Tag: Free Association

  • Historical Materialism

    Historical Materialism

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    The chronological sequence of events leading to the present can be looked at in a number of ways. Sometimes it is mystified, a progression guided by the hand of God or a creator. This is generally what is taught in churches. To the more secular-minded, it can appear as a random sequence of events—one unfolding drama after another between the armies of warlords and conquerors, the avarice of kings and emperors, the bedrooms of aristocrats and financiers. This is the “great man theory” of history which supposes that social changes and historic events are mainly impacted by gifted individuals driving the realm of humans forward. Then there are the idealists, asserting the predominance of collective consciousness and content of the mind in determining events. This view holds that the best ideas will advance themselves through free and open communication, with the strongest ones rising to the top and shaping our government, laws, technologies, economic exchange and global institutions.

    The materialist conception of history grounds things differently. As humans are evolved from nature and are reliant on it to meet all of our basic needs, materialism places our history on the basis of our natural being. As most hominids and pre-modern humans existed without religious concepts, advanced cognition or complex language, mapping our history onto these things does not make much sense. While human society today may “feel” very much removed from the whims of nature, this is a fallacy since everything from computers, smartphones, houses, clothes and food are all ultimately derived from some natural extraction. Thus the true fault line between society and the world of nature is “the mediating realm of human labour and production.”1 As individuals must be nourished and fed before they can think or speak, so too must any collective of people be able to meet their biological needs before they are able to ponder philosophy, establish an oral history or develop an artistic culture: “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these [biological] needs, the production of material life itself.”2

    Historical materialism is the assertion that the basis of all history starts with how people produce. Because we, as material beings, are required to first produce our physical bodies before we can produce ideas and individuals, the ideas and individuals that come thereafter will be a reflection of how we produce. Everything else—politics, art, culture, religion—derives secondarily from this basis in production. That is not to dismiss the existence of individual talents or the significance of ideas, but life’s first instances must be materially produced before any individual or collective expressions can be made. The latter depends on the former. Thus it is seen that great men, religion, political intrigue and ideas in general are corollary to the economic system and not the other way around. Human societies, as an outgrowth of nature, therefore emerge with a universal base-superstructure shape that Karl Marx summarized as follows:

    In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.3

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Labour and production are an “everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence” but the forms that production takes and the societies that it produces are variable and highly dependent on available technology, access to resources, received cultural values, etc.4 The social hierarchy of production plus the resources in use and the technologies deployed constitute the mode of production—the economic base. Politics, culture, social customs and intellectual products are the superstructure resting atop this base, shaping our individual and collective consciousness. If anybody imagines being born at a different time period than their own, what they are imagining is life within a different hierarchy of production and its corresponding customs and norms.

    In history, there has been a progression of four major modes of production that have been well-documented and studied, presented below. A fifth is theorized but has yet to fully emerge.

    1. Primitive communism. This is also known as a tribal or hunter-gatherer society, but it is regarded as a form of communism because they were classless. A classless society does not denote equality or absence of authority or any social hierarchy, however. Classlessness denotes individual autonomy over labour, as nobody has the means to seize the work of others. Surpluses, resources and positions of authority are managed democratically by the group, often by consensus. This mode of production was predominant during the Paleolithic Era when Earth was in an ice age. The economic base consisted of technology such as bows and arrows, early use of fire, rafts, hand axes, and big game resources like rhinoceros’ and woolly mammoths. This mode of production corresponded with a superstructure which found expressions in cave paintings, figurine carvings, flute-like instruments made of bone and animistic religions.
    1. Ancient mode of production. The transition to settlements and agriculture occurred after the ice age had ended and various megafauna species began going extinct. The warmer climate allowed for a transition to domesticated crops and livestock which resulted in much greater food production and increased population densities—even as life expectancy crashed due to higher rates of disease and less nutritious diets. The appearance of large grain surpluses also gave rise to humanity’s first class structures and violence over territory. As warrior-kings and armies developed, enslavement of other peoples became common. This mode of production is largely epitomized by the master–slave class relation seen in Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and Asia. Humanity’s first cities were created under this mode and it developed technologies like wood ploughs and iron tools, utilizing a variety of resources through aqueducts, roads, mines and quarries. The existence of a slaveholding class resulted in a complex superstructure marked by polytheistic, harvest-based religions, early writing systems, political institutions, philosophy, pottery and astronomy.
    1. Feudal mode of production. Feudalism came into being as the western Roman Empire was gradually undermined by an exhaustion of the slave trade and conflict with Germanic tribes, until it was eventually negated by the tribes altogether. The result was a massive deconstruction of political authority, away from cities and empire and toward rural fiefdoms controlled by warlords-turned-aristocrats and hereditary royal monarchies. This mode of production is defined by the predominant lord–peasant class relation. While ownership of slave labour was diminished, the labour of serfs was captured by agricultural rents paid to the manor. Previously discovered technologies were mostly adapted to village life, including mills, clocktowers and blast furnaces. The superstructure at this time was largely characterized by the rise of monotheistic religion across the known world. In western Europe, this was crystallized in the Catholic Church which offered political legitimacy to rulers in the form of a “divine right to rule” ideology. The Church also dominated the musical, writing, art and social life of this time period.  
    1. Capitalist mode of production. As feudal Europe developed its productive forces and its aristocracy matured, a thirst developed for expanding trade routes. Existing routes had become monopolized by the Ottoman Empire and this is what motivated Christopher Columbus to set sail, eventually landing on the shores of what is now the Dominican Republic. Ensuing was an unprecedented wave of settler colonization, with all of the pillage of gold, silver, produce, furs and fish that came along with it. As whole continents cracked open to agriculture and trade, plantations developed and slavery was revived in a racialized form. This veritable rush of wealth led to immense capital accumulation by European powers, ushering in the capitalist era. Technological development began to rise exponentially with the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, as steam power, cotton gins and telegraphs appeared. Additional crop varieties from the New World and improved plough technology led to enclosures of farmland, expulsions of peasants and the creation of a mass wage-labour force. The capitalist–wage labour, or employer–employee, class relation is dominant under capitalism, rendering both slavery and serfdom uneconomical due to huge increases in production and the need for mass-consumption. The superstructure under capitalism is marked by the rise of liberal representative democracy, a secular public life, the fracturing of the Christianity with Protestant strains, mass media and the commodification of culture and goods and services. With rapid technological change, capitalism has now placed us firmly into the digital age.
    1. Free association of producers. A theoretical system whereby the labouring classes under capitalism—almost 99% of the population—become the ruling ownership class over the economy and government. Systems of socialist ownership sprouted up during the 20th century in opposition to imperial capitalism, while others have found a footing within the global capitalist structure today. National parks, public education, health care services, co-operatively owned enterprises, public transportation and the post office are all examples. Durable forms of socialism have yet to supersede global capitalism in a meaningful way. The goal of a free association is a classless society which minimizes mandatory work and unleashes the creative potential of all individuals as they dedicate themselves to self-directed pursuits. The primary purpose of this economic base is to produce goods and services according to need rather than payment, with the realm of want and culture dictated by free and voluntary exchange between individuals. Calculated surpluses would be managed via direct democratic means and allocated according to the material interests of the liberated society. The superstructure of such a system is unknown, but would be determined organically from the bottom-up, with decentralized communication technology, such as the Internet, playing a central role.

    Further reading:

    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Chapter One.

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    1. John Bellamy Foster, “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 6. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: On Feuerbach. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value” in Capital: Volume One. ↩︎
  • Revolution

    Revolution

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    Marx observed that revolution occurs when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.”1 Over the territories of the Soviet sphere, this happened first when breaking out from autocratic feudalism in 1917 and again in 1991 when a lethargic party apparatus was absorbed by global capital. The Marxist-Leninist states of the Soviet Union and its offshoots were successful in negating their feudal and colonial circumstances. But on the conditions necessary for socialism, Marx says it is “bourgeois industry and commerce that create the material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.”2 It isn’t the feudal aristocracy or foreign colonizer that must be negated, it is the late capitalism of the present. Only then may we reach the conscious, abundant and individual-affirming free association that Marx had contemplated. 

    In the West today the capitalist oligarchy flaunts its power more than ever against a backdrop of digital connectivity, modern monetary theory, artificial intelligence and the ruination of mental and natural spaces. Our political institutions and regulatory bodies—devised by the pre-internet industrial society—have been rendered moribund against the rapidity of technological development and monopolistic economic power. The luxury doomsday bunkers constructed by billionaires is an admission from the ruling class that the centre will not hold indefinitely. That the people are not satisfied with the wealth they’ve appropriated. That there are more of us than there are of them. 

    But the people—us—we don’t have bunkers for solitude. The world will be ours to fix, regardless if we want it. Will these presently grinding contradictions produce the friction needed for revolution? Marx answers: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”3 What shape this will take is not predetermined. There are some who suggest that we are entering a techno-feudalism, with Big Tech rentiers harvesting our data and content creations across digital spaces in a quest for global domination. It is difficult to imagine a rosy outcome if our primary economic function were reduced to online activity, feeding only from the scraps of corporate largesse through some kind of universal income scheme.

    The situation is not hopeless. These new technologies contain within them the potential to enslave us but also carry, dialectically, the potential to set us free. Even from the Victorian Era, Marx predicted that global connectivity could advance prosperity and liberate the entire species instead of the current set-up whereby one country or class progresses only at the expense of another. Right wing populism will have its moments to try and return the world to a simpler order of things. But they should know that these attempts will always be feeble in a world where no man will step in the same river twice.

    Affecting an axial shift, Marx likens political action to learning a new language: “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”4 To that end, any movement predicated on “Great, Again” cannot articulate solutions to the problems posed by the current paradigm. If it seems that right wing “solutions” only cause greater problems after the fact, it is because all of its referents are embedded within the problem’s cause—namely, the capitalist system. A revolutionary programme must create something dynamic, a system which does not dominate the masses but the opposite: the masses dominate the system. 

    To end the spell of corrupt elections, special interest groups and outdated constitutions, power needs to flow directly from the people via combinations of online voting, citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot and direct referenda. It is radical structural change, not policy change, that opens the doors to freedom. The post-revolutionary abolition of all political parties and elected representatives. The nationalization and subordination of banks, tech, pharmaceutical and telecom companies to the democratically planned production goals of the people. The decontamination of the environment and protection of biodiversity, wild spaces and hunting grounds for their own sake. The promotion of worker-owned enterprises, community associations and consumer cooperatives to service local needs. The dissolution of innovation-destroying “intellectual property.” The erasure of the Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy in favour of courts of ethicists and philosophers. The suppression of central bank financiers, the billionaire ownership class and the Davos-style decision making of the global elite.

    Aristotle imagined that communally owned automata—robots—could free humanity from toil by making necessary human labour redundant. It is an idea that the classically-trained Marx grasped during his lifetime in the age of early mechanization. An economy where automation was not a blind tool for profit, but rather, was put into the service of humanity to create use-values that individuals would harness. It is only in the post-capitalist sphere that a mass-unchaining of people from the compulsion to labour can be realized. This economy must be dynamic, premised on the maximization of free time and fully developing the talents latent in each individual. The individual, in turn, “reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive force.”5 The potential of our species becomes realized only when the full potential of each individual is expressed.

    It is in this vein that Marx and Friedrich Engels argued for a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”6 Free development is not a matter of social justice or moral righteousness. The more victims of poverty, prejudice, preventable death and compelled labour that fall in the world, the fewer people we have contributing to our collective well-being and individual material life. The objective is therefore not equality but classlessness. Both class division and social equality bring limitations to individual compensation and the expression of talent. The cessation of class conflict is requisite to eliminating depravations, cultivating virtue and maximizing the self-directed activity of society’s members. It is only the universal development of human power which may form the basis of a productive and limitless civilization, harmonious with nature and spiritually rich.

    The capitalist ruling class, with its trail of biological contaminations and enslaving techno-feudalist designs, will try to safeguard their misanthropic commercial interests and hypnotize us with dead-end notions of “building back,” “great resets” and conservative “golden ages.” But, in the words of the great philosopher, Slavoj Žižek: “It is not that Communism is one of the possible choices; it is the only choice. Once we choose it, we see it’s the only way out.”7

    Further reading:

    Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism.

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    1. Karl Marx, “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎

    3. Marx, “Preface,” Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Chapter One,” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005), 711. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎

    7. Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (OR Books, 2021), 221. ↩︎