According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.
The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history. full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/preface.htm One does not have to prove an inference or it is not an inference. Presentation of an issue, any issue, depends to a large extent on ones purpose or in our case our political purpose. Engles presents the issue of society and its evolution as: "within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms" because his purpose is to outline what is fundamental in the social process. What is fundamental means a complex of changing factors in which one aspect is more mobile than the other aspects. Hence, "the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life . . . the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; . . . the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species." Property relations arise within this context or after the evolution of tools that give rise to the material power of production. Property is transitory, while the shape of production - mode of reproduction, is a permanent ever changing feature of human existence. Revolution comes about as a result of the development of the means of production. An antagonism develops between the new, emerging economic relations and the old, static political relations within the superstructure. The political relations are the legal expression of property relations. Marx approach to social revolution was basically that there were two classes that propelled history forward. One was the class that owned the means of production and the other was the class that toiled at these means of production. The struggle was over control of these means of production. Contradictions internal to the system forced a political struggle between the classes that ended in revolution. At the risk of being tossed out of the "Marxist movement," I do not believe this is entirely correct. The feudal class was not overthrown by the serf; they were overthrown by a new economic class outside the production and reproduction of the property relations of feudalism. This point is so important that I have written it 10-20 times for the past three years, at least. The dialectic between the toiler and the owner of the means of production is the dialectic of reform. Some call the struggle and fight for wages class struggle. It is not the meaning of class struggle. When Lenin spoke of the class struggle of the workers it was in a historically specific context of the final overthrow of the feudal order in conflict with the bourgeoisie attempting to impose its class demands and economic interest as the shape of industrializing Russia. When Lenin politicized against the economists of his day he was arguing for creating an organization to carry out insurrection and aligning a section of the workers in motion behind the political demand for state power or carrying out the bourgeois revolution under the banner of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The concept that the bourgeoisie and the serf overthrow feudalism lacks a dialectical conception of classes in their rise and fall. The energy of the serf as a serf was used by the bourgeoisie, but the objective logic of the serf as a class is not to destroy itself but to preserve that which makes him a tiller of the land, with expanded economic and political liberties. The demand of the serf under feudalism is to reform the system. If he is aligned politically to the new classes created by the new economic relations that arise on the basis of the development of the means of production - driven by the technological revolution, he is revolutionary in that sense. Marx pretty much describes the underlying social and political process in the Communist Manifesto under the section Socialist and Communist Literature. The issue of the mode of production - defined as a set of property relations, being in conflict with the material power of production, expressed as the crisis of overproduction does not reveal what is taking place today. We are faced with a more than less permanent glut and overcapacity due to the state of development of the technological regime. Productive forces have to be destroyed and shut down. The modern question is not the contradiction between the bourgeois property relations and the material power of production, but rather the passing over of this contradiction to antagonism on the basis of the qualitative changes in the technological regime. The working class and bourgeois are birthed as a contradiction or the two basic classes of the industrial system, with the property relations within. Their evolution begins within the feudal economic and social order. This same process logic is taking place today. The new class that has emerged today exists outside - more than less, world wide . . . of the system of buying and selling or exchange of commodities that stabilize the bourgeois property relations. This is the real proletariat. Social revolution as historical necessity can only arise with the development of a new class created as the result of the development of the material power of production. This new proletariat is a communist class. The bond that unites the bourgeoisie and working class is severed and sectors of both classes have in fact begun to exist in external collision to one another. The class of modern speculators detached from the means of production on the one hand and a proletariat detached from the means of production on the other. Here is the dialectic of class and the end game of the law of value, which Engels clearly saw in 1844 and whose general laws Marx worked out. Political revolution was attempted on behalf of the working class during the last century because the communist understood the general direction of society. Our task was to carry out industrialization without the bourgeois property relations and absolutely liquidate - on the basis of developing the material power of production, all feudal economic and social relations. The reason "the Marxists" in the American Union do not see this process is because they have been under the spell of political syndicalism for an entire century. The grave digger of the bourgeois order is the advance of industry and the victory of the proletariat is inevitable. It is this new class outside of value production that has the historical demand and right to reorganize society on the basis of to each according to his need, from each according to their ability. The evidence is right in front of us and clearly revealed in the history of the development of our own working class. Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
