Question to Various comments in In Digest 77

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Question to Various comments in In Digest 77
by Justin Schwartz
05 March 2002 04:32 UTC  < < <
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>CB: Doesn't _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ make it pretty clear
>that Marx's theory of history is rooted in the relations of production
>aspect of the forces of production, the division of labor, and the class
>struggle ?  History is a history of class struggles, not technological
>innovations. Since producers are part of the forces of production , it is
>their development that is in the forces of production that makes history,
>and historical revolutions.
>
>

That's one strand in Marx. The other one is represented most famously by the
1859 Preface to the CoPE, where Marx sets out the "forces" thesis, which he
also stated as early as 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy ("the hand nmill
gives you the feudal lord, the steam mill the industrial capitalist"). Cohen
may overdo the claim that Marx is _consistently_ committed to the forces
thesis, but his book establioshes with scholarly rigor that Marx was often
committed to it. You have to read the book carefully, it's as important a
piece of Marxist analysis as has been published in the last 50 years.
Personally I think that Marx never thought through the tensions between what
have come to be called the class struggle/relations of production account,
articulated by Fisk, Miller, and Brenner, and the forces of production
account, articulated by Cohen and Wright Levine and Sober (among others).
jks

^^^^^^

CB: My reading of Marx and Engels finds that they have thought through quite thoroughly the "tensions" or contradictions between the classes and instruments/organization of production.  They are explicit and serious dialecticians, so for those who disregard their explicit declarations that their method is dialectical, it may seem that they didn't think through the "tensions".

Regarding the 1859 Preface to the CoPE, when we consider the human producers are one of the forces of production, the forces of production coming into conflict with the existing relations of production includes the revolutionary class in production driving the process to the new mode by its struggle, consistent with formulation in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_.  Note that Marx mentions _The Manifesto_ in the 1859 Preface to the CoPE. He ,no doubt, considered the theory in the two to be consistent, after sufficient deliberation on his part.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
"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. 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 hav!
e 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 fo
which it is 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. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production ― antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence ― but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditio!
ns for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Franz*sische Jahrb*cher, arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose ― self-clarification!
. Of the scattered works in which at that time we presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre echange, which I myself published. The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misere de la philosophie..., this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on this subject at the German Workers' Association in Brussels, was interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence.