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, G A 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’ (i.e. 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 the totality of social relations in which they grew up.
Base, superstructure and social change
Much of the confusion which has arisen among Marxists over the interpretation of Marx’s Preface to A Critique of Political Economy lies in the definition of the ‘base’ on which ‘the legal and political superstructure’ rises.
For some people the ‘base’ has, in effect, been the material interaction of human beings and nature – the forces of production. For others it has been the social relations within which this interaction occurs, the social relations of production.
You can justify any one of these positions if you take particular quotations from the Preface in isolation from the rest of the passage and from Marx’s other writings. For at one point he talks of the ‘sum total of these relations of production’ as ‘the real basis on which arises a political and legal superstructure’. But he says earlier that ‘relations of production… correspond to a definite form of development of their material productive forces’, and he goes on to contrast ‘the material transformation of the material conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science’ and ‘legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical forms’. It is the ‘material productive forces’ which come into conflict with ‘the existing relations of production’.
In fact he is not making a single distinction in the Critique between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Two distinctions are involved. There is the distinction between the ‘forces of production’ and the relations of production. And then there is the distinction between the relations of production and the remaining social relations.
The reason for the confusion is this. The ‘base’ is the combination of forces and relations of production. But one of the elements in this combination is ‘more basic’ than the other. It is the ‘forces of production’ that are dynamic, which go forward until they ‘come into conflict’ with the static ‘relations of production’. Relations of production ‘correspond’ to forces of production, not the other way round.
Of course, there is a certain sense in which it is impossible to separate material production from the social relations it involves. If new ways of working do involve new social relations, then obviously they cannot come into existence until these new social relations do.
But, as we saw above, there are reasons for assigning priority to the forces of production. Human groups who succeed in changing the ways they work in order to develop the forces of production will be more successful than those that don’t. Small, cumulative changes in the forces of production can take place, encouraging changes in the relations between people which are just as small but also just cumulative. People change their relations with each other because they want to produce the means of livelihood more easily: increasing the means of livelihood is the aim, changes in the social relations of production the unintended consequence. The forces of production rebel against the existing relations of production, not the other way round.
So, for instance, if hunter-gatherers decide to change their social relations with each other so as to engage in horticulture, this is not primarily a result of any belief that horticultural social relations are superior to hunter-gatherer social relations; it is rather that they want access to the increased material productivity of horticulture over hunting and gathering.
In the same way, it is not preference for one set of relations around the production process rather than another that leads the burghers to begin to challenge feudal society. It is rather that for this particular grouping of people within feudalism, the only way to increase their own control over the means of livelihood (to develop the forces of production under their control) is to establish new production relations.
Even when the way one society is organised changes, because of the pressure of another society on it (as when India was compelled to adopt a European style land tenure system in the 19th century, or when hunter-gatherers have been persuaded by colonial administrators and missionaries to accept a settled agricultural life), the reason the pressure exists is that the other society disposes of more advanced forces of production (which translate into more effective means of waging war). And the ‘social relations of production’ will not endure unless they are successful in organising material production – in finding a ‘base’ in material production – in the society that is pressurised into adopting them. Where they do not find such a ‘base’ (as with the Ik in Northern Uganda) the result can even be the destruction of society.[35]
Expansion of material production is the cause, the social organisation of production the effect. The cause itself can be blocked by the old form of organisation of society. There is no mechanical principle which means that the expansion of material production – and with it the changes in social relations – will automatically occur. But in any society there will be pressures in this direction at some point or other. And these pressures will have social consequences, even if they are successfully resisted by those committed to the old social relations.
The distinction between forces and relations of production is prior to the second distinction, between ‘economic base’ and the superstructure. The development of the forces of production leads to certain changes in the relations of production. These in turn result in changes in the other relations of society being made, until a whole range of institutions of a non-economic sort help reproduce existing economic relations (and so resist further economic change).
The point of these distinctions is to provide an understanding of how society changes. If the forces of production are static, then there is no reason why any society should undergo systematic change at all. The existing social relations will simply tend to reproduce themselves, so that at most there can be random, accidental changes in the relations of people to each other. Neither the social relations of production nor the wider social relations will provide any impetus to the revolutionary social changes that do occur (eg from societies of small bands to those of settled villages, or from those of medieval feudal manors to those of advanced industrial capitalist cities).
There is a further confusion in some of the discussion on forces and relations of production. This concerns what the ‘relations of production’ are.
At one point in the Preface Marx equates the social relation of production with property relations. People like Cohen have given this view a central place in their own accounts of historical materialism.
It seems to me to limit the notion of the ‘social relations c production’ far too much. Much of the power of Marx’s account of history lies in the way in which it shows how small changes in the forces of production lead to small, cumulative changes in the social relations arising directly at the point of production, until these challenge the wider relations of society. These small changes might involve new property relations, but in many, many important cases do not.
For instance, an increase in the number of journeymen working for the average master craftsman in a medieval city is not change in property relations. But it does change the social relations in the town in a way which may have very important implications. Similar considerations apply with many other significant historical developments, from the first planting of seed by hunter-gatherers to changes in production methods in capitalist countries today.
To sum up the argument so far. There is not one distinction in Marx, but two. The forces of production exert pressure on the existing relations of production. And those in turn come into conflict with the existing superstructure.
Once this is grasped, it is possible to deal with the questions which are sometimes raised as to whether particular institutions belong to the base or the superstructure.
There is a sense in which the questions themselves are misframed. The distinction between base and superstructure is not distinction between one set of institutions and another, with economic institutions on one side and political, judicial, ideological, etc institutions on the other. It is a distinction between relations that are directly connected with production and those that are not. Many particular institutions include both.
So, for instance, the medieval church was a superstructural institution, defending ideologically existing forms of feudal exploitation. But it acquired such large landholdings of its own that no account of the economic structure of medieval society can ignore it. In the same way, modern capitalist states arose out of the need for ‘bodies of armed men’ to protect particular capitalist ruling classes. But such protection has rarely been possible without the state intervening directly in production.
In pre-capitalist societies, even the question of the class people belong to comes to depend upon superstructural factors. The attempt to preserve existing relations of production and exploitation leads to elaborate codes assigning every individual to one or other caste or estate. This, in turn, determines the productive activity (if any at all) open to them. As Marx put it: ‘… when a certain degree of development is reached the hereditary nature of castes is decreed as a social law’.[36]And ‘in the estate… a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner a commoner, apart from his other relations, a quality inseparable from his individuality’.[37]
There is a sense in which it is true to say that only in bourgeois society do there exist ‘pure’ classes – social groupings whose membership depends entirely upon relations to exploitation in the productive process, as opposed to privileges embodied in judicial or religious codes.[38]Of course, these codes had their origin in material exploitation, but centuries of frozen social development have obscured that fact.
The situation with the capitalist family is somewhat similar to that of the medieval church or the modem state. It grew up to preserve and reproduce already existing relations of production. But it cannot do this without playing a very important economic role (in the case of the working class family, organising the vast amount of domestic labour that goes into the physical reproduction of labour power, in the case of the capitalist family defining the way in which property is passed from one generation to the next).[39]
This has led to attempts to assign it to the ‘base’ because of its economic role.[40] But the distinction between base and superstructure is a distinction between social relations which are subject to immediate changes with changes in the productive forces, and those which are relatively static and resistant to change. The capitalist family belongs to the latter rather than the former category, even in its ‘economic’ function of reproducing the labour force.
Changes in the way reproduction is organised in general follow changes in the way production takes place. The simple fact is that the ‘forces of reproduction’ do not have the tendency to cumulative change that the forces of production do. The possible ways of restricting the number of births hardly changed from the hunter-gatherer societies of 30,000 years ago until the 20th century – whether these means were used depended not on the sphere of reproduction at all, but on the sphere of production. (For instance, while a hunter-gatherer society is forced to restrict the number of births, many agricultural societies have an interest in as many births as possible.) The material conditions under which children are reared do change – but as a by-product of material changes taking place elsewhere in society.[41]
Finally, these considerations also enable us to dispose of another argument that is sometimes raised – the claim that all social relations are ‘relations of production’.[42]
All parts of any social structure owe their ultimate genesis to the realm of production. But what Marx quite rightly emphasised by talk of the ‘superstructure’ was that, once generated, some parts of the social structure have the effect of constraining the development of others. The old stand in contradiction to the new. The old form of organisation of the state, for instance, rose out of the needs of exploitation at a certain point in history and has continuing effects on production. But it stands in contradiction to the new relationships that are continually being thrown up by further developments of production. To say that all social relations are ‘relations of production’ is to paint a picture of social development which ignores this important element of contradiction.[43]