[PEN-L:3864] Re: poverty of technological determnism

[dassbach@xxxxxxx (Carl H.A. Dassbach)]

I requested the Marx quote on the "hand mill etc." because I was in the
middle of preparing an essay on 19th c. views of progress and starting to
think about Marx.

My feeling on the matter of Marx's "technological determinism" (which I feel
is related to his views on progress or the inevitability of the final
revolution) is that these pronouncements such as the one about the handmill
or the famous statement of 'results' in the Introduction to the Critique of
Political Economy which begins with "In the social production of life..." is
that these statements were made for emphasis or for openly political
purposes.  When these statements are taken out of context - their context in
a particular essay and their context in Marx's works - they appear to
support the claim that Marx subscribed to technological determinism.  This
however, is an error analogous to trying to identify a large beast by
looking at one toe.  Here, the toe of technological determinism is
overshadowed by the far larger body of Marx's works which suggests, and here
I agree Jim Devine, that Marx gave primacy to social relations and struggle,
whose outcomes can only be contingent.

If anything, the relations of production predominate over the forces of
production and the forces of production are transformed, as Marx frequently
points out in the GRUNDRISSE, to a form _adequate_ to the relations of
production. The problem (for analysis and the analyst) is discussed in the
passage on "fetishism of commodities," the observation attributed to Marx
that essence and appearance do not coincide and Marx's slogan about grasping
things by the "root.", namely, that social relations are not obvious.  They
can not be easily seen, and, as a result, we tend to lose sight of them.  We
see commodities or the forces of production or relationships between
individuals and things such as ownership and  forget that underlying,
supporting, all these are social relations, i.e. relations between
individuals which are conditioned by differential juridical, economic and
political etc. relationships between classes of individuals and things.
The classic example is the capital labor relationship - a exploitative
relationship between individuals which is made possible by the differential
relationship of both parties to a thing - the means of production.

This, I think, also relates to the question of what it means to move from
concrete to abstract to concrete.  The latter, Marx tells us, is the proper
method while the former is the method of classical political economists.  It
is only an improper method if one stops at the results of the movement from
concrete to abstract.  In a larger sense, this movement to ever thinner
determinations must precede the movement in the other direction, from
abstract to concrete. Specifically, moving from concrete to abstract means
uncovering the social relations underlying and resulting from relations
between individuals and things.  Moving from abstract to concrete means
returning to the rich complexity of the world - the concrete is the concrete
because it is the unity of many determinations - but seeing the rich
complexity of the world in terms of social relations.

Apologies for the length,

Carl Dassbach
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Carl H.A. Dassbach                             E-mail:   DASSBACH@xxxxxxx
Dept. of Social Sciences                      Phone:   (906)487-2115
Michigan Technological University         Fax:       (906)487-2468
Houghton,  MI   49931    USA