A scientific guide to revolution
Fundamentals of Historical Materialism
By Doug Lorimer
Resistance Books, 1999
216 pp., $12.95
Available at all Resistance Bookshops, or write to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007.
Review by Chris Slee
Historical materialism is concerned with uncovering the fundamental laws which govern the origin, development and organisation of human society. In doing so it provides a scientific guide to revolutionary practice.
The author of this new Resistance Books publication, Doug Lorimer, points out: "The social environment is the product of collective human action. It can therefore be changed by the collective action of working people ... But in order to do this, working people need a scientific understanding of the laws that govern and shape social life. That is what historical materialism provides."
Many bourgeois theorists equate being scientific with not taking sides in political struggles. They discount the scientific character of historical materialism because it frankly acknowledges that it is a guide for making revolution.
Lorimer argues that in a class-divided society, there can be no social theorists who soar above classes, disregard their interests and do not take a stand on the struggles between them. "In fact", he writes, "we constantly find that the very people who boast of their 'uncommittedness' are in practice those who conduct a far from non-partisan struggle against Marxist social theory".
Marxists openly affirm that their social theory serves the practical needs of the working class. But does this mean that Marxist social theory is purely subjective? Not at all: "Marxist social science ... relies in its development on specific social research, on the wide use of statistical and other empirical data concerning various aspects of social life". There is no contradiction between honestly seeking the truth about all aspects of social life, and taking sides with the working class and all those oppressed by capitalism.
There is, however, a contradiction between truth and partisanship for those who defend an outdated social order. "Class partisanship in social theory certainly does not coincide with a scientific approach when that theory expresses and defends the position and interests of the classes that have been historically outmoded in the course of social development. In doing so, social theory will depart from objective social reality."
Lorimer shows that "Bourgeois social 'science' is incapable of fulfilling the task of a genuine science of society, i.e. to provide an integral theory of society by revealing the general laws that govern its origin, organisation and development".
The dominant schools of bourgeois social theory treat society as merely an accidental collection of individuals, and history as a record of accidental, unique events. This atomistic view of society reflects the reality of capitalism, which separates people and pits them against each other and favours reductionist theories which view parts in isolation from the whole.
By contrast, the Marxist dialectical view recognises that "parts have properties that are characteristic of them only as they are parts of wholes". For example, individuals today have the ability to fly — but only because they are part of a society that has created aircraft, pilots and fuel.
Historical materialism deals with "the general laws of the development of society, the laws of the rise, existence and motive forces of development of socioeconomic formations". It studies, "not one particular people, or one particular country, but human society as a whole".
Lorimer examines the apparent contradiction that history is governed by social laws yet is also a result of the conscious purposeful activity of people themselves. "This contradiction can be resolved if we remember that people (and particularly large groups of people — classes, parties, etc.) in pursuing their aims, in being guided by certain ideas and desires, at the same time always live under certain objective conditions that do not depend on their will and desire and that ultimately determine the direction and character of their activity, their ideas and aspirations".
Recognition of "the objective character of laws of social development" does not negate the need for conscious purposeful activity. "The laws of social development, unlike the laws of nature, are laws of human activity. Outside this activity they do not exist. Therefore social revolutions, including socialist revolutions, occur only as a result of the struggle of the progressive classes on the basis of using the objective laws of social development, particularly the laws of class struggle."
"Historical necessity is not the same thing as predetermination", Lorimer says. "In real life, thanks to the effect of objective laws and various trends of social development, there arise certain possibilities, the realisation of which depends on the activity of the masses, on the course of class struggle".
Hence, in every historical period there exists more than one possibility. Today, for example, we have the possibility — for the first time in history — of creating a socialist society. But the alternative possibility is the collapse of capitalism into a new form of barbarism involving ecological degradation and even the destruction of the human race by nuclear war.
This makes the task of mobilising the mass of people to struggle for socialism more urgent than ever. But this can only succeed if revolutionaries understand social laws: "Ignorance of these laws, failure to take into consideration actual conditions and means of struggle, condemns the masses of the working people, the working class and its parties, either to hopelessness and passivity or to adventurism and defeat".
One of these laws is that "it is social being that ultimately determines social consciousness, the ideas, aspirations and aims of individuals and social classes". Social being refers to "the totality of associations humans enter into to maintain their existence".
But although social consciousness is ultimately determined by social being, "it possesses a certain relative independence. When radical changes occur in the economic structure of society, the material basis of social life, this does not mean that corresponding changes in social consciousness will automatically follow."
Tradition and habit play an important role. So too do ideologies, both progressive and reactionary. "Public opinion in class society thus inevitably reflects the struggle of class interests and ideologies."
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels established the law-governed dependence of all social relations on the relations people enter into to produce material goods. "In the process of production people do not only create material products ... [they] produce and reproduce their own social relations."
The development of the productive forces was accompanied by the division of society into classes. The communal property of the clan and tribe was replaced by the concentration of property in the hands of a minority who owned the key means of production.
Lorimer explains: "If the means of production are owned by the whole of society, the members of society stand in an equal relationship to the means of production, and collectivist relations of cooperation and mutual help are established between them. If on the other hand ... the means of production are in the hands of only a part and not the whole of society ... people are placed in an unequal relationship to the means of production, and relations of domination and subjection, relations of exploitation, appear."
Various forms of exploitation of the majority of people by a minority have existed since the collapse of the communal property of the clan and tribe. These are outlined in this book as the tributary, slave, feudal and capitalist forms of exploitation. The transition from one form to another was made possible by changes in the productive forces.
But capitalism has developed the productive forces to the point where there is a contradiction between the social character of the production process (thousands of people working together to create any particular product) and the private ownership of the means of production. "This contradiction shows itself in the cataclysms of the spontaneous capitalist economy, in anarchy of production and crises of overproduction, and in the class struggle of the proletariat."
The transition from one socioeconomic system to another is "a complex and lengthy process involving change in the material and technical basis of society, in its economic system, political life, ideology and intellectual culture". While some of these changes are incremental, and the whole process extends over a substantial period of time, there is always a key turning point, a "qualitative leap" — a social revolution.
The main feature of the social revolution is the transfer of power from one class to another in order to bring about a complete change in the relations of ownership of the means of production. "A social revolution can succeed only when the maturity of its objective conditions coincides with the vigorous activity of driving forces, of the classes fighting for realisation of their interests.
"Social revolutions can not be called into being at the will of small revolutionary-minded groups." There must be "a general crisis of the obsolete system".
"If the objective conditions for accomplishing historical tasks have not matured, no efforts on the part of progressive social forces can lead to a revolutionary transformation of society. But if the objective conditions are present, the results of social revolution depend on the subjective factor."
Key elements of the subjective factor are the masses' degree of revolutionary consciousness, their organisation and their leadership. In a socialist revolution, a crucial role is played by the Marxist party, consisting of "those who have an understanding of the proletariat's fundamental class interests and a clear program for realising them".
In the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, the objective conditions for a socialist revolution had not yet fully matured. Today, the most developed capitalist countries have become materially ripe for socialist revolution. Thus the subjective factor has become "the central question on which the fate of humanity depends".