Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 5-10
In class 8, on the first part of chapter 15, Harvey focused considerable attention on footnote 4, on pages 493-4. This footnote contains important theoretical material that situates Marx’s discussion of the technology of large-scale industry in his theory of historical materialism. In order to be succinct, I will excerpt it as follows:
“A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual… And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.” (493)
Harvey took this opportunity to respond to some criticisms of Marx’s method and to explain his own interpretation of historical materialism. As Harvey notes, the notion that Marx is a technological determinist is easily refuted by the above passage. Marx sees technology as a phenomenon by which we can understand humans’ metabolic relationship to nature because it mediates that relationship—it does not determine the overall shape of society.
But Harvey takes it a step further, explaining that there are seven elements that make up the totality of society. I only caught six of them: technology, humans’ relationship to nature, mode of production in the physical sense, mode of social reproduction, social relations and mental conceptions. He argues that the revolutionary moment is when all of these elements change at the same time because they all condition each other. He argues that this is in essence what Marx is describing in this chapter—the revolution whereby feudalism was swept away by capitalism.
I do think some of this is true. Marx was definitely not a technological determinist and there are a plethora of elements in society that change when there is a social revolution. Whether it is the seven that Harvey mentions is hard to say.
However, I have two differences with Harvey. First, Marx’s last sentence states pretty clearly that mental conceptions flow from the process of production of social relations of human life. In other words, it is the social relationships of production that determine our outlook: being determines consciousness. Harvey’s notion of the seven elements that interact to create the totality of society sounds like a non-Marxist notion that he is importing and projecting onto Marx here. It is similar to the theory of “overdetermination” advanced by Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick, wherein they argue that four elements overdetermine each other to create society (see Knowledge and Class). Essentially, this is carving out a space for idealism within materialism by arguing that it is not the relations of production that are fundamental. The effect is to undermine Marxist analysis and promote a liberal view of the world where changing people’s ideas is just as important—or more so—than changing the mode of production.
But Marx uses the study of evolution as an analogy to explain historical materialism in a quite a different way from Harvey, Wolff and Resnick. Indeed, when scientists study animals, the key questions they ask are how those animals survive, eat, reproduce and find shelter. The starting point is material needs. All animals have material needs that are fundamental, i.e. they exist prior to culture, politics and social relations. Since no animal species can survive without satisfying material needs, their metabolic relationship to nature must be studied as the foundation upon which ideas form. This is the essence of materialism. No ideas exist outside of the metabolic relationship to nature.
Since humans are animals, scientists should study their societies in the same way: starting with the metabolic relationship to nature as the key element that determines how we relate to each other and the ideas we develop. Human society is more complicated than other animal societies because we have much more complex cultures, institutions, economic structures and classes. In many ways, these elements of the superstructure do influence the mode of production and can put pressure on it to change. Here we have the dialectical relationship. However, Marx’s point is not that all of these elements mutually determine each other with the same amount of force. Rather, it is the relationships of production that determine these other elements in the last instance. It is as simple as understanding that once people cannot eat, culture becomes irrelevant. You can see this distilled in its purest form in the February 1917 Revolution in Russia, which was triggered by growing hunger among the masses. Indeed, hunger is often the catalyst for revolution.
Second, Harvey’s politics around these seven elements seem to be similar to the politics that flow from his erroneous interpretation that Marx advocated a gradual reformist move to socialism. He argues that these seven elements change over a long course of time and eventually culminate in revolution. He claims that their complexity has been underappreciated by Marxists throughout history. This may be true to a degree, but he is missing a key element: politics, the subjective expressions of all the class forces of capitalist society. Politics is the means by which the working class can assert its collective intentionality to change the relationships of production. To paraphrase Lenin, the revolutionary party seeks to create one generalized picture of capitalist brutality to guide the working class to victorious revolution. The party is the most direct and efficient means to express this revolutionary intentionality.
While he doesn’t explicitly state this, Harvey’s conception makes it sound like we need to wait until all these seven elements line up and then the revolution happens. When pressed, he doesn’t have any solutions for the working class. Yes, it is true that you cannot simply will a revolution to happen—it will happen when the contradictions come to a head—but to neglect the agency of the working class is to neglect a central pillar of Marxism: the point is not only to describe the world, but to change it.
World of Lenidzky 