Jim Devine wrote:
some things are constant over time. Marx had a pretty good take on
this: the use-value categories (tools, raw materials, labor) are
historically universal so far (at least until the labor/leisure
distinction goes away). But the social categories (e.g., constant
capital, variable capital) vary between modes of production. (see ch.
7 of volume I of CAPITAL)
The development of forces of production parallels human development
since the former objectifies the latter.
"... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one." "Capital
and a labouring population are precisely synonymous" ([Hodgskin,
Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.
"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:
"... The real wealth ... is man" (Della Moneta, Parte
Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities',
vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity,
constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this
'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the
Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible
cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and
animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism
and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the
lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian
opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed
exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites."
<http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/
ch21.htm>
"An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which
the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his
labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes
use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some
substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims.
[2] Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence
as fruits, in gathering which a man’s own limbs serve as the
instruments of his labour, the first thing of which the labourer
possesses himself is not the subject of labour but its instrument.
Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he
annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite
of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his
original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for
throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, &c. The earth itself is an
instrument of labour, but when used as such in agriculture implies a
whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high
development of labour. [3] No sooner does labour undergo the least
development, than it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus in
the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the
earliest period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals
which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone
modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments
of labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and
shells. [4] The use and fabrication of instruments of labour,
although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is
specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin
therefore defines man as a tool-making animal. Relics of bygone
instruments of labour possess the same importance for the
investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil
bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not
the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments,
that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. [5]
Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of
development to which human labour has attained, but they are also
indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is
carried on."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm>
So the science and technology characteristic of an historical period
- e.g. the period of "manufacture" - are historically specific to
that period. They have a positive content that is "sublated" in the
following period, but this transforms the baby in the process of
getting rid of the bath water.
Since, understood in this way, the historical process of human
development is a set of internally related stages, the "essence" of
the present is constituted by its relations to the past. Its full
understanding requires the understanding of the past.
Ted
