Re: Re: Re: Historical Materialism FAQ

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

> Sam responds:
> >But in order to increase profits you need the work of scientists and
> >engineers. Technology is introduced to help increase the rate of profit
> >(rising organic composition of K.) The work and knowledge of scientists
> >and engineers constrains the type and amount of technology thus
> >constraining the amount of profit (to put it crudely.)
>
> Yes, but capitalism tries to subordinate the scientists and engineers (and
> more importantly their effects on profits) as much as possible. S&Es change
> the natural constraints we face, but capital limits the way in which they
> do so and which points on these constraints are chosen.

If one were to take Sam's claim as fundamental, it would be difficult to
explain
how capitalism existed before [name your technological breakthrough]. In
fact, capitalists *must* grow, independently of the effects of
technology,
and it is this compulsion to grow (which results from competition) that
they look, among many other things, to technology to cheapen the value
of labor. No matter how you attempt to qualify it, if you insist on the
forces of production having an independent impact on the relations of
production, you begin to move towards seeing history shaped by a force
exogamous to history. ("Nature," however defined, is exogamous to
history, but technology, the metabolism of humans with nature, is not.
It
flows from history.)

Query: Class society is not more than a few thousand years old (say
10,000 at the extreme), while biologically modern humans go back
about 100,000 years and social relations of various sorts involving
cooperative use of tools go back a million more or less. Should we
use the term relations of production for those social relations that
predate not only class society but biologically modern humans or
should we use some other term?

I would assume that the social relations that made tools possible
(not necessary) predated the actual development of those tools,
just as the development of capitalist relations predated technological
development in response to the compulsion to cheapen labor.

On the whole, in "tributary modes of production" (to use the most
general term for pre-capitalist class societies) there was no compulsion
and only intermittently incentive to improve technology. This is shown
in part by various technologies which were "invented" prior to
capitalism but never made significant use of. (The steam engine,
for example.)

Carrol