> ot wishing to fan the flames of these dying embers, I came across this today, the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov gave rather more credit to private property in encouraging science and technology than we might expect:
>
> 'the whole technological and scientific culture of Europe and North America owes its very existence to private property as an indispensable condition sine qua non.
> No sensible Marxist has denied or denies this.'
>
> The preceding read:
>
> 'That all "Western Culture" developed and flowered in the soil of "private property" is a historically acknowledged fact. "The Declaration of Independence" and the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789" that legally settled this form of property as the basic principle of all legislation were documents of greatest revolutionary significance. The freed the tremendous resources of human potentialities from the surveillance of bureaucratic regimentation and secured wider limits for the realisation of these potentialities and for personal initiative.'
>
> Ilyenkov was speaking at a conference at the University of Notre Dame in 1966, the papers were published the following year as 'Marx and the Western World', edited by N Lobkowicz p 395
This too ignores Marx's relating of the development of science and technology to "the development of the human mind" which he in turn has occurring within the successive forms of the labour process treated as "schools."
In particular, it ignores the role Marx assigns to "private property" in this development.
In the 1881 speculations about the possibility of the individuality characteristic of the Russian peasant commune enabling Russia to move directly to socialism without passing through capitalism, one key concern is whether or not it has the developed intellectual and other "powers" required to "appropriate" the degree of development of mind embodied in the productive forces of social labour developed within capitalism outside Russia and use them to imagine and build a penultimate social form from which all barriers to full individual development have been eliminated.
In speculating that it does possess the requisite degree of "integral development," Marx makes several supportive points.
One is that Russia had already demonstrated a capacity to appropriate "machines, steam engines, railways, etc." and "the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise."
"By going back a long way communal property of a more or less archaic type may be found throughout Western Europe; everywhere it has disappeared with increasing social progress. Why should it be able to escape the same fate in Russia alone? I reply: because in Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a nationwide scale, may gradually detach itself from its primitive features and develop directly as an element of collective production on a nationwide scale. It is precisely thanks to its contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may appropriate the latter’s positive acquisitions without experiencing all its frightful misfortunes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world; neither is it the prey of a foreign invader like the East Indies.
"If the Russian admirers of the capitalist system denied the theoretical possibility of such a development, I would ask them this question: In order to utilise machines, steam engines, railways, etc., was Russia forced, like the West, to pass through a long incubation period in the engineering industry? Let them explain to me, too, how they managed to introduce in their own country, in the twinkling of an eye, the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise?" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm
Another, related to this, is, as I've pointed out, "certain characteristic features which distinguish the [Russian] 'agricultural commune' from the more archaic types," one key characteristic being the role played by "private property."
These are characteristics, he claims, that facilitate "a development of individuality which is incompatible with conditions in more primitive communities."
Marx identifies "the development of the human mind" with the development of "free individuality."
"Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm
A certain degree "free individuality," of "the universal development of individuals," is necessary for imagining and creating socialism.
In particular, for individuals to be able to "appropriate" the productive forces of social labour developed within capitalism, the degree of "universal development of individuals" corresponding to the degree of universality objectified in these forces is necessary.
“private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03o.htm
So Marx, in 1881, is repeating the claim that conditions in "more primitive communities" are incompatible with the degree of "universal development of individuals" required for imagining and creating socialism.
Thus, in 1853, he claimed of Indian peasant commune conditions that they "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
Capital generalizes this point:
"Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions." http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
Marx's speculations about the compatibility of conditions in the Russian peasant commune with the requisite degree of "universal development of individuals" turn out to have been badly mistaken.
An incident indicative of this is recounted is the passage from Kara-Murza's Soviet Civilization: From 1917 to the Great Victory Chris Doss translated and posted here some years ago.
"When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But not a democracy of civil society of rational individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant commune. This is an enormous dark force, and when it is allowed to carry out its will, innocent heads roll. For it is easy for the peasant commune to believe in plots and the secret power of aliens, of 'enemies of the people.' When such hatred, possessing the power of an epidemic, rules the peasant commune, every witch will burn. And the Russian peasant commune is not crueler in this, than, for example, that of Western Europe -- it simply occured there earlier than it did among us.
"In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against 'enemies of the people' took place in their regions in 1937. He simply relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people -- leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed; the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose “brutsellez” [brucellosis] (CD – I don’t know this word, I think it’s some kind of disease). Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms, and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system – upon injection with antiserum, an abscess forms, like that in the case of smallpox inoculation.
"This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to the knacker’s yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: 'She is such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is big.' The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: 'Oh, she was such a good cow, I’m so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow.'
"General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all approximately the same: 'We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!' How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move against the clearly expressed 'will of the people,' which had obtained such an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow, where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a pardon, but this happened in far from all instances." http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-October/020858.html
Capitalism itself significantly fetters "the development of the human mind" and, thus, the development of science and technology.
One symptom of this is the misidentification of "science" with "scientific materialism."
One indication of the barrier to insight this creates is found in the modelling of economics on physics.
Another is the insistence on interpreting Marx as a "materialist" in the "scientific materialist" sense.
Ted