Is human history directionally oriented? Does it point toward the overcoming of class society? This is one question — a contentious one — raised in the following, the third and final part of this essay written for Kasama. The first two parts are here and here.
Why historical materialism matters, 3
by Eddy Laing
Economic Base, Political-Ideological Superstructure and the Need for Revolution
In their historical analysis, Marx and Engels specifically noted and partly described several types of societies that have existed over the past two thousand years, primarily citing the Mediterranean and Europe. Tribal societies, slave societies, feudal societies, and capitalist societies have each been characterized by distinctive but generalizable economic relationships and technologies (e.g. estate agriculture using slave labor together with small-scale handicraft production) and ideo-political superstructures (Roman or common law, literature and music, religions and customs, etc.) In every stratified society, the dominant class exerts hegemonic control over the rest of society, including over intellectual life, aspirations, and the ability of subaltern strata to express ideas independent of that dominant, ruling class narrative. The proletariat (and every other non-dominant class) is not only expropriated economically; they are expropriated in every aspect of culture including their intellectual life. Consider, for example, how the ruling class narrative defines popular discussions of ‘democracy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘violence’, ‘peace’, ‘terrorism’, ‘economic crisis’, and so on.
The oppressed classes’ struggle – as individuals and in groups – not just against the surface phenomenon of economic conditions, they push up against all of these other types of subjugation too, although often without awareness of the real nature of the contradiction or of potential outcomes. Within the system of class divisions, the boundaries of oppression – just like the actual composition of the classes – shift over time, depending upon the resistance of the oppressed, the rate of success/failure of the social economy, the relative political/military strength of the classes facing each other, and environmental conditions. Bourgeois revolutions often set out to overturn the hereditary rights that characterized earlier class societies, and replace those with the so-called ‘inalienable rights of man.’ Yet, as the history of the last 350 years shows, social status remains inheritably constrained (but not completely fixed) within capitalism; through inheritable property; through the bourgeois family; through literacy and a stratified education system; through acculturation in literature and arts; through national/ethnic oppression and racism, and so on.50 As Marx and Engels observed, “class in its turn assumes an independent existence against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it.” This “subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labor … can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor [i.e. the sale of labor-power] itself.”51 In other words, class societies reproduce themselves by reproducing the classes of social practices on which that mode of life is based.
Based on their analysis of historical succession, Marx and Engels theorized that class society was itself historical; that the blind necessity that had driven all prior class societies was being eclipsed by the current capabilities of social reproduction; and that therefore exploitative capitalist society could and should be brought to an end by the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat. This struggle, aimed immediately at the capitalist state, must account for all the other components of the social superstructure and not only production relationships.
“The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”52
As 20th C. history shows, while an essential and great leap, the revolutionary transformation of the superstructure requires much more than ‘smashing the state’ and establishing a new regime of workers or their representatives. It is increasingly evident that the revolutionary transformation of all social relationships (economic, political and ideological) must be the program for the entire period of socialist transition. Short of that type of movement, the economic relationships at the outset of socialist reconstruction not only bear “the birth marks of the old society,”53 they stand in active opposition to moving forward: an extensive division of labor; wage scales and the exchange of labor-power; various forms of small-scale production and commerce; the administration of public property, etc.
In order to create a society that has rid itself of the ‘muck of ages’ we need to refashion all of the ways in which we interact with each other; transform all of the social relationships upon which society is based. This is not just a matter of enacting laws or restructuring the economy, although those are enabling actions from which we must start. This again speaks to the relationship between being and thinking; between the ways society is organized and functions and the ways we conceptualize each other. We cannot re-conceptualize ourselves without changing the ways in which we live; we cannot change those social relationships without re-conceptualizing our peers and ourselves.
Is Human History Directionally Orientated?
Marx wrote to Joseph Weydermeyer that “no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes or the struggle between them … what I did new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases of the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”54
This has led some to view socialist revolution and the demise of capitalism as inevitable and bound to occur, under the pressure of its own internal contradictions. There are indeed fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist societies, not the least of which are those internal contradictions between exploitation and accumulation, between the proletarian and capitalist classes. However, patterns and trends in social history do not necessarily indicate all potential or future actions; human societies are inherently dynamic and variable, even – perhaps especially – when large numbers of its members attempt to act in concert, such as classes struggling to become conscious of their collective and strategic interests.
Engels spoke to social contingency in his notes on Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and is worth citing at length here. “In spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. … The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. … Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history.”55
The struggle for communist society is a struggle to overcome and do away with all of the inequalities that arise from the historic divisions of society and the division of labor. As the struggle between classes is fought out through every social relationship, it creates further potential for revolutionary transformation of all social relationships. The object of the socialist revolution is not simply an equal (or even generally-increased) distribution of the social product – such an equity between sellers and buyers can only reproduce the old social relations of capitalist exchange56 – rather, the object must be the creation of new and non-exploitative social relationships in every field of activity. Most importantly, this applies to the proletariat itself, which must “rid itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.”57
Instead of life’s work as compulsory and alienated (so many units of labor-power within a capital process), communism envisions emancipatory ‘life’s work’ unfettered of narrow economic relationships. To arrive at that mode of life, we need to reorganize society beyond the narrow confines of the “bourgeois right,”58 beyond an ‘equality’ grounded in commodity exchange and which masks the relationships among people with relationships between things. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, classless society enables the full realization of individuals through the full realization of society as a whole. In capitalist society, the prime objective for the worker is the sale of her labor-power for purposes directed by capital. Even one’s ‘free (unpaid) time’ and compensatory (in lieu of truly self-directed) activities are narrowly defined by capitalist relations, such as the periodic ‘freedom’ to purchase – or more often, borrow against – ‘non-essential’ consumer goods, make a holiday excursion, etc. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, communist society is one where “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [since] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.”59 This vision of the future suggests but cannot propose specific solutions to every form of social contradiction, and it certainly strains an imagination subsumed in the present-day ideologies of late capitalism and the age-old traditions of class society. (e.g., how can everyone be competent or enabled to engage in every type of activity?) However, the scope and sociality of this vision stands exactly opposed to all of the brutality, muck and ennui of imperialist society, with its ruling class of loathsome parasites.
The oppressed can make their own history only through overcoming the ‘dead hand of the past’ – ideologies and practices that perpetuate exploitation and oppression. Historical materialism is an essential tool for decrypting those social practices. Especially important to the theory is the observation that “it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people in each people. … Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much on the circumstances.”60 We are who we are through our social practices and our socially transformative capabilities arise from that sociality, especially as class struggle.
Up through the mid-19th century, materialist philosophy had largely been constrained by mechanistic and reductionist interpretations: the world as an aggregate of things, each with a cause and effect. Marx and Engels liberated materialism from this conundrum by applying dialectical analysis; instead of a series of isolates, the physical world and human society were revealed as complex webs of interactive processes. Within the web of human culture is the communist project, based on the premise that overthrowing capitalism and building a new form of society is historically possible; the proletariat can act in that direction because of its position as a class within the matrices of contemporary social relationships. Our actions are generally deliberate, but not ‘inevitable’ or automatic, and often produce unanticipated consequences. For all of that, by acting we are transformative of society, the world and ourselves.
Of course, the advent of dialectical historical materialism [HM] has not meant the demise of idealist and subjectivist modes of thought. It did however expand the proletarian class struggle – already taking place over economic and political relationships – into the realm of philosophy and within the ideological superstructure more broadly. In that way, by providing a framework for interpreting the world, HM dialectically enables the communist hypothesis to change it. The manifestations of this ideological struggle (such as against idealism and subjectivism) are of critical importance for those struggling to revolutionize society.
For example, in their examination and analysis of society, Marx and Engels adopted the approach of isolating and dissecting various social relationships in their phenomenal forms – such as labor-power, surplus-value, constant capital, economic base, political and ideological superstructure – in order to describe internal features and specific categories of interaction. These specific features were examined by Marx in order to understand society as a whole process, as a ‘rich totality of many relations.’
“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”61
This approach remains vulnerable to one-sided and reductionist interpretations and, indeed, some activists have made those types of mistakes; adopting mechanical and atomized perspectives — over that of capitalism as a matrix of international process — fragmenting the relationships between economics, politics and ideology in the near-term revolutionary class struggle and as they affect the longer struggle for communism. Those misinterpretations have had harmful and often disastrous effects. For example, various conceptualizations of socialism have been advanced over the past century which give priority to productive capacity, types of technology, or amounts of output as the ‘key link’ for creating socialism and for revolutionizing society, substituting these for the truly key objectives of socialist revolution: the radical transformations of all economic, political and ideological social relationships. Similarly, various visions of anti-capitalist social change center on organizing incremental economic oppositions to individual capital formations, policies or capitalists in place of advancing the struggle to challenge all of the oppressive and exploitative social relationships inherent in capitalist society, including and especially the character of the state. Within the ranks of the proletarian movement, the failure to recognize and accurately advance the struggle over key matters of ideology, of materialist dialectics, as well as of the analysis of specific socio-political moments, contributed to the reversals of socialism in the USSR and China, and to the misdirection of many revolutionary movements in other countries worldwide.62 Our practical and theoretical work today is very much grounded in those past practices – successes and failures – and on the struggle to accurately assess them.
As current events continually remind us, the social world is not frozen, waiting for the oppressed and exploited to seize the day. The outrages and atrocities of capitalism are an ongoing assault on the great majority of the people of the world and on the planet itself. The clock is always ticking. For us, the project for the future will only advance if we assume among our component tasks the critical opposition to such mechanistic and ‘metaphysical’ conceptualizations and the further critical development of dialectical, revolutionizing, historical materialist practice and theory.
Notes
[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]
50 Studies of education practices in the US have shown that a large majority of low-income and ethnic-minority students are regularly placed in ‘low-skilled’ educational tracks. c.f. Condron, D. J. 2007. Stratification and Educational Sorting: Explaining Ascriptive Inequalities in Early Childhood Reading Group Placement. Social Problems 54(1): 139-160.
51 The German Ideology. p. 77.
52 The German Ideology. p. 53.
53 Marx, K. 1969/1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. p. 17.
54 Marx, K. 1969. Letter to J. Weydermeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 528.
55 Engels, F. 1969/1888. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. p. 366.
56 Where “he, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.” Capital Vol. 1 p. 172.
57 The German Ideology. p. 88.
58 Critique of the Gotha Programme. p. 18.
59 The German Ideology. p. 47.
60 Ludwig Feuerbach. p. 367.
61 Grundrisse. p. 107-108.
62 c.f. Ely, M. 1980. Slipping into Darkness, ‘Left’ economism, the CPUSA, and the Trade Union Unity League (1929 – 1935). Revolution 5(2-3).
No related posts.
John Steele on 
»The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism« « Subprole on 
Don Hamerquist on 
db on 
er cooper on 
don on 
