible and actually takes place within the framework of the existing production-relations of an historical epoch, i.e., the only process of development which leaves the basic structure of a given society "on the whole" or "essentially" unchanged is the intrinsic development of the social "productive forces." The material conditions of the new and higher production-relations which are to be substituted for the existing production-relations by a social revolution are brought to maturity within the womb of the old society. Thus the production-relations, unable to develop by themselves, nevertheless fulfil for a certain time and up to a certain point a positive function on the development of material production. Within them there proceeds the further development of the old, and the growth of the new productive forces. The latent, potential, dynamic further development of material production going on within a fundamentally unchanged system of production-relations occupies the first phase of every historical epoch. As soon as the harmonious development, or rather an externally "harmonious" development only, which contains the hidden germs of a future conflict, has reached a certain point, it loses even that outwardly harmonious aspect. "At a certain stage of their development," said Marx, "the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production-relations within which they hitherto moved.
KARL MARX From being forms of development they turn into fetters of the productive forces. Then an epoch of social revolution sets in. With the change in the economic foundation the whole of the vast superstructure is more or less rapidly overturned."1 This dynamic conception of material production itself, distinguishes the Marxian theory of the social revolution from all other revolutionary theories. Although revelling in "dynamics" and "development," the bourgeois sociologists remain the slaves of a fundamentally "static" concept at the most important point , they are not able to extend their "dynamic" terms to the very foundation of society. The material mode of production in a given epoch of society forms for them a closed system which is determined throughout. In it production is carried on in definite forms. The whole of the existing productive forces of society is actualized in these forms. There is no room in this conception for any surplus or unutilized fund of productive powers that might possibly be added to those really active productive powers. They take seriously what was presented as a terrific indictment against the existing capitalistic system by the late German socialist leader, August Bebel ; "Without profits, no chimney smokes." According to this view, the capitalistic production relations together with the corresponding relations of distribution are just as indispensable for the productive process as is the land, the raw materials, machines, and labouring "hands." From this static viewpoint it amounts almost to a miracle that production has been able to develop at all and thus to get from its past to its present stage. This miracle is either explained by a pseudo-scientific disintegration of real change into smaller and smaller steps of a gradual and imperceptible evolution,2 or else it is disposed of by reference to the supernatural creative forces 1 Sec Preface 1859. 2 This logical fallacy was critically exposed by Hegel in his Science of Logic, I, pp. 383-84. Marx illustrated the equation between a real change and an infinity of alterations "so minute that they can be ignored" by a reference to the foolish maid who excused her mistake by saying the "the baby was at first so very little." 208 PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS of the "great bourgeois revolution" of the past which exploded once for all the obsolete feudal order that was in itself no longer capable of any further development and created the modern industrial system capable of an unlimited evolution. The apparently undivided whole of a given material production is split by Marx into fixed production-relations and elastic productive forces. Thus material production is stripped of its closed character, its immovability, and unchangeability. The production-relations are now no longer asked whether production can go on within them. They are asked, above all, whether a further development of production can go on within them. They are the forms that either advance or block the development of the productive forces. Conversely, the existence and extent of the potential productive forces inherent in the present mode of production cannot be tested by a technological calculation so long as they cannot be tested in their actual working within a given social process of production, and as the way for the real test has not been cleared by the revolutionary destruction of the capitalistic barrier. Like the mutations of animals and plants which have replaced the older evolutionary concepts in modern biology, the "social mutations" occurring in the material mode of production1 are not completely determined and determinable in advance. Just as the mutation is a "leap of nature," in spite of Aristotle, so is the social revolution in its actual process, with all materialistic determination of its premises and forms, a "leap," not from an absolute "realm of necessity" into an absolute "realm of freedom," but from a rigid system of long-established and repressive social relations to a flexible system of new and more plastic forms of social life as yet in the 1 The term "mutation" which to-day is mainly used in natural science was first applied to those historical and social events which to-day would be called a revolution. The term "revolution" was only recently transferred from the field where it was most impressively used by Copernicus in 1543, to its present principal application. It was not applied in this sense until the end of the 17th century and obtained its full present significance with the French revolution of 1789. 209 KARL MARX process of formation, with plenty of room for a further development of the productive forces and for new forms of human activity.1 The social revolution of the proletariat is an action of men united in a definite social class and engaged in a war against other social classes, with all the chances and all the risks attached to such a real practical effort. This is in no way contradicted by the Marxian statement of 1859 that "a formation of society never perishes before all the forces of production for which it is wide enough have developed" ; and that "new and higher production-relations never come into being before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society itself." There is no reason to suspect, as some bourgeois and reformist opponents of Marx's revolutionary theory have done, that Marx had by this time abandoned the practical materialistic standpoint of his earlier writings (Theses on Feuerbach, German Ideology, Misère de la philosophic, and Communist Manifesto) and had adopted a "fatalistic" conception of the revolutionary process as a purely economic development brought about by the working of an inevitable law. Marx had formed his materialistic opinion that "l' organisation des éléments révolutionnaires comme classe suppose l'existence de toutes les forces productives qui pouvaient s'engendrer dans le sein de la société ancienne," long before the failure of the bourgeois revolution of 1848 and the ensuing reaction and despair could have turned him from a "militant propagandist of the revolutionary class struggle" into a "detached scientific observer of the real historical development." Such difference as there is between the earlier and later formulations of the materialistic principle, consists in a shift of emphasis from the subjective factor of revolutionary class war to its connection with the underlying objective development. This shift of emphasis appears for the 1 See the sentences quoted above, p. 94, from Engels, Anti-Düehing, and from Marx, Capital, III. See further Communist Manifesto, 1848, and Marx, Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Labour Party, 1875. 21O PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS first time in a document of the autumn of 1850 in which Marx and Engels drew attention to the restored prosperity and the consequent temporary close of the revolutionary movement. "Under the conditions of this general prosperity, when the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as abundantly as is at all possible within existing bourgeois conditions, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in those periods when the two factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come to contradict one another."1 By this sober, materialistic statement they disowned "the illusions of the vulgar democracy grouped around the would-be provisional governments in partibus"2 and thus separated themselves once for all from the leaders of the revolutionary bourgeois emigration of 1848 "who later, almost without exception, have made their peace with Bismarck — so far as Bismarck found them worth the trouble."3 More important, by the same act they broke with the so-called "partisans of action" who at that time under the leadership of Willich and Schapper had swept with their illusionary hopes of a speedy new outbreak of the defeated revolutionary movement the majority of the reconstituted Communist League of 1850. So bitter was the ensuing fight that it led to a formal split within the then most advanced proletarian party4 and to an eventual dissolution of the whole orgainzation. As we have seen in discussing the successive phases of Marx's economic theory5 the new form of Marx's revolutionary 1 See Neue Rheinische Zeitung, politisch-oekonomische Revue, No. 5-6, Hamburg 1850. 2 See Engels, Introduction to his 1895 edition of the articles contributed by Marx and himself to Neue Rheinische Zeitung, politisch-oekonomische Revue (reprinted in that edition under the title Class Struggles in France, 1850-52). 3 Ibid. 4 See the reasons offered by Marx for his motion as embodied in the record of the proceedings of the last meeting of the London Central Executive Committee of the Communist League, 15.9.1850, later published by Marx in his Disclosures on the Communist Trial at Cologne, 1852. 5 See above, pp. 110 et seq.
KARL MARX materialism was due to the changed conditions which were henceforth given for the practical development of the proletarian class struggle. The stronger emphasis now laid on the objective presuppositions of a victorious proletarian revolution which cannot be replaced by good will, by the right theory, or by the most efficient organization of the revolutionaries, appears from this point of view in the main as a lesson drawn from the experiences of the European revolution and counter-revolution of 1848 for the benefit of the new phase of the revolutionary labour movement which began in 1850. In a similar manner, the revolutionary Marxist, Lenin, on a closely analagous occasion, summed up for the benefit of the Russian and international militant party the tactical experiences of the three Russian revolutions of the 20th century. In what he now called the "fundamental law of revolution," he stated the indispensable objective conditions of a "direct, open, really revolutionary struggle of the working class." Just as Marx and Engels, after the final defeat of the 1848 revolution, had confronted the subjective and emotional hopes of the Leftists of 1850 with the cruel materialistic analysis of the objective economic position and the sober perspective resulting therefrom, so Lenin came to grips with the activistic revolutionary tendencies of the left communists of 1920 who in an objectively changed situation adhered to the slogans of the direct revolutionary situation released by the Great War.1 While thus warning the vanguard of the working class not to stick too conservatively to the direct revolutionary tactics which were no longer justified by objective conditions, both Marx and Lenin did not think for a moment of supplanting the real revolutionary action of the working class by a passive belief in a mere economic process of development which would after a considerable amount of waiting finally achieve the revolutionary change with the inevitability of a 1 See Lenin, Radicalism, an Infantile Disease of Communism, written 27.4.1920 — 12.5.1920. 212 PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND PRODUCTION-RELATIONS natural process. The class which stands in the midstream of historical development and by its own movement determines that development, must by its conscious activity finally prove the maturity reached by the productive forces within the existing production-relations. They must with their own hands break the fetters that obstruct the development of the productive forces and establish the higher production-relations of a new progressive epoch of society. 213 CHAPTER VI BASIS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE WHAT are the particular relations between the "economic structure of society" and its political and juridical "superstructure," between "social existence" and "social consciousness ?" In what definite forms is the material connection between the various fields of social life realized? What is their significance for a materialistic investigation of the different spheres of a given economic order of society ? We know already that all these apparently separated and widely different spheres form together a universe of society in which, just as in a living organism, every part is connected with every other part. This "just as," by the way, is to be read as meaning "just as much and just as little." The author does not want in either case to be regarded as adhering to that mystic and unscientific theory of "whole-ism" according to which this connection is previously granted and needs only to be discovered in detail by the endeavours of the investigator. He would rather, with old Kant, regard the idea of whole-ism as a working principle which guides our strictly empirical research and may or may not hold good even in a given instance. The position to-day is different from that which prevailed at the time when Marx had first to establish the materialistic principle against a host of deep-rooted idealistic prejudices. Marx himself nowhere discussed the question in a general way.1 But it follows from his criticism of the equally metaphysical bourgeois concept of Evolution,2 from the principles of specification and change 1 For a discussion of Marx's attitude towards the "whole-ism" of Hegel see Rebecca Cooper, The Logical Influence of Hegel on Marx, Seattle, 1925,, pp. 178 et seq., and Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx, London, New York, 1936, pp. 62 et seq. 2 See above, pp. 51 et seq. 214 BASIS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE underlying his whole work and, even more, from the methods actually applied by him in the investigation of the economic sphere in Capital, that he would have ruled out the words "all" and "every" just as well from that broader universe of a strictly empirical and critical research which he called alternately "history" or "society" or the realm of "practical action." He would have replaced those vague and meaningless generalities by a specific description of a given state of society, its historical genesis, and its inherent developmental tendencies from the practical viewpoint of the working class. Marx had not passed in vain through the school of Hegel which had been for the whole generation of the revolutionaries of the 30's and 40's the great school of philosophical thought. He brought to his materialistic research a method of inquiry ranging from the most exact theoretical to the most direct practical knowledge. Unfortunately, that broadness and subtlety of Marx's thought has been less and less understood by its later exponents and opponents. Thus one group fell into the error that, according to the materialistic theory, a full material reality pertained only to the economic phenomena, while all other social phenoma—State, law, forms of consciousness possessed a lesser and lesser degree of "reality" and ultimately were lost in pure "ideology."1 According to this first misconception which will hereafter be called the "economistic" tendency, it is only the economic struggle of the workers and the forms of social struggle springing directly from it which are recognized as a direct proletarian and revolutionary action, whereas all other forms of struggle, and more especially "political action," are regarded as an undesirable deviation from the real revolutionary aims. This economistic tendency was represented during Marx's lifetime, within the Working Men's International Organization, by the adherents of Proudhon, by Bakunin, and other 1 For a more detailed discussion see the author's Marxism and Philosophy, 1923, second edition, 1930. 215 KARL MARX "anti-authoritarian," "anti-political," and "anti-party" groups of the day. The violent battle waged by Marx and his followers against that heterodoxy led to the formal expulsion of the dissident groups from the "International" and, finally, to the dissolution of the whole organization. A direct descendant of this earliest form of an economistic and anti-political tendency is that second current of socialistic thought which was represented by revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism and is actually responsible for that second great rallying of the proletarian forces after the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which formed during the last seven years the real driving force of the revolutionary movement in Spain.1 The same revolutionary economistic tendency was represented, in a weaker form, within the Marxist movement itself. We do not mean here that pseudo-economistic school of the German and other European Social Democratic parties and Trade Unions which under the pretext of an "economistic" principle actually contested all forms of the workers' movement going beyond the mere "economic" wage struggle within the framework of the bourgeois production and of the bourgeois State. On the basis of that pseudo-economistic principle, they opposed, in the period preceding the World War, among other political activities of the workers, the Social Democratic campaign for the abolition of the property qualification on the franchise in Prussia, the militant Liebknecht campaign against militarism, and the so-called "révolution Dreyfusienne" in France. They did so not for any particular dislike of the very moderate political aims of those campaigns, but on the ground of the "revolutionary" weapons (general strikes, street demonstrations, etc.) employed therein. Thus they did not oppose politics but only the alliance of the workers with a radical bourgeois politics. They opposed on the same grounds, during the 1 See the author's article on The Spanish Revolution in Die Neue Rundschau, Berlin, 1931. 2l6 BASIS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE war, even the slightest attempts of the socialist workers in Germany to endanger the "Burgfrieden" thrust upon them in the interest of the ruling class. While this group emphasized the "materialistic" importance of a so-called "economic action" only for the purpose of avoiding the revolutionary implications of an unrestricted political fight, the real importance of an economic action in a social struggle for power was worked out, both against the pseudo-economism of the reformists and against the merely political radicalism of the party leadership, by that small revolutionary group of the German Social Democratic Party which then centred around Rosa Luxemburg. That left-wing radicalism of the pre-war period developed during the war, and the ensuing phase of a direct revolutionary struggle, into the anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union tendency of the left communists, who with several directly anarchistic and syndicalistic currents, took a considerable share in the foundation of the new international organization of the revolutionary working class to be later shoved into the background again by the increasing stabilization of the old capitalist conditions. They were then, after a vehement internal struggle, finally expelled from the ranks of the communist Third International by a process begun by Lenin himself,1 and followed out to the bitter end by the "queue de Lenin" after his death. As shown by this brief historical outline, the "economistic tendency" of Marxism has played, on the whole, an important part in the revolutionary development of the European labour movement comparable to the contribution which during the same period was made by the Industrial Workers of the World to the revolutionary development of the class war in the U.S.A. This was recognized even by such an arch-political Marxist as Lenin when, on looking back to his own battles against the
KARL MARX reformist and centrist deformation of revolutionary Marxism within the German Social Democracy, he made the characteristic statement : "Anarchism is the punishment for the sins of opportunism."1 Even from a merely theoretical viewpoint the connection of the Marxist theory with the whole of the revolutionary proletarian class war was preserved most efficiently In this "economistic" group, although the original Marxian idea of a continuous struggle waged simultaneously on all fronts of the social life was kept alive by them only in the "abstract" and almost mystical form of a direct identification of the objective economic development with the active revolutionary movement of the proletarian class. In opposition to that first extreme stands another and apparently much more comprehensive interpretation of revolutionary Marxism which will hereafter be called the "sociological tendency." While the former school over-emphasized the importance of economics and more or less "one-sidedly" reduced all social relations and developments to the unique "reality" of material production, this other school of Marxian thought, in an equally one-sided manner, strove to supplant the basic importance of the production-relations for all political, legal, ideological phenomena occurring in a given socio-economic formation by a "co-ordination" of the "interactions" going to and fro between the various departments of social life and, ultimately, by a "universal interdependence of all social spheres." The materialistic conception of history, then, no longer appears as the principle of a materialistic science, investigating all facts of history from the point of view of their specific relation to material production. It appears at its best as a general empirical and positivistic method which represents all facts in their own contexts and not in connection with any preconceived "idea" at all. Thus the materialistic Critique of Political Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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