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334 pages
First published January 1, 1959
“by a strange turning upside down of perspectives, it ‘seems’ that the natural sciences provide the ability to foresee the evolution of natural processes, historical methodology has been conceived as ‘scientific’ only if, and in so far as, it enables one abstractly to ‘foresee’ the future of society. Hence the search for essential causes, or rather for the ‘first cause’, the ‘cause of causes’.” (A. Gramsci, Critical Notes on an Attempt at a Popular Presentation of Marxism by Bukharin 1921, in: The Modern Prince & Other Writings, p.93, FLP, Paris, 2021)If predictiveness was the only qualification for a science, then Marxism-Leninism has long since been victorious, i.e. (the well-known) Engels prediction of World War 1:
“the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover, of an extent and violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery; irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy” (F. Engels, Introduction to S. Borkheim’s In Memory of the German Blood-and-Thunder Patriots 1806-7, 1887, in: MECW 26, p.451, L&W, 2010)And of course Stalin and the Soviets knew years prior about the designs of the capitalist countries to invade the USSR, (the interventionists had just invaded from 1918-1922):
“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.” (J. V. Stalin, The Tasks of Business Executives 1931, in: Works Vol. 13, p.41, FLPH, Moscow, 1954)____________
“The problem of the foreseeability of historical events needs to be posed correctly, so that an exhaustive criticism can be made of mechanical causation, in order to deprive it of all scientific prestige and reduce it to a mere myth which was perhaps useful in the past in a backward period of development of certain subordinate social groups [sic!!!].” (A. Gramsci, p.94)Continued:
“pre-Marxist materialism was mechanistic. All kinds of motion up to the most intricate—social life and thinking—were reduced to elementary, mechanical motion [….] the entire intricate world with its multifarious qualities and colours, reducing it to mechanics and mathematical formulas [….] the idea of development was alien to it [….] pre-Marxist materialism did not extend to social phenomena” (I. Khlyabich, An Outline History of Philosophy, p.66, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970)__________
“mechanistic materialism [….] motion as purely mechanical shifting in space; all forms of motion were reduced to mechanical motion.” (I. Khlyabich, p.40)
“The greatest scientific service rendered by Marx was his development of historical materialism, and it did for the historical sciences what Darwin’s theories did for the natural sciences.” (F. Mehring, Karl Marx 1918, p.121, Routledge, 2010)Difference between the biological and economic:
“Bourgeois sociologists claim that social life is determined not by material factors, but by psychological and biological factors, by moral considerations of individual ‘prestige’, and so on. They do not recognise such concepts as socio-economic formation, mode of production, relations of production, productive forces, etc., without which there can be no genuine science of history.” (A. O. Sternin, Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’, p.126-127, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1988)Historical-Analytic:
“my analytic [...] proceed[s] from […] a given economic period of society” (K. Marx, Marginal Notes on A. Wagner’s Lehrbuch Der Politischen Oekonomie 1879, p.547 in: MECW 24, L&W, 2010)At first natural history:
“Marx […] was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.” (V. I. Lenin, What the ‘Friends of the People’ are and how they Fight the Social-Democrats 1894, p.14-15, FLP, Peking, 1978)_________
“My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history” (K. Marx, Capital Volume 1 1867, p.92, Penguin, 1990)
“Five main types of relations of production […] known to history: primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist and socialist.” (J. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism 1938, p.42, FLPH, Moscow, 1951)II. To the biological (bio-logos):
“Dialectical materialism affirms the strictest causal development of the higher from the lower […] it recognises a higher synthesis as a result of this development […] from unities already existing on lower levels unities are formed on higher levels [….] At every step practice proves to us that there exist unities, unions, which represent more than the sum of their parts. From atoms are formed molecules, from molecules chemical substances, micellæ, chromosomes, and other subordinate parts of the cell, then the cell itself as a unity, the multi-cellular organism, human society (class, state, family)” (L. Rudas Dialectical Materialism and Communism p.15, Labour Monthly, 1933)III. Finally to just abstract logic (in general):
“From ultimate physical particle to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloidal aggregate, from aggregate to living cell, from cell to organ, from organ to body, from animal body to social association, the series organizational levels is complete. Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and the levels of organization (or the stabilized dialectical syntheses) at different levels having been required for building our world.” (J. Needham, Metamorphoses of Scepticism 1941, in: Essays and Addresses, p.15, Allen & Unwin, London, 1943)
“A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed, but repeats them differently, on a higher basis (‘negation of negation’), a development, so to speak, in a spiral, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes and revolutions; ‘breaks in continuity’; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses to development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest, indissoluble connection of all sides of every phenomenon (history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, law-governed, universal process of motion” (V. I. Lenin, Karl Marx 1913, p.14, FLP, Peking, 1974)< The (general) investigation (in abtstract) of the law-of-motion |class-struggle| (of chronology) cannot be separated from (concrete) investigation of the historical modes of production (in their totalities of social-relations, social-form, i.e. society, national-states, countries, civilizations, geographies, etc.). >
“Dialectical Materialism teaches us that life originated on earth as a result of the process of development of matter. Nature should be considered not as a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but as a state of continuous movement and change. All phenomena should be studied from the standpoint of their continuous renewal and development, their arising and dying away.” (O. B. Lepeshinskaya, The Origin of Cells, p.7, FLPH, Moscow, 1954)Just as cells quantitatively regenerate through interaction with the environment (but progressively decay over-time, as that regeneration process itself decays) until a qualitatively break occurs and a part of the totality dies causing the totality to transform into a lower level of organized matter, the same is true of a given mode of production in which multiple rising and decaying modes of production exist within a given social-formation.
“Mode of Production, unity of two interdependent entities – productive forces and relations of production [….] relations of production represent the social form of the development of the productive forces” (M. I. Volkov, Dictionary of Political Economy, p.226, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1981)a) Production relations + forces compose the social-form (society type – totality of social-relations).
“Mode of Production, a historically conditioned manner of obtaining the necessities of life (food, clothing, housing, tools of labour [….] The productive forces are the determinative and most revolutionary factor of the M.P.” (M. Rosenthal, P. Yudin, Dictionary of Philosophy, p.294, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1967)
“By the productive forces Marxists mean the instruments of production and the people who operate these instruments of production [….] productive forces reflect the active relations of society to nature; they are an indication of the degree of power over nature attained by society.” (F. Konstantinov, The Role of Advanced Ideas in Development of Society, p.8, FLPH, Moscow, 1954)
“the relations of production are men’s relations with each other in the process of production of material values. The character of the relations of production shows who owns the land, forests, waters, mineral resources, raw materials, instruments of production, buildings, installations, means of transportation, etc.” (A. Alekseyev, The Basic Economic Law of Modern Capitalism, FLPH, Moscow, 1955)
“The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave labour, and one based on wage labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.” (K. Marx, Capital Vol. 1 1867, p.226-227, MECW 35, L&W, 2010)
“production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on.” (K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy 1847, p.62, FLP, Peking, 1978)_____________
“According to nature, corporeal extension is prior to any of its modes [of production], although it can never exist without this determinate mode or that” (F. H. Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza 1785, in: The Main Philosophical Writings, p.218, McGill, 1995)< the brilliance of Spinoza indeed - seeing the world through the ‘mode of production glasses’ but not as a time-period. Metaphysics (psychology, theology, ontology, etc. → eliminate from lexicon) utterly bankrupt when everything is related only through the individual ‘ego’ or ‘I’. > Stress this point again:
“For it is one thing to inquire into the nature of things, and another to inquire into the modes [of production] by which things are perceived by us.” (F. H. Jacobi, p.213)
“my analytic method [...] does not proceed from man but from a given economic period of society” (K. Marx, Marginal Notes on A. Wagner’s Lehrbuch Der Politischen Oekonomie 1879, p.547 in: MECW 24, L&W, 2010)The being-thinking circle of metaphysics:
“a vicious circle was formed: the method was good, therefore the result must be good, and since the result was good, the method must be good.” (A. S. Makarenko, Problems of Soviet School Education, p.34, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965)Get a job to get money, to pay for a car, to go to work, to get money, to pay for the car, to get to work, to go to school, to get a job, to get more money, to get a better job, to get more money, to pay for school etc. etc. The Zen Koan: carry the water to the pond and back 1000 times, ohm, ohm, ohm, bah, bah, bah (a sheep), and repeat the holy materialist mantra of so-called “class-consciousness”: the proletarians are all very good-boys who work hard, and by working hard, come to know that working hard is good, and by knowing that working hard is good, continue to work hard, and anyone who is not a manual-labourer is an unemployed no-bedtime exploiter etc.
