You’re going to make me miss my bus! My actual motivation on this question is because of vague misgivings over vague applications of the idea during the capitalist era - I’ve not devoted a ton of time to this so I don’t have a lot of documentation.

It’s easy to think of peasants and underdeveloped places as being behind the times, so to speak. Insofar as one thinks that, one could think that that those people and places need to catch up to the present before they can go another direction. I read a book of biographical essays on people who were around during the Spanish civil war, one of whom was heavily involved in the Spanish socialist party. He believed and argued strongly that Spain couldn’t have a proletarian and peasant revolution because it hadn’t had a proper bourgeois revolution yet and one can’t skip stages of history. That didn’t have particularly positive results.
This is basically the same thing that makes me interested in Marx’s late comments on Russia (here - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/12/19/was-marxs-russian-road/)

All of that said, I recognize that dire circumstances make dire actions more likely or understandable. But I don’t think it’s guaranteed that dire actions will result or that their mode is determined by the dire circumstances (I’ve just started Thompson’s moral economy essay, I think his remarks on the term ‘riot’ are relevant, I’ll post a bit about that after I finish the essay).
take care,
Nate

Nate you write:

” I see no reason why a free society (in the political sense) which developed at any prior point in history would not be capable of eventually achieving similar gains to those of unfree societies. I realize that this didn’t happen, but Marx as you present him (which I think is a fair presentation) doesn’t seem to simply say “didn’t” but “couldn’t have”.”

For me this has always been an intriguing and troubling counterfactual. It seems to me compelling enough as a gesture to be worth establishing the reasonability of. But it also seems to me there are very many good reasons why “a free society (in a political sense)…would not be capable of eventually achieving similar gains to those of unfree societies.” (The immense human suffering required to exploit minerals and fossil fuels initially, for example, without which all the rest is strictly physically impossible). So I was wondering sort of what persuades you this alternative case was really possible, or if it is more of a principle to consider it so.

I doubt we disagree in practice… ‘Historical necessity’ has no place in actual organising or activism because no-one can pretend to be in a position to have a good vantage point for seeing where they are in history. Strategy is a strange beast and the proof of historical necessity is always in the pudding (sorry to mix metaphors, I’m also typing in a rush). The example someone used above of May ‘68 does seem to be an example of where things really could have turned out differently if certain groups had not been so timid or blinkered by ‘historical necessity’.

I think you’re right that Marx is trying to do this in Capital. He argues that capitalism _in particular_ generates abstract historical forces that are abstract in reality and not just in theory, in a way that no previous social formation did. This is because of the price and market mechanism and the forces of competition.

This is why Marx found the political economists so insightful and spent so much of his life studying them and developing his own version. His critique of political economy was essentially that most political economists did not see the social conditions that made capitalism historically specific, not that they were wrong to seek economic laws, however much he also criticised their specific economic theories.

You’re right that sometimes he is teleological about it and I agree this is a weakness and a mistake. Economists have always been bad at predicting the long run and Marx is no exception.

Mike, real quick - I disagree completely re: the importance of historical necessity. Obviously we need some sort of common sense reasoning so as to identify courses of action and deliberate about strategy, but that’s not historical necessity. I think this sort of common sense - by which I mean “theoretically minimalist” or “not necessarily very theoretically interesting” - reasoning is enough to eliminate mistaken voluntarism, I don’t think we need any sort of idea of necessity to eliminate that sort of problem. I’ll get back to you on necessity soon-ish, but as a parting shot or kick off - there’s a tremendous difference between retroactive positing of historical necessity and positing such in and about the present. The former is also wrong in my view (I don’t see what’s gained by adding “and it had to be the case” to the proposition “X happened”) but the second is much more problematic.
take care,
Nate

I take Marx to be arguing that capitalism actually does generate a theorisable historical dynamic - so that something like “immanent critical theory” becomes possible, because the society has strange, systematic, “lawlike” characteristics. But I take this argument, by Capital, to be largely an argument about capitalism being unusual in this respect - and therefore enabling unusual forms of theory.

I need to qualify the hell out of what I’ve just written here - as written, it sounds like a stronger claim than I want to make. My laptop battery is about to die, though, so I’ll just post it as is, and let you criticise it… ;-P I’ll come back later, if the conversation is still going, to clarify what I mean… Sorry to post on the run like this…

Actually your comments are really interesting, I like your interpretation.

I would defend some notion of historical necessity as crucial to a materialist view of the world. It’s easy to criticise crude ideas about stages, which are bad generalisations and a major overreach of theory. But voluntarism is also a mistake, the idea that if only people had the right ideas and acted in the right way at some point in time we could have had a revolution. It leads to other political mistakes.

I don’t think it’s mystical to argue that possibilities for change are limited by the social circumstances of a time. Not least because those circumstances shape how people view society and their place within it, which seems to be what Marx is saying in the passage above.

On the material necessity issue: I agree with you on the issue of whether we needed to “wait” for capitalism to solve our material problems before trying anything meaningful politically. On this end of history, of course, it’s probably a bit easier to see how this sort of notion can facilitate the sort of May ‘68 problem, where party leadership subverts mass political action because it’s convinced itself that the times aren’t ripe… ;-P I tend to see these sorts of gestures in Marx’s work as indications that he’s still sort of trying to out-clever Hegel in places in Capital - the tacit notion of “necessity” here strikes me as somewhat similar to what Hegel will do in places, as though we “had” to go through certain things to open up the possibilities available to us now. On one level, of course, this kind of thing is always trivially true: we’re here because we’re here - we face our current problems because those problems were opened up, and not resolved, in earlier periods, etc. But to go beyond this and suggest that there might have been some strong “necessity” in those earlier historical moments steps into territory that, to me, seems a bit… mystical…

It’s possible that all Marx is trying to do here is nod at Hegel - in other words, it’s possible that he might not “believe” in this kind of “necessity”, but is trying instead to hint at why Hegel might have found such a narrative plausible. Certainly in other places Marx is quite clear about the retrospective and reconstructive character of his account - which would be inconsistent with a strong notion of historical necessity in the developments leading up to capitalism.

Marx does seem to appeal in a number of places to the notion that vulnerability to nature, which Marx associates with a low level of technological development, renders “rational” a sort of religious worship of nature (Adorno picks up this theme, and “Freudianises” it, making far more of it, I think, than Marx himself did…). So I think there’s an element of Marx thinking that meaningful freedom emerges from the development of technology (as a necessary, though not sufficient, development). So maybe this is part of what lies behind his occasional suggestions that we “needed” capitalism to take place…

On the historical periodisation issue: I’m not happy with it either, almost I’m not completely sure whether it’s for the same reason? (It might be - just not familiar enough with how you think about the issue.) Marx offers a theory of capitalism as a social form that generates a particular “logic” of historical development - and that therefore opens up the possibility for a particular kind of reflexive theory, precisely because there are certain systematic tendencies or trends that can actually be theorised. (I may perceive this “logic” a bit differently from the way Marx does - I’m not completely sure, to be honest - but I see Marx as trying to make this kind of argument.) I don’t personally think this kind of analysis can be unfolded until something like “relative surplus value” becomes available as an option - and, as you’ve said, I can’t see why this wouldn’t be an option, as soon as you have wage labour (and there are very early forms of self-organisation of wage labour, so I don’t see an enormous historical lag between the advent of wage labour, and these kinds of contestations). The sorts of conflicts over the working day that figure in Capital are taking place in a context that has already become technologically dynamic - perhaps the argument is more that the “mainstreaming” of such conflicts and the development of a particular understanding of the role of the state is key in intensifying the rate of technological dynamism: I want to re-read these sections to work some of this out…

At any rate, to me, we’re not really talking about “capitalism”, until we’re talking about a situation in which both absolute and relative surplus value might potentially be in play. I kind of regard the absolute/relative distinction as a conceptual one (which also has some practical political implications in any given capitalist present), but I don’t really find it that useful to think in terms of an overarching historical shift from absolute to relative surplus value extraction. (And I probably share your irritation with the formal/real subsumption discussion - although, again, it may not be for the same reason: I tend to get irritated with repeated declarations that labour has finally been “really subsumed”, when what is being described is usually more the latest qualitative transformation in technological or organisational arrangements for work… Apologies if this doesn’t make any sense…) I’m always a bit cautious with Marx about whether he thinks he really is describing historical shifts - there’s a lot of meta-commentary going on in the text. But, to the extent that he seems to be, I would find it questionable…

On the ideology issue: this is interesting and (for once!) I’d like to hear a bit more about what you’re thinking here, before barging in. If I’m hearing you correctly, I think some of my work touches on this, and it would be something I’m interested in hearing more about - but I don’t want to plunge off the deep end into my own questions, before hearing more what you’re thinking.

Sorry for droning on… I’m working back through a lot of Marx at the moment, and I’ve already bored everyone I know in person - now it’s evidently your turn! ;-P

I was just having a discussion over at readingthemaps.blogspot.com about this last issue, about the progressive dimension of capitalism. I think you present the issue well… Counterfactuals are pretty tricky for historical materialism but I don’t think M (& E) meant to use capitalism’s prior development of the forces of production as an argument that some egalitarian alternative couldn’t have done it as well, had it been on the cards. It was an argument that capitalism did it better than feudalism.

I think the reason capitalism has been so materially productive, though, is less to do with unequal _distribution_ as such and more to do with how labourers are forced to work hard and productively and capitalists are forced by competition to innovate, accumulate and increase labour productivity. Would a socialist society worth living in be able to exert these kinds of forces? I think this is a trickier question, and we’re lucky to be living a long way further down the track when increased productivity is hardly one of humanity’s greatest challenges.