Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness by Mészáros István

Author:Mészáros, István
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

5.6 Naturalistic and Dialectical Conceptions of Necessity

The materialist conceptions that originate in the social ground of “civil society”—idealized from the standpoint of capital’s political economy—are equally constrained by their characteristic vantage point. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marx is not less critical of the materialist conceptualizations of historical development than of their idealist counterparts. For while Marx’s materialist predecessors operate with naturalistic models of social life, Marx consciously defines his own position as dialectical, hence irrepressibly historical.

Nowhere is the irreconcilable opposition between dialectical and naturalistic materialism more acute than in their respective conceptions of necessity. The dialectical conception puts into relief the historical dynamic and specificity of the processes concerned. By contrast, the naturalistic approach tends to obliterate the historical specificities and transubstantiate them into claimed natural characteristics and determinations.

Marx clearly illustrates this opposition in his critique of political economists, underscoring the apologetic ideological function of their general approach. Thus Malthus, for instance,

regards overpopulation as being of the same kind in all the different historical phases of economic development; he does not understand their specific difference, and hence stupidly reduces these very complicated and varying relations to a single relation, two equations, in which the natural reproduction of humanity appears on the one side, and the natural reproduction of edible plants (or means of subsistence) on the other, as two natural series, the former geometric and the latter arithmetic in progression. In this way he transforms the historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical relation, which he has fished purely out of thin air, and which rests neither on natural nor on historical laws. There is allegedly a natural difference between the reproduction of mankind and e.g. grain. This baboon thereby implies that the increase of humanity is a purely natural process, which requires external restraints, checks, to prevent from proceeding in geometrical progression. … He transforms the immanent, historically changing limits of the human reproduction process into outer barriers; and the outer barriers to natural reproduction into immanent limits or natural laws of reproduction.”85

As we can see, the transubstantiation of the historically specific into a timeless “natural” determination, and the concomitant inversion of the relationship between immanent limits and outer barriers for the sake of inventing an alleged “natural law,” are not simply “mistakes” or “conceptual confusions.” On the contrary, they fulfill the obvious ideological function of “eternalizing” the given social/economic order: by transferring its historical, and therefore changeable, characteristics to a fictitiously permanent “natural” plane.

This happens to be the case not only with Malthus, the “clerical baboon,” but even with the outstanding figures of bourgeois political economy—including Adam Smith and Ricardo—who are often praised by Marx. Thus Adam Smith treats labor and the division of labor as human natural force in general, ahistorically linking the latter to capital and rent, and constructing out of these elements a “vicious circle” of self-sustaining presuppositions from which there can be no escape.

With Adam Smith

“labour is in principle the source of value only in so far as in the division of labour the surplus appears as just as much a gift of nature.

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