The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

7. The Mode of Production

137 7 The Mode of Production Marx’s Engine of History as Simultaneous Forward and Backward Movement In a speech delivered at the anniversary of the “People’s Paper ,” Marx outlined the rupture of history, which had produced such a lamentable state of wealth and inequality, progress and deepening failure. There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific processes which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the later times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary .... This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.1 Humanity is divided against itself because history is divided against itself. People being wholly the products of history, history 1. Karl Marx, Surveys From Exile: Political Writings (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 2:299–300. 138  Karl Marx itself must be set right in order to accomplish ourselves. Labor being humanity ’s prime want and need, history is hence for Marx the working of the mode of production. And yet as Marx sees it, the mode of production has reached its point of sharpest conflict. Productive powers and social relations are tort in opposition. Marx is hence explicit in his reading of the separated nature of productive forces and social relations. Yet when he talks of the causal mechanism of history, the mode of production, he seems less understanding of it as a conflicted entity. Taken from the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, it is obvious that there exist two distinct motive powers within the mode of production, at times cooperating in harmony, at other times conflicting. In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces .... At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.2 The mode of production then comprises both the relations of production and the forces of production. Their proper relation to one another has been a contentious issue among commentators on historical materialism . Steven Best, in his work The Politics of Historical Vision, has surveyed the two opposing positions in an attempt to fuse the forces and relations of production into a homogenous mode of historical causality. In doing so he wishes to counter and balance out the conflicting claims of the technological determinist and class-conflict readings of Marx’s work. He shows us that the “key problem relates to the issue of whether or not Marx was a technological determinist, whether he privileged forces of production (technology, knowledge, work relations) over relations of production (social classes) as the fundamental causal dynamic of history .”3 Of the technological determinist school, G. A. Cohen and W. H. 2. Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, Marx, Engels, Lenin: On Historical Materialism (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 137–38. 3. Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision (New York: Guilford, 1995), 54. The Mode of Production   139 Shaw are cited as the most lucid in the field. Shaw opines that “from the ‘Preface’ itself, it should be clear that Marx saw the key to human history in the development of man’s productive forces. They are ‘the material basis of all social organization’; their improvement explains the advance of society.”4 This position holds that forces determine relations, and this arrangement of the mode of production is allied to a particular view of history. A perusal of key words in this passage, such as “development,” “improvement,” and “advance,” gives us the background tone to this approach to Marx. Technological determinism is the narrative of progress in the human species. Cohen outlines the dynamic...