Social Structure and Forms of Conciousness, Volume 2

The Dialectic of Structure and History

Istvan Meszaros

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781583672679
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In The Dialectic of Structure and History, Volume Two of Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, István Mészáros brings the comprehension of our condition and the possibility of emancipatory social action beyond the highest point reached to date. Building on the indicatory flashes of conceptual lightning in the Grundrisse and other works of Karl Marx, Mészáros sets out the relations of structure and agency, individual and society, base and superstructure, nature and history, in a dialectical totality open to the future.

The project is brought to its conclusion by means of critique, an analysis that shows not only the inadequacies of the thought critiqued but at the same time their social historical cause. The crucial questions are addressed through critique of the highest point of honest and brilliant thought in capital’s ascending phase, that of Adam Smith, Kant, and Hegel, as well as the irrationalities and dishonesty of the apologists of the capital system’s descending phase, such as Hayek and Popper. The dead ends of both Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and post-modernism, arising from their denial of history, are placed in their context as capital-apologetics.

What Mészáros, the leading Marxist philosopher of our times, has achieved is of world historical importance. He has cleared the philosophical ground to permit the illumination of a path to transcend the destructive death spiral of the capital system.

CHAPTER ONE
The Nature of Historical Determination

1.1 Material Imperatives and the “Active Side”

At Marx’s graveside, his lifelong friend Engels assessed in the following terms one of the greatest achievements of the founder of historical materialism:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the ideas on art, and even on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.¹

And yet, notwithstanding the plain transparency of what Engels called a “simple fact,” the true character and significance of Marx’s discovery remains in the present a highly contested issue: no less concealed today “by an overgrowth of ideology” than ever before.

Nor is the systematic misreading and distortion of Marx’s views on historical development confined to his adversaries who, for understandable reasons, a priori reject anything they consider threatening to their established positions—even if it has the character of an obvious “simple fact”—with unconcealed hostility. More puzzling is the “agreement” we find in “vulgar-Marxist” interpretations that tend to reduce Marx’s complex dialectical explanations to some simplistic caricature, postulating a crude, immediate correspondence between determinate changes in the material base and the mechanical emergence or modification of even the most abstract ideas.

To be sure, the ideological motivation of Marx’s adversaries needs no further explanation beyond the self-evident hostility of its negative posture. The position of “vulgar-Marxism,” however, is much more complicated than that. For the views of its representatives range from the fatalistic determinism of the Second International to the subjective voluntarism of Stalin and his followers, and well beyond; all the way down to the paradoxical voluntarism of “structuralist Marxism,” which manages to combine a mechanical conception of determination and “homology” with a complete depreciation of the subject of socio-historical action.

Thus historically different situations of relative social immobility—with regard to the basic confrontation between capital and labor—produce characteristically static ideological conceptualizations of the social process itself. Such vulgar-Marxist reflections of the temporarily prevailing social immobility separate theory and practice from, and oppose them to, one another in a fatalistic/voluntaristic vision of historical determination as such, substituting a fetish-like view of “science” (some main figures of the Second International), or an arbitrary/subjective conception of the “class struggle” (Stalin and his followers), or a combination of the two (“structuralist Marxism”) for the Marxian dialectic of base and superstructure and the irrepressible social dynamism implicit in it.

Marx is often accused of “historical determinism,” “economic determinism,” or quite summarily of “determinism” in general. However, if we bear in mind that even an idealist like Hegel defines freedom as “recognized necessity,” it is very difficult to imagine what meaning, if any, could be given to a historical conception that tries to do away with the need for rigorous determinations in tracing historical events and developments, explaining them, instead, with the help of some “principle of indeterminacy.” For all historical theories properly so called, whether materialist or idealist, must operate within the framework of some coherent set of determinations through which they can locate and identify the relative weight and significance of particular events, linking them to one another, and pinpointing through their determinate linkages some historically specific, and more or less far-reaching or comprehensive, tendencies of development. Thus the real question is not “determinations or indeterminacy,” but what kind of historical explanation one adopts: a mechanical-determinist or a dialectical overall framework.

Marx’s conception of historical materialism from the very outset rejected all mechanical explanations, stressing that “the chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.”²

When it comes to genuine historical explanations, their plausibility hinges on whether or not they can account for the “active side” through which history is constantly being made, and not merely given as a brute conglomeration and fatalistic conjuncture of self-propelling material forces.

Admittedly, such forces are everywhere in evidence in history known to us: the history of class society, or “pre-history” as Marx called it, in contrast to the coming “real history” when the human agency is envisaged to be fully in control of its own destiny. But even when the strictly material forces are still preponderant, in the darker phases of that “pre-history,” there is nevertheless an increasing tendency toward their being mastered, thanks to the controlling potential of the “active side.” And how much more favorable could be this correlation between the material forces and the human agency in our own time, if the productive powers of society potentially available for the satisfaction of genuine human needs were not gravely distorted and crippled by their necessary subordination to the alienating imperative of capital’s expanded self-reproduction? At a historical stage, that is, when the removal of the constraints of natural scarcity would be no longer beyond human reach, if it were not for the self-paralyzing—but in principle transcendable—impact of antagonistic social contradictions? For it is the latter that create the false appearance of a humanly uncontrollable material force being responsible for the crises of plenty (overproduction), imposing themselves in the form of a brutal paradox as chronic “scarcity,” thanks to the “own goals” of the selfsame active side.

1.2 Philosophical Foundations of Historical Materialism

In his attempt to spell out the real historical potentialities of the “active side” of human involvement in the complex network of social determinations—in its active character defined as an objective movement from “prehistory” to the “realm of the new historic form”—Marx had to set out from a position diametrically opposed to that of Hegel on every key issue. Hence he put into relief labor in the form in which it actually constituted the foundation of both historical determinacy and emancipation: as “sensuous productive activity,” and thereby also as the ground of even the most complex and mediated intellectual production. Similarly, he rejected all forms of theological teleology, focusing attention at the same time on the dynamic material/intellectual telos of labor: both as human self-production and as the production of the conditions of emancipatory social transformation in the direction of that “realm of freedom.”

In the same spirit, he conceived the nature of historical determination and the unfolding of historical necessity—in contrast to the self-anticipating circularity of such concepts within the confines of Hegel’s truncated dialectic—as the necessarily “disappearing necessity”³ of actual historical transformations which, through the growing mastery of material life’s objective constraints, also create the growing margin of freedom. Accordingly, there could be no such thing as “the end of history.” For history had to remain radically open to qualify as history in order to make any sense at all of “self-activity” and “freedom” in terms of the objective potentialities of human self-realization.

Furthermore, if history as such had to remain radically open, how could one possibly assume an uncritical attitude toward the state as the permanent framework of all future historical development? This contradiction in terms could only be propounded by those who arbitrarily identified the modern state with the elementary conditions of social life in general, as indeed happened in much of liberal political theory.

Hegel adopted a more ingenuous scheme than his predecessors: by opposing an inward-oriented “ideal realm” to the world of practical interest, insisting that “mind receives in its inner life its truth and concrete essence, while in objectivity it is at home and reconciled with itself.”⁴ Thus he interweaved the themes of a “reconciliation with the actual” and of “enjoying the present” with his discourse on the end of history and on the ultimate consummation—in “objectivity” and “actuality”—of such end, under the supremacy of Europe, through the absolute permanence of the idealized state. In this way he created the semblance of a genuine history by allowing the emergence of objective forces in the form of their genesis and expelling them through the back door: by envisaging the necessary culmination of all such historical movement in the apriori anticipated “return of the Spirit into itself.” Thus, however ingenious the Hegelian scheme in its details, the “end of history” and the permanence of the state were ideologically wedded together in its overall construct.

Understandably, Marx’s rejection of the idea of the “end of history” necessarily implied a radically critical attitude toward the state as a historical product as well as toward all theories—whether the original liberal conceptions or the Hegelian variant—which failed to treat the state in a consistently historical manner. All social institutions, no matter how elementary or all-embracing, had to be accounted for in strictly historical terms, rather than being merely assumed “ready made,” like Pallas Athene emerging fully armed from Zeus’s head. And they had to be accounted for with regard to both their origin and historical dissolution, in the generally ignored Marxian sense of historical necessity, defined as necessarily “disappearing, vanishing necessity.”

In this respect, the methodologically vital critique of theories that ahistorically “assume what needs to be proved” is a guiding thread of Marx’s approach not only to Hegel (particularly to his theory of the state) but equally to Hobbes and Locke as well as to the classics of political economy in general. For all these theories tend to equate the modern state and the capitalist market-relations with the elementary conditions of social life, thereby a priori excluding the possibility of situating the dominant social institutions within the dynamic horizon of their ultimately necessary supersession.

In Marx’s conception of objective and open-ended historical determinations both philosophy and its categories had to be assigned a role qualitatively different from that of his predecessors. For even within the Hegelian scheme of things (which stressed the importance of the “active side”) philosophy, as the “owl of Minerva,” was presented as the consolation prize for an unavoidable resignation to the false positivity of the established world. Defined as “the rose in the cross of the present,” philosophy was destined to provide the necessary “reconciliation to the actual” and to authenticate—with the help of its “eternal” categories—the apologetic circularity of beginning and end in the “essentially present” ahistorical “actuality.” Thus philosophy, as the “owl of Minerva,” had to culminate in the atemporal categories of the Hegelian logico/dialectical circle in order to fulfill its function of reconciliatory resignation; and vice versa: the conception of the categories fit to produce the formal/sequential deduction of “actuality”—as corresponding to the a priori anticipated “return of the Spirit into itself”—could only result in an essentially pessimistic worldview of unavoidable reconciliation and inward-oriented resignation.

In Marx’s view, by contrast, philosophy was itself inherently historical and, as such, subject to materially identifiable objective determinations. At the same time, as an active constituent of the complex dialectic of the social base and its superstructure, it was also a necessary instrument of the struggle for self-emancipation from the real “cross of the present”: that unholy rule of dehumanization in the exploitative “actuality” of the established world. To be sure, it was the prevailing state of affairs that made it necessary to orient philosophy toward “changing the world,” in polemics with its contemplative/interpretative role in the past. However, only a dialectical conception of the social base and its superstructure—which acknowledged philosophy’s materially articulated active potential and thereby emancipatory intervention in the complicated network of historical determinations—made it realistically possible to do so.

As to the categories themselves, their historical character had to be stressed with equal radicalism. Accordingly, Marx insisted that they are produced by objective historical development as “forms of being” [Daseinsformen], becoming manifest in the practical interrelations of the social world before they can be conceptualized by philosophers and “political economists” in a general form. Thus the general category of “labor,” for instance, appears in theory only after the displacement or marginalization of its particular forms—e.g., agricultural labor as the key concept in the physiocratic system—in reality itself. For

as a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labour. Indifference toward specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category of labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society—in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category, “labour,” “labour as such,” labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. …⁵ In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject—here, modern bourgeois society—is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such. ⁶

Thus the categories of philosophy could not be produced by the “self-activity of the Idea” but as “forms of being” had to r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. The Nature of Historical Determination
• 2. Dialectical Transformations: Teleology, History, and Social Consciousness
• 3. Key Concepts in the Dialectic of Base and Superstructure
• 4. Material Transformations and Ideological Forms
• 5. Kant, Hegel, Marx: Historical Necessity and the Standpoint of Political Economy
• 6. Structure and History: The Dialectical Intelligibility of Historical Development
• Index