What causes a mode of production to change?

The discussion on China as a mode of production focused for a while on what lies behind the transition from one mode of production to another -- class struggle or the development of the means of production. That is, is it primarily an economic or a political question?

 http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/which-way-for-china-part-one/#comment-3839

'Waistline' wrote:

“Marx was quite clear about the antagonisms leading to the passing of one mode of production into another, including capitalism into socialism – they are *all* the product of class struggle. Relations between living people, not between dead things (ie not technology). To claim that new means of production bring about the final crisis of capitalism is a) to ignore the fact that human labour power is a means of production, and b) to fall into the trap of commodity fetishism attributing human qualities (living drives and aspirations) to dead things.”

In my opinion socialism is not a mode of production. It is precisely because socialism is not a mode of production that controversy existed over defining the economy of China and even that of the former Soviet Union. Socialism or rather industrial socialism in the past century was according to much of Marxism a transition society or the first stage of transition to a new mode of production. When Marx spoke of the bourgeois mode of commodity production (capitalism for short speak) he meant a specific form of property plus the industrial revolution. Means of production plus social relations of production, based on means and property form.

New means of production brings about the final crisis for every mode of production, not simply capitalism. By final crisis is meant “the condition of crisis – antagonism – that is transition to a new quality or the leap to a new quality. By antagonism I mean something different than “contradiction” or the unity and struggle of opposites.

Marx is clear. My view changed concerning the question of the law system immanent to capital and whether or not its crisis, understood as cyclical crisis, can usher in a new quality of means of production or a new mode of production. In his famous outline of transition from one mode of production to the next, Marx does not write about “class struggle” causing transition to a new mode of production. Let look at Marx again.

“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. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

Further

“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

The last paragraph is the enigma. “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” In my opinion capitalism of the past century was not pregnant with socialism, precisely because socialism is a transition to something else. Further, there was still much room for development of the means of production based on the industrial revolution. In America we experienced destruction of the sharecropping system by the tractor, which changed the form of land tenure and the social organization of labor based on old implements of production. Determining how much “room is left in a social order” (does social order here mean mode of production) is tricky business Rosa L attempted to solve. I do not believe one can figure out how much “room is left in a social order” until new means of production actually appear and throw society into antagonism or a mode of destruction of the old society productive forces and social relations.

Without question history is about human beings, which we presuppose or there is no history. When Marx writes about the material power of productive forces he assumes the reader understands this material power is the product of the human, as they are productively active and form social groups and classes.

Class struggle most certainly plays a role. Specifically, there seems to be two distinct kinds of class struggle. The struggle between the two basic classes defining a mode of production, e.g. feudalism as serf and landowner/nobility, drives the feudal mode of production through all its quantitative boundaries. Then qualitatively new means of production enter the picture, the industrial revolution.

The struggle between the serf and nobility or all the classes defining the meaning of feudalism can never cause society to spontaneously leap to a new mode of production. To incite a leap to a new quality, something qualitative has to happen. A new quality has to be injected into the social process or something taken away that destabilizes the quality and set it into a qualitatively different kind of change cycle.

What happened in history was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution created new classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat as basic class constituting the foundation of what becomes a new mode of production). Stated another way, a new social organization of labor arose on the basis of the industrial revolution. The new classes are connected to and express the self-movement of qualitatively new means of production. Marx uses the steam engine as a bookmark, but I understand this bookmark to mean the entire technology regime implied in the steam engine and its continuous development.

In my reading of Marx, history and society moves in class antagonism and not simply class struggle. The antagonism is not reducible to the struggle between the primary classes, e.g. serf and nobility. The serf and nobility in this example are the decisive contradiction defining and driving the feudal system through its quantitative stages. Capitalist and proletariat evolved within the society of feudalism. However, the serf and capitalist are not “connected together” as the unity of the mode of production identified as feudalism. Serf and nobility is the unity of feudal production. The proletariat and nobility are not connected together as the unity of production or rather the unity of production relation defining feudalism. Serf and nobility as the landed property relations define feudalism in its property form. In its material power feudalism spans centuries from handicraft to manufacture and then the industrial revolution brings the world of feudalism to an end, or rather set the condition for the leap to a new mode of production. In this sense Marx writes the steam engines get you industrial capitalist.

I do agree that people are decisive in shaping the society formed on the basis of new means of production.

What happen in my opinion is that bourgeoisie and proletariat evolve in external collision – antagonism – with the serf and nobility as these old classes constitute the decisive contradiction defining the world of feudalism. The world of the serf and nobility is not industrial. Of course there is much more involved in transition from one mode of production to the next. For instance gold as an expanding form of wealth begins the breakup of the landed property relations or what is the same, society based on landed property as the primary form of wealth.

I think. 

Waistline

I replied:

Waistline, if technological progress is all that is needed for a new mode of production to arise, all we need to do is sit back on our arses and wait for the great day.

You are trying to get Marx to argue this. But he doesn’t. If Capital III isn’t good enough an illustration of this, then how about:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

[...]

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

“Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.”

[...]

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. [...]

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

[...]

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Surely this is clear enough? The forces of production grow – of course – but they grow because new relations of production, that is new class relations, replace old relations of production that strangled these forces. And the replacement of these all-important relations of production depends on the fighting out and resolution of class war – “open revolution” and “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie” laying the “foundation for the sway of the proletariat”.

Economic fatalism, “objectivism”, led many Marxists (like Ernest Mandel and his followers to imagine that the Soviet Union had means of production that were too highly developed to be stuffed back into the straitjacket of bourgeois property relations. The class struggle, with a misled and disorganized working class and a rampant imperialist bourgeoisie proved them wrong. But to stuff the non-capitalist baby back into the capitalist womb, the baby had to be chopped into bloody pieces.

Our concern right now is to figure out what is happening in China in this historical political economic perspective. Forcing the Chinese baby back into the devil mother’s womb will require grinding it up. Our discussion is about how much of this is capitalism, how much is a new mode of production in becoming, and who is doing what on which side of the class divide, and where, and how.

I might add that this discussion is of burning urgency for the masses of the Indian subcontinent, too. And India and China make up almost half of humanity. We aren’t just engaged in academic chit-chat.

Must, won't, Kant, will - Means Ends Duties

Response to Kenodoxia

Kenodoxia stirs it up again:

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Get more sleep and be a better person?

You might think that I am a little obsessed with sleeplessness. Most parents of young children, I reckon, don't get enough sleep, so perhaps I have an excuse. But more support comes from an interesting study in the journal Sleep which tried to measure the effects of sleep deprivation on 'moral judgement'. (You can download the .pdf if you're viewing the page from a domain which has access privileges.) I'm interested in the methods used: participants were asked to answer questions as part of a 'Moral Judgement Task', which involved 40 moral questions, further divided into 'Impersonal' and 'Personal' types. 20 other non-moral questions were also asked. This is how the paper characterises the two types of moral question:

In the present study, Moral Impersonal (MI) dilemmas were those that required the volunteers to judge the appropriateness of various non-personal moral violations in scenarios in which the respondent is presented with a solution to the dilemma that would benefit a larger group by merely deflecting an existing threat of serious bodily harm or death onto another individual or smaller group. In this form of dilemma, the individual performing the action does not directly or personally inflict harm on another, but the course of action described will indirectly bring about serious harm to one party through deflection of an existing threat away from another party.

Moral Personal (MP) dilemmas were similar to the MI dilemmas, except that the moral violation was of a more personal nature in that the course of action initiated by the respondent in the MP dilemmas would directly inflict serious bodily harm or death to a specific identifiable individual in order to reduce the impact of an external threat to another party. The key difference between these 2 types of dilemmas is the degree of personal involvement in producing the harmful consequences; in the MP scenarios, the actor is the “author” of the outcome and directly inflicts the harm, whereas in the MI scenarios the actor merely “edits” the inevitable harm by redirecting an already existing source of harm onto a different victim.

You can see examples of the two types, and also the non-moral scenarios also included in the questionnaire here. They are of the kind familiar from lots of ethical philosophy and of the kind which pop up regularly in Cambridge Admissions interviews. For example, this is a Moral-Impersonal scenario:

You are the late-night watchman in a hospital. Due to an accident in the building next door, there are deadly fumes rising up through the hospital's ventilation system. In a certain room of the hospital are three patients. In another room there is a single patient. If you do nothing the fumes will rise up into the room containing the three patients and cause their deaths.

The only way to avoid the deaths of these patients is to hit a certain switch, which will cause the fumes to bypass the room containing the three patients. As a result of doing this the fumes will enter the room containing the single patient, causing his death.

Is it appropriate for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the three patients?

And this is a Moral-Personal scenario:

A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large.

The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workmen will be saved.

Is it appropriate for you to push the stranger on to the tracks in order to save the five workmen?

It is a good question whether there is a morally significant difference between these two kinds of cases. It is nevertheless plausible that there is a significant psychological difference between reactions to the two kinds of scenarios, precisely because of the differing degree of direct personal involvement involved, particularly regarding the causing of a harm -- albeit one which might prevent another, greater, harm.

So what effects does sleep deprivation have on the way you answer this sort of question? It's complicated, as you might expect. The headline results are:

1. Sleep deprivation increases the decision-making time for Moral-Personal scenarios relative to Moral-Impersonal and Non-moral scenarios.

2. In general terms, sleep-deprivation tends to increase the likelihood of a participant answering that a proposed course of action (in both types of case) is appropriate.

The researchers, probably rightly, avoid making claims about which course of action for a given scenario is 'correct', so there is no sense in asking whether these results suggest that there is a 'moral decline' associated with the absence of sleep. But, regardless of which course of action is right, it seems to me that since the action suggested, both in the Moral-Impersonal and Moral-Personal cases, tends to be one which is likely either (i) to foster the agent's own interests at the expense of someone else or (ii) to foster the interests of a larger group at the cost of a smaller group or an individual, it does seem that lack of sleep tends to promote an acceptance of broadly consequentialist reasoning (of either egoist or a more agent-neutral kind).

Which raises a further good question: did Bentham and Mill just not get enough sleep?

Also, as Sara reminds me, didn't Margaret Thatcher famously get by as Prime Minister on only four hours of sleep per night? (She certainly claimed to: see this interview from 1989.)

Posted by JIW at 11:59 AM

*************************************************

Choppa's response:

For a quick introduction to the basics here Wikipedia's entry seems OK, and the links from the following will get you away and into further reading easily enough. It's about duty vs consequences in relation to how we understand ourselves and what we do. The "duty" line (means) is represented by deontology (with Kant in the blue corner) and "consequences" (ends) by consequentialism, (with Bentham in the waxy yellow corner).

Criticism of deontology

Many Act or Case utilitarians offer critiques of deontology as well as Rule Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham, an early utilitarian philosopher, criticized deontology on the grounds that it was essentially a dressed-up version of popular morality, and that the unchanging principles that deontologists attribute to natural law or universal reason are really a matter of subjective opinion. John Stuart Mill, who lived in 19th century Britain, argued that deontologists usually fail to specify which principles should take priority when rights and duties conflict, so that deontology cannot offer complete moral guidance.

Shelly Kagan, a current professor of philosophy at Yale University, notes in support of Mill and Bentham that under deontology, individuals are bound by constraints (such as the requirement not to murder), but are also given options (such as the right not to give money to charity, if they do not wish to). His line of attack on deontology is first to show that constraints are invariably immoral, and then to show that options are immoral without constraints.

Another, unrelated critique of deontological ethics comes from aretaic theories, which often maintain that neither consequences nor duties but "character" should be the focal point of ethical theory. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, sought to describe what characteristics a virtuous person would have, and then argued that people should act in accordance with these characteristics.

I'll get back to Aristotle and his virtue (Gk. "arete") later.

Duties and constraints always make me ask "who decided this?" and "who stands to gain by it? (cui bono?)" A less ironic and indirect way of asking "who guards the guardians?". And my next questions are: "have I got to obey you?" and "what will happen to me if I don't?"

The train examples are typically mindless examples of individual ethical guilt-prods, designed to paralyse the unprepared in the same way as military tribunals try and paralyse potential conscientious objectors. "If a Hun was about to slit your mother's throat, what would you do? Hand him a flower?"

I think I would refuse to answer questions like this without a social hat on. Commander-in-Chief, Prime Minister, schoolchild, drunk, local vicar, undertaker, Pope... whatever. It's like the old chestnuts from primary school about being stuck in a sinking balloon and having to jettison a cook, a bus driver, a hunter or a Senior Lecturer. Who are you prepared to kill, you murderer!!?

Nuremburg tried to make this type of decision imperative (a duty) for everyone in war too. No more hiding behind "Befehl ist Befehl" (orders is orders). The UN tried something similar with its conventions. But the optimistic ideals of postwar humbug and dogoodery have since been trampled down by decades of violent violation. Individuals can rarely stand up en masse (so to speak) against the holders of collective power. And there is no constituted single holder of power (or body) in human society today to give even the illusion of potential consensus.

The abstract ideals of various competing factions of humanity (the working class national and international, the bourgeoisie national and international, ethnic groups, states, groups of states, genders of various nationalities, classes and gradations, etc) might have some superficial resemblance, or not, but the concrete aims of these factions are mutually contradictory and often lead to injury or death for the antagonists, especially the weaker party. Like industrial accidents (the massively fatal leaks in Bhopal, for instance, with the owners of Union Carbide pitted against the workers and local residents there). Like the wars directly engendered by the dismantling of the USSR by its bureaucracy (Armenia-Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya etc etc) and less directly too (the Balkanization of Yugoslavia, Iraq etc, Africa). Like the rollback of the welfare state's priorities of a high general level of education, health and social security, which has translated into increased ignorance, disease and social precariousness for millions of unpropertied families throughout Europe, and into increased profits and wealth for thousands of propertied families.

So basically, the effect of your decisions on the lives and welfare of others depends on who you're fighting with, and what position you hold in the your group (faction of humanity). And the "intrinsic" moral value of your decisions depends on the formal or informal moral code that holds in your group, and how this compares with the code(s) of other groups, and the group to which the evaluator belongs and its relationship with your own group.

And the more antagonistic the relationships between the group of the evaluator and the evaluated, the more likely the clash of values is to lead to death and destruction, given the empirical propensity of human groups to organize themselves into armed and combative entities.

Imagine for instance that two people were in a position to affect the outcome of the train incidents exemplified above in K's blog. One with a close relative or friend in one of the threatened groups, the other with an enemy (creditor or boss, say) in the same group. It's easy to imagine the "demons of private interest" that Marx refers to propelling their interventions into violent conflict.

Now what effect might lack of sleep have on any of this? For an individual perhaps just to strip away a veneer of conventional (lip-serving?) respectability? Neutralize the dickering of a confused ego and let the super-ego and the id hammer at each other for the right to decide?

Or maybe group decision-making is a kind of enforced collective insomnia by which deep collective needs are connected up with powerful collective desires, with the kaleidoscopic variety of individual differences cancelled out.

It's worth bearing in mind too, that the things you can do without thinking, automatically, are often referred to in terms like "I could do that in my sleep". In other words, behaviours that we have acquired so well, so thoroughly, that they become second nature. We do them without conscious thought. Tying a shoelace, putting on a coat, opening a familiar kind of packaging, negotiating an initially confusing route. So an insomnia test would reveal how deeply a particular set of behaviours, in the present case "moral" responses, have penetrated our being. I know from personal experience how important this depth of knowledge can be from teaching, where the pressures of a classroom full of frustrated and unmotivated teenagers can strip away superficially acquired skills and attitudes and only the "instinctive" gut response is left.

Both Kant and Hegel claimed that there was a single universal moral good that could guide people in their moral decisions. Kant the categorical imperative for all humanity (rigid but optimistic pre-French revolutionary stance), and Hegel the will of the Spirit so fortuitously embodied in the bureaucracy of the Prussian state (dynamic but less optimistic post-revolutionary stance). All other motivations for decisions were demonstrated to be philosophically inadequate. Kierkegaard individualized the Spirit to hold up the ideal of Faith (credo quia absurdum) against Duty (Kant) and Aesthetics (art, the Greeks, Catholicism, god only knows what!). Marx saw the Spirit embodied if you like disparately in the collective decisions and actions of the antagonistic classes into which humanity is divided, and realized that its full flowering (as the active creative potential of a united humanity freed from the fetters and filth of permanent war and want) would only come when the class struggle had resolved itself in accord with the material preconditions laid down by historical development so far and the intellectual and artistic capacity of the materially productive class -- these preconditions and this capacity requiring a cooperative government/management of the whole of humanity in the interests of itself without antagonistic internal divisions. That is, the removal of class divisions in the world consequent on the seizure of power by the working class in more and more states over time. The victory of the bourgeoisie is unthinkable, in that we have seen a world ruled by a victorious bourgeoisie for the past couple of centuries at least, and it is getting progressively more and more feverishly destructive. It's already eaten its own tail, and is on the way to devouring its own belly. A final victory for the bourgeoisie would only lead to the destruction of all humanity as we know it, before any such final victory - which is why it's "unthinkable".

And how does this lead us back to Aristotle?

If we see the "virtuous man" as a collective being, a collective decision-maker, then it's possible to draw up a reasonable list of "good" qualities, get a consensus on them in the collective/group concerned and commit them to general awareness in the form of statutes or a constitution, complete with sanctions for violation. This can be seen in action in revolutionary wars for instance, in such cases as the New Model Army (in England) and the Red Army in 30s China, in which strict orders were issued for the magnanimous treatment of civilians and enemy combatants. As against the atrocities done to these by reactionary armies (such as, for instance, the Swedes in Germany in the 30 Years War).

In this way a reasonable mix of individual and collective behaviours (deontological and consequential) can be codified, subjected to the purifying flame of experience, and refined further until eventually there remains one relatively stable code to which all people are able to relate individually and collectively and by which they feel adequately guided in the decisions and choices they need to make, and which is transparent and instrumental enough to be accessible to necessary modification as circumstances and the development of consensus demand.

And it's nice to think that if we interpret Aristotle in this way, we're corroborating Marx's view of the Greek civilization as the "childhood of mankind".