While often viewed as a
revolutionary, Marx and Engels’ sociological theory is explicitly
evolutionary in character. According to Marx’s view of the evolutionary
process society has moved through several evolutionary stages, from a
communal society based on hunting and gathering what nature provided, to a
society based on slavery (ancient), land (feudal), and capital (bourgeois) (Marx
1964, 52, 133). While he saw struggle as the
moving force of the evolutionary process, this struggle was only rarely
violent in character. Marx’s theory posits that since mankind left the
communal societies of pre-history, society has been based on the domination
of powerful elites over the mass of people. The power of elites is rooted in
their control of the forces of production; this power is often contested,
with subordinate groups struggling to increase their share of wealth and
power. Technologies of production affect human organization based upon the
control of these means. As these technologies change in response to a
depleting environment or to new discoveries, the relations between the
dominant and subordinate groups change. As new technologies develop, power
differentials between the groups shift, at times new elites arise based upon
their control of new and more powerful production technologies. It is this
struggle between dominant and subordinate groups that are the engine of
history, the engine, if you will of sociocultural evolution.
Marx
recognizes that these changes are not instantaneous, that they occur over
the course of generations. “The
economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic
structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the
elements of the former” (1867/1887, 13250-13252). Marx and Engels often use
the term “revolution” in the sense of a drastically different way of
behaving or thinking. As when anthropologists or sociologists use the term
in referring to the Neolithic or Industrial Revolutions, they are not
talking about some instantaneous change but rather transformative changes
that often take place over generations, sometimes over thousands of years.
What aside
from its gradual and incremental speed makes Marx’s theory evolutionary?
Most significantly it is based on cumulative historical change of human
societies in response to a changing environment. The first human societies,
Marx argued, were communal in nature. These classless societies existed with
a minimal division of labor and were relatively egalitarian in nature. With
the domestication of plants and animals, the increasing specialization of
crafts and roles appears, bringing in its wake differential access to
resources as well as differing material interests. These divisions
eventually lead to the formation of differing status groups acting in
antagonistic cooperation to meet their biological and psychological needs.
As the material means of production are changed the social relations that
are based on these productive forces are necessarily altered and
transformed. In a classic evolutionary statement Marx (1867/1887) states: “Labour
is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate,
and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the
material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature
as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands,
the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions
in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and
changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature” (2772-2775).
According to Marx, every
sociocultural system produces counter forces that eventually lead to new
social forms. Over time, these forces become so great that they tap into new
resources to satisfy human needs at which point the social relations are
transformed. The rise of capitalism began with changes in the mode of
production in the last third of the fifteenth century and in the opening decades of the sixteenth” (13296-13299). Innovations in wool manufacturing
caused a rise in the price of wool in England. In response, feudal lords
transformed their holdings from manorial systems in which thousands of
peasants had rights to farming the land in exchange for labor and crops,
into pasture land for sheep. These peasants had as much right to the land as
the lords, Marx points out, but the nobility, weakened by incessant wars,
“was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers.”
Against all opposition of king and Parliament, the feudal lords forcibly
drove the peasantry from the common land. The serf is “freed” of his bond to
the soil and torn from his means of subsistence. He becomes unprotected and
without rights to a livelihood with nothing to sell but his labour
(13300-13305). “The history of this expropriation, in different countries,
assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different
orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we
take as our example, has it the classic form” (13271-13273).
The structure of
capitalist society grew out of the guilds, markets, and towns that were in
increasing conflict with feudal lords, church, and the central nobility. The
newly emerging merchant class eventually amassed great wealth and began to
challenge the hold of elites that had dominated the feudal order through
shifting alliances with nobility and monarchy. This revolutionary class
began to view existing property relations (feudalism) as a restraint on the
further development of their interests, that is, the production of goods
through the factory system (Marx and Engels 1848, 18-19, 32-38). Many modern
day historians and sociologists have taken up this perspective and assert
that the fact that feudal Europe’s elite were split between church,
centralized monarchy and feudal lords was a large factor in the successful
rise of capitalism.
Marx predicted that
similar tensions and eventual class conflict will arise in late capitalist
societies, bringing on a new social order. Like all previous existing
economic systems, capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction. The
capitalist system necessarily goes through regular periods of boom and bust
as the productive forces unleashed by capitalism far outstrip its ability to
sell its goods at a profit. These periodic crises create great hardship for
workers who live only through selling their labor, as well as bankrupting
many of the capitalists themselves. Over time, Marx predicted, capitalism
necessarily leads to enormous amounts of wealth and political power being
placed in very few hands, the formation of monopoly capitalism in which a
few control all the big industries as well as the state. At the same time he
foresaw that the mass of people would become relatively impoverished in both
wealth and political power as well as continuing to be subjected to periodic
crashes of the economic system. As capitalism continued to evolve the
situation would become intolerable for the great masses of people, and the
working classes would begin to exercise the power of their numbers and take
control of the means of production through the nation state and gradually
establish industrial production as a means of satisfying the wants and needs
of the people rather than the profit of the few.
Engels, of course, recognized the
explicit evolutionism in Marx’s theory and stated so in his eulogy for his
friend. “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 production of the immediate
material means, 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, art, and even the ideas 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” (Engels 1883). We will examine Marx’s analysis and
predictions for the fall of capitalism in more detail in another
essay, for now suffice it to say that he had a well-defined evolutionary
theory.
Many Russians now say “Marx knew everything about capitalism, and nothing
about socialism.” His vision of life after the socialist revolution is
sketchy. It appears that the division of labor would not be eliminated but
only limited, industrial forces will be harnessed to provide for human needs
rather than profit. Supposedly, it is under socialism where the state
withers away, it is here where “from each according to his abilities, to
each according to his needs” applies. It could be described as a sort of
second coming without Christ. Clearly, Marx’s hopes, dreams, and values have
unduly affected his analysis and his vision.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1848. The
Communist Manifesto. (F. Engels, Trans. and Ed.) Public Domain Books,
Kindle Edition, (2005).
Marx, Karl. 1867/1887.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, The
Process of Production of Capital. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated
by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Public Domain Books, Kindle Edition
(2008-11-19). Originally published as Das Kapital:
Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, vol. 1.
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