Scientific analysis of social change

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The material world anot be understood thout grasping the fact it all things are in a ›cess of movement, ange, growth and cay.

This was the lesson of last ek's article on • dialectical terialism -the scientific thod of analysing the itradictory material forces hin things that produce ise changes.

Neither objects nor events uld be seen as stationary, manent or devoid of ernal contradictions. And just as matter itself been shown by scientific earch to have its own ernal laws by which atoms I sub-particles move, so i, historical change-the ivement of material forces time-takes place according * understandable material is and causes.

Major advance Historical materialism is application of the lectical method of analysis the understanding of tory, and marks the major rance of Marxism beyond aimless and idealist iceptions of history as amed up by bourgeois torians.

Before Marx, history was n as simply a matter of a d succession of individual nts-in the words of Henry rd one damned thing er another"

All "analysis" centred on : role of individual statesn or kings. There were id kings, bad kings, gressive kings or reactionkings, great men and iked men.

And behind the actions of se individuals was posedly nothing more subntial than individual lughts and ideas. Apparentwars were waged and itinents ravaged for the e of ideas and abstract als.

Good Religion was seen as the atest--and most bafflinga of all. Wars and "civil rs" were apparently fought ely because of religious agreements.

According to this kind of antile analysis the English il war' was a battle ween the supporters of the id king who had ringlets I lace collars and who The capitalist system, like all class supported the established church, and the supporters of Cromwell who had short hair and warts and were puritanical fanatics.

That the English revolution represented a struggle between two opposed classes for their material interests and that the religious ideas were mere expressions of those class interests is denied by bourgeois thought.

For the bourgeoisi the world is full of individi als in unending competition.

Class struggle

For a Marxist the basic division of the world is a material division between different social classes and, as Marx says in the Communist "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."

This is the cornerstone of a Marxist view of history. It does not diminish the significance of individuals, of individual actions, for as Marx states in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: - Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it in circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past" society is based on want and scarcity As Marxists we ale engaged ceaselessly in the class struggle; it is therefore important that we understand the history, the movement of the class struggle, and the stages of its historic development.

Division

Modern capitalism is a system that depends upon a division between those who sell their labour power in order to live and those who buy it; society is torn between the • makers and takers of profit-labour and capital.

This form of social organisation and class struggle has not always existed, nor is it in any way spontaneous or natural; but class struggle itself is age old.

Class conflict and class society did not fall from the skies nor rise from the seas; they emerge in time as the social form, of the relations of production, of a particular historical stage of economic development.

Fetters

What distinguishes humanity from animals is that human beings produce their means of subsistencefood, shelter and clothing-. and they produce these socially with other human beings.

The division of society into possessing and nonpossessing classes rests on the inability of each historical stage of development of the productive forces to supply wealth in terms of commodities in quantities sufficient to eliminate scarcity and want.

Only the massive technol ogical advances made in the course of the epoch of capitalism now make it materially possible to enviseage a social system in which want could be eliminated.

But the fetters of capitalism's requirement to produce only for profit and not to satisfy social need now obstruct such a development.

To go forward to unleash the material forces developed under capitalism means that the propertyless proletariat must mobilise in revolutionary struggle internationally to overthrow and expropriate the capitalist class that owns the means of production.

In place of capitalism a socialist system must be established, with the mission of expanding and developing production in order to pave the way for a classless, communist society.

Not possible Unlike animals, people t live merely in nature Karl Marx also in society and as Franz Mehring argued:

"The basis of all social community is the form of production of material life."

In other words, who and what you are derives from what and how you produce. It is not materially possible, for example, for an intellectual, free-thinking inventor to emerge spontaneously from a society based on the hunting of animals with sticks and stones.

Material changes

A certain way of life, of social organisation and of thought derives from each particular type of organisation of production.

Changes in ways of life or patterns of thought do not therefore merely emerge in themselves but emerge as a result of material changes in the organisation of production and in the class relations which are the social expression of the economic basis of society.

Marx puts it thus:

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society-the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond"

Preface to a Contribution 1o the Critique of Political Opposition While the major factor in the movement of history is the class struggle, the material basis of that struggle is the economic division of society into those who own the means of production and those who do not.

The forms which this division has taken have varied during the course of human "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes"

Communist Manifesto.

church ideal fe The form of conflict and struggle alters as the productive basis of society alters.

In that struggle, the material interests of the opposing groups are reflected in what Marx calls the superstructure of society.

In this arena are all the legal, philosophical, religious and ina word, ideological expressions of the basic economic divisions.

Thus the law under capitalism is based upon the notion of private property which is the basis of capitalist The bourgeois family unit exists as the mode of organisation of sexuality and childcare which is appropriate to capitalist production, both in terms of the inheritance of property in the male line (which requires monogamous marriage to prove paternity): the forcing of children into acceptance of their roles in society: and as the domestic unit which at minimunt cost to the employer prepares the male worker for sale of his labour power.

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Charles I-social contradictions cost him his head The Paris Commune 1871-the first major proletarian threat to The religious beliefs which have developed under capitalism are those which sanction individual competitiveness.

These brief examples reveal the fact that the ruling ideas of any age are d hierarchical he ideas of the ruling class" ind that particular sets of deas flourish at particular imes as expressions of naterial economic interests.

Materialist vision

Thus we begin to see that hanges in ideas, and the levelopment of new concepts ire a response to material ¡hanges in the mode of "The mode of production if material life conditions the jeneral process of social, ¡olitical and intellectual life. t is not the consciousness of nen that determines their xistence, but their social xistence that determines heir consciousness."

Critique Political iconomy.

This materialist vision is a lirect challenge to the idealist iew that it is people's ideals vhich shape their nature and rhich move history.

For this reason the very erms idealism' and 'materialin?' can sometimes cause aisunderstanding since in bourgeois speech they are almost always used in different sense.

Engels shows this clearly in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy:

"By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit hunting and stock exchange swindling -in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism, he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in general, a 'better world' of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only as long as he is undergoing the hangover or bankruptcy consequent upon his customary 'materialist" excesses. It is then that he sings his favourite song, 'What is man? - Half beast, half angel'."

Mehring in 1893 added his own comment on the distinction between bourgeois idealism and the pursuit of a principled goal:

"If one wants to use the words in this metaphorical sense, then it must be said that today the profession of historical materialism demands a high moral idealism, since it invariably brings with it poverty, persecution and slander, whereas every careerist makes historical idealism his cause, since it offers the richest expectations of all earthly goods, of happiness, of fat sinecures, of all possible decorations of merit, titles and honours."

The basic distinction in philosophy is therefore between the materialist school that declares the objective material world is primary and the source of all ideas, and the idealist school that insists that man's thoughts or God's thoughts are primary and that the material world is some kind of embodiment of these thoughts or ideas.

Objective But within the idealist camp is a wide spectrum of apparently very diverse positions, including all of the religions.

Through historical and materialist analysis of religion it is possible to see the objective basis for the different types of belief as particular social groups struggle for existence under varying material conditions.

Mehring cites the example of a nomadic tribe in Siberia whose economy is based on following the movements of their reindeer. I They suffer "terrific storms whose causes they could not explain", , "lose their reindeer suddenly by an epidemic disease which defies human remedies" find themselves "frightened by magnificent auroras that set the whole universe ablaze" and their people "decimated by pestilences whose nature they could not understand and whose disastrous effects they were powerless to avert"

Their religion is consequently a simple worship of powerful spirits whom they implore 1o keep them from harm.

But openly attempting to control the events of life by appealing to the spirits of the air is entirely inappropriate today in an age whose technological advance means that rockets can travel millions of miles beyond the carth's atmosphere.

Yet this does not prevent various more modern forms of idealism from gripping the minds of the masses -though in a less overtly religious and mystic fashion.

Another example of how religion reflects the economie divisions of society is found within the Hindu caste system in India where cach Engels individual is born into a particular caste which defines the job he will do, as potter, weaver or "unclean" washerman.

There is no room within this rigid religious system for the development of new trades, technological change or economic innovation.

The way different religions express the interests of different classes is shown very clearly in periods of transition from one method of organising production to another, in periods of revolutionary upheaval.

Marx puts it thus:

Conflict "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or-this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms-with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.

From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.

The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and • the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society"

Critique Political Aconomy The emergence of capitalism and its establishment as the dominant force in a society hitherto dominated by landowning or feudal aristocrats is one example of this process.

We will briefly outline some of the developments which have taken many authors whole volumes to discuss.

Under the feudal system of production, everything depended on the owners of land. The feudal lords, barons and monarch also owned the labour power of the serfs and villeins who worked the land and were tied to a particular village and a particular lord.

In exchange for tilling the lord's land or a payment of goods, the serf or villein was allowed 'to work his own small strip of land.

The religion appropriate to this rigid hierarchical mode of production was that of Catholicism, which enshrined the "divine right" of kings (and barons) to rule, and a fixed order of things.

There was next to no free market, and exchange of goods for money was only of very secondary importance.

Such a situation meant that only a very limited army of free labour was able to be employed in new manufacturing industries.

And rigid legal restrictions hampered the rising merchant class and kept them from political power, despite their growing economic strength.

This held back the ability of this section of society to take advantage of new openings and innovations that promised to develop the productive forces and increase the volume of wealth produced in society.

New trade routes were opened up, new techniques of navigation were discovered new continents were revealed new areas of knowledge were unlocked with the development of the printing press and the translation of material from Latin into English.

For those sections of society panting to exploit these new developments the feudal fetters and the ideology supporting them were increasingly a material obstacle to the expansion of manufacturing.

Increasingly the most advanced sections. of the rising bourgeoisie came into conflict with the ideolo ty of feudalism-with the Catholic Church.

The economic power of the bourgeoisie forced a bankrupt Henry VIII to break the bond with the Church.

The Reformation established a church in which the individual insists on his right to communicate directly with God and make his own way to heaven-a bourgeois conception of progress towards the "ideal".

But still the restrictions on individual enterprise upheld by the absolute monarchy proved irksome to the commercially productive sector of the propertied classes-the bourgeoisie.

Overthrown

These social relations were overthrown in the English Revolution. The monarchy, when restored, was restored within the context of a society in which the bourgeoisie was dominant.

This process, unleashed in the guise of a religious struggle under the leadership of Cromwell in the 17th Century, was not complete until in 1832 the Reform Act firmly established Parliamentary power in the hands of the then expanded and strengthened industrial bourgeoisie.

Leap forward

By taking the reins of power from the absolute monarchy and the landowing aristocrats, the early industrial bourgeoisie created the conditions for a massive leap forward in the development of the productive forces.

Scientific and technical skills flourished in the early COMMUNE capitalist rule. climate of competitive capitalism, in a way that no other system could have provided at that point of time.

But now the development of capitalism has brought to the fore the material contradictions within this, the most advanced and yet most polarised form of class soriety.

The working class, the propertyless class of society, cannot achieve any long term solution to its material problems of falling living standards, mass unemployment and increased exploitation in the framework of a society in which production only takes place in order that the propertied class, the bourgeoisie, should accumulate profit.

The further development of the productive forces is incompatible with the capitalist system.

The task now is to equip the working class, the only consistently " revolutionary class in society, with a revolutionary leadership and programme which will mobilise its full strength in the struggle to overthrow capitalism, destroy its state apparatus, and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and planned, socialist In this way a material foundation can be laid for the eventual elimination of class distinctions in a communist society in which the primary struggle is not between opposed social classes but between mankind, and nature to prolong and enrich life for all.

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turbulent period, he never abandoned his fervent belief in the ideal of liberty that had pervaded the rhetoric of the revolutions.

Whether from malicious irony or perverse stupidity, the British bourgeoisie has selected some of Blake's verse to pompously chant in one of its patriotic anthems.

Yet even the stifling dreariness of school assemblies is not enough to deaden the power of the