erage axis of mankind's intellectual development 'runs' parallel to that of its economic development ', so that in the end all that really matters is the economic development. [9]
The outcome of great historical events like the French Revolution did not depend at all on the role played by individuals like Mirabeau or Robespierre:
'No matter what the qualities of a given individual may be, they cannot eliminate the given economic relations if the latter conform to the given state of the productive forces.
Talented people can change only individual features of events, not their general trend. '[10]
Just as Kautsky's interpretation of Marxism dominated in the parties of the Second International, Plekhanov's was taken up as the orthodoxy by the Stalinist parties from the late 1920s onwards. [11] In the hands of Stalin and his 'theoreticians' it became an unbendable historical law: development of the forces of production inevitably led to corresponding changes in society, so the growth of industry in Russia would inevitably lead from a 'workers' state 'to' socialism 'and from' socialism 'to' communism ', regardless of the misery and hardship involved; by contrast, the clearest indication that Western capitalism had outlived its lifespan was the decline in its forces of production.
The reaction against determinism
Stalinist Marxism did not long outlast Stalin himself. The 'new left' of the late 1950s and the Maoist left of the mid-1960s both launched assaults on the crude mechanical determinist account of history.
They insisted, rightly, that in Marx's own historical writings - the Class Struggles in France, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France - there is not a hint of a passive, fatalistic approach to historical change. They also laid great emphasis on certain remarks Engels had made in a series of letters he wrote at the very end of his life, in the 1890s, criticising an over-crude use of historical materialism. Engels had written to Starkenburg:
'Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc development is based on economic development. But these all react on one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is rather interaction on the basis of economic necessity which ultimately always asserts itself. '[12]
And to Bloch:
'According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than that neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless abstract senseless phrase.
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by victorious classes after a successful battle, etc, juridical forms and even the reflexes of these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - Also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form ...
There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents, the economic element finally asserts itself as necessary. '[13]
The post-1956 new left went on to argue that even the terms 'base and superstructure' were simply a metaphor, not to be taken too seriously. The 'reciprocal' influence of the superstructure on the base meant that 'determination' was not to be seen as a strict causal relationship.
The Maoist left did not begin with such an explicit break with the past. The doyen of this school, Louis Althusser, was quite willing in his early 1960s writings to quote Stalin himself favourably.
But the Althusserians created a new theoretical structure which destroyed most of the content of the old notions of 'base', 'superstructure' and 'determination'. Society consisted of a number of different structures - the political, the economic, the ideological, the linguistic - each developing at its own speed, and having an impact on the others. At any particular point in history it could be any one of them that dominated the others. It was only 'in the last instance 'that the economic was' determinant '.
The new left and the Maoist-Althusserian schools were initially very hostile to each other. [14] Yet both of them redefined historical ...
