<< JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> But if you want to get particualt about it, I didn't say that that view of
> Marx committed him to technological determinsim or a rigid sequence of stages
> or hsirorical inevitability. You don't have to buy into Plekahnov or G.A.
> Cohen. The view can just be that there is a rough a sequence of stages in
> which the later ones count as progress over the earlier ones and one gets
> fron one to another by some sort of dynamic internal to the stages.
>
> That's weak eniugh that I believe it be true myself.
Yes, technological determinism can just mean that the productive forces
limit the types of social relations. For example, there cannot be the
types of mass production we have today with feudal social relations or
hunter-gatherer societies with computers.
But the obvious truth that you can't have the feudal lord without the hand mill or the industrial capitalsit without the steam mill is (a) too weak for progress, since it does not say that, or what, drives the taransition from one to the other, and (b) is misleading, in my view, in placing the engine of progress in technology.
My own story about progress, explained in my paper Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, and Justice, Legal Studies 1987; and in a short and mere accessible version, Revolution and Justice, Against the Current 1993, is a class struggle story. I don't look to technology at all, except as a limiting condition of the sort you mention above. I argue there that societies marked by regimes of domination create particulat forms of resistance to the oppression that they generate that tends to destabilize those regimes. Ultimately, over the long run, there is a pressure to changr, limit, and ultimate abolish the kinds of domination that create these forms of resistance.
There is also a weak ratchet effect, pulling against retrogression, based on the fact taht people, having won emaponcipation fdrom a form of oppression, will resist submitting to it again. These build on on eacxh other, creating a long run tendenct towards graeter emapancipation. There is nothing inevitable in progress, meaning greater emancipation from domination, and no guarantee that retrogression will not happen. But there is a long run tendency towards progress.
This story is based in part on Marx's observation that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class striuggle, in part on on Hegel's notion of history as the progress of freedom and master and slave, and in part on J.S. Mill's liberal conception of historical progress. Hoiwever, I don't argue from what the big guys have thought, but from the logic of domination and resistance, given some elementary onservations about human social psychology, like: people tend to promotre their grouyp interests and resist oppressive regimes taht harm those interests.
>Socialism is different and
more difficult since I think it is consistent with all levels of
productive forces.
May some kind of socialism is consistent with all levels of productive forces, but whether a socailsim we would consider desirable is thus consistent would have to be argued.
> Brenner doesn't actually offer interpretations of Marx at all, just accounts
> of the rise of capitalism. By Wood I presume you mean Ellen M. Wood, not
> Allan Wood, the analytical Marxist, who does in fact think that Marx is a
> pretty rigid historical determinist.
He (A.Wood) argues this in his published work, he also thinks its true
which gives rise to his views about morality where morality is relative
to the mode of production. By definition, capitalism is just because the
concept of justice is relative to the mode of production. Capitalism is
just in the capitalist mode of production, feudalism in the feudal mode
of production etc. The critique of capitalism should not be a moral one.
Interesting argument, though Wood is weak on why capitalism should be
condemned how exactly we are supposed to get beyond it. If socialism is
inevitable, why struggle for it today? (I know Cohen has an essay on
this.)
Right. Cohen accepts an ideal justice based in something like natural right. But he used to think that the development of the priductive forces made socialism inevitable. Now he just thinks it makes socialism possible.
The
> best interpretive case against a technological determinsit, stagist,
> inevitabilist reading of Marx himself is probably Richard Miller's in
> Analyzing Marx. (Miller was an analytical Marxist, he since given up on
> socialsim because he thinks markets are here to stay.)
> Another good book is *The Structure of Marx's World-View* by John
McMurtry, also an analytical philosopher. He's influenced by Cohen but
presents a much weaker and hence more defensible version of the
deteminism thesis.
The best weakening of Cohen is Write, Levine, and Sober's Reconstructing Marxism. I still think that the technological explanation of progress is a blind alley.
> Mcmurtry also argues that Marx and Engels were
economic determinists, that non-economic phenomena can be explained by
economic phenomena most of the time.
There's some basis for so thinking. Certainly Marx makes a lot of geberal statements to this effect.
--jks