he output of present labour: both material means (tools, machines, access to raw materials) and new knowledge. But in adopting the new ways of working, humans also adopt new ways of relating to each other.
These changes will often be so small as to be barely perceptible (a changed relationship between two people here, an additional person engaged in a particular labour process somewhere else). But if they continue, they will bring about systematic molecular change in the whole social structure. The succession of quantitative changes then has a qualitative impact. p> Marx does not deny the possibility of changes in other aspects of social life. A ruler may die and be succeeded by another with a quite different personality. People may tire of one game and start playing another. The accident of birth or upbringing may produce a gifted musician or painter. But all such changes are accidents. There is no reason why they should lead to cumulative social change of any sort. They can produce random change in society, but not a dynamic which moves society in any specific direction.
Material production, on the other hand, does have a tendency to move in one direction rather than another. Its output is wealth, the resources that allow lives to be free from material deprivation.
And these resources can be piled up in ever greater quantities.
This does not mean that forces of production always develop as Kautsky, Plekhanov and, more recently, GA Cohen have claimed. As we have seen, the clash between new ways of producing and old social relations is a central feature in history.
Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto that 'Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes '. [32] The outcome of the clash between the new and the old did not have to be the defeat of the old. It could be the stifling of the new. There could be the 'mutual destruction of the contending classes'. [33]
'Regression' (from more advanced forms of production to more backward) is far from being exceptional historically. Civilisation after civilisation has collapsed back into 'barbarism' (ie agricultural production without towns) - witness the dead 'cities in the jungle' to be found in Latin America, south east Asia or central Africa; there are several instances of hunter-gatherer peoples who show signs of once having been horticulturalists (eg some tribes of the Amazon). [34] It depends upon the particular, historically developed features of any society whether the new forces of production can develop and the classes associated with them break through. At one extreme, one can imagine societies which have become so sclerotic that no innovation in production is possible (with, for instance, closely circumscribed religious rites determining how every act of production is performed). At the other extreme, there is modem capitalist society where the be all and end all of life is meant to be increasing the productivity of labour.
In fact, most human societies have been somewhere in between. Because human life is harsh, people have wanted to increase the livelihood they can get for a certain amount of labour, even though certain activities have been sanctified and others tabooed. Generally speaking, there has been a very slow development of the forces of production until the point has been reached where a new class begins to challenge the old. What has happened then has depended on the balance of class forces on the one hand, and the leadership and understanding available to the rival classes on the other.
However, even if the development of the forces of production is the exception, not the norm, it does not invalidate Marx's argument. For those societies where the forces of production break through will thrive and, eventually, reach the point of being able to dominate those societies where the forces of production have been stifled. Very few societies moved on from the stage of barbarism to that of civilisation; but many of those that did not were enslaved by those that did. Again feudal barons and oriental despotic gentry were usually able to beat back the challenge of urban tradesmen and merchants; but this did not stop them all being overwhelmed by the wave of capitalism that spread out from the western fringe of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
It did not matter, at the end of the day, how grandiose or elaborate the superstructure of any society was. It rested on a 'Base' in material production. If it prevented this base from developing, then the superstructure itself was eventually doomed. In this sense Engels was right to say that the 'economic element finally asserts itself as dominant'.
As a matter of historical fact, the forces of production did succeed in breaking down and transforming th...
