12 Labor and Monopoly Capital
conclusions which achieve their plausibility only by worship of the existing fact. The problem can be fruitfully attacked, it seems to me, only by way of concrete and historically specific analysis of technology and machinery on the one side and social relations on the other, and of the manner in which these two come together in existing societies. Such an analysis could well start with the possibility that the present mode of the organization and control of labor arose in capitalist society for reasons specific to that society, and was transferred to Soviet society and imitated by it for reasons that have to do with the specific nature of that society. Recognizing that there are very few “eternal" or “inevitable" features of human social organization in an abstract sense, such an analysis would proceed by way of an understanding of the historical evolution which produced modern social forms. And most important, such an analysis must not simply accept what the designers, owners, and managers of the machines tell us about them, but it must form its own independent evaluation of machinery and modern industry, in the factory and in the office; otherwise it will create not a social science but merely a branch of management science.
I must at this point devote a few pages to some discussion of Marx's view of the relation between technology and society before saying something more about the Soviet Union. A clarification of Marx's views on this relationship is necessary because orthodox social science, although it is, as we have just seen, itself prone to the most vulgar and superficial technological determinism, often misunderstands Marx in exactly this respect, and accuses him of this very sin.
In the first published essay in which his approach to history and society was outlined, the reply to Proudhon written in 1846-1847 and called The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx at one point says:
M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
The final sentence has the striking quality and broad historical fidelity characteristic of Marx's best aphorisms. But unfortunately it is its other quality, that of appearing to be a ready-made formula, that has attracted the attention of many and caused them to try to use it as a substitute for the immense historical and analytical labors Marx performed on this theme. “Science," Marx says of Proudhon only a few pages later, “for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas."8 In spite of such warnings, there are those who have tried to understand Marx as a provider of formulas, and in that way labeled him a “technological determinist."
Marx did, of course, give a position of primacy to the "means of production" in social evolution. But this was never conceived as a simple and unilateral determinism which “causes" a specific mode of production to issue automatically from a specific technology. Such a determinism is false to history in general, and particularly useless in confronting revolutionary and transitional epochs, with which Marx was especially concerned. In such epochs, clearly, societies exhibiting a variety of forms of social relations coexist on the basis of substantially the same technology. Marx's solution to the problem of transition turns upon his conception of the development of the productive forces within a system of social relations, until they outgrow it, come into conflict with it, and burst its bounds. This has two important implications which clash with the interpretation of Marx as a “technological determinist wielding a simple formula. On the one hand, it means that the same productive forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding epoch; indeed, how could it be otherwise, since social and political revolutions, although they may come about in the last analysis because of the gradual evolution of the productive forces, do not on their morrow provide society with a brand-new technology. And on the other hand, it provides for the growth and evolution of the forces of production within the bounds of a single social system, a feature of all social systems but especially significant for capitalism. Thus if steam power “gives us" the industrial capitalist, industrial capitalism “gives us," in turn, electric power, the power of the internal combustion engine, and atomic power.
On the basis of this sketch, we would expect the technology and organization of production of early capitalism to be much closer to those of the late feudal epoch, and those of late capitalism much closer to those of early socialism, than they are to each other. This is of course true, and serves as an elementary demonstration of the fact that the relations between technology and society are beyond the reach of any simpleminded "determinism." The treatment of the interplay between the forces and relations of production occupied
Introduction
13
itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel."6 One may agree wholeheartedly with Engels that in mastering natural forces and using them in social production, humanity has altered the terms of its social life and introduced organizational limits to the free and individual activity of the isolated producer. But in postulating “a veritable despotism," and in making this “independent of all social organization,"Engels was so carried away by his polemic that he used terminological generalities uncharacteristic of the body of his, and especially Marx's, writings. In particular, the use of the term “authority" as a supra-historical concept, independent of the various forms which it may assume—individual or collective, antagonistic or harmonious, alienated or retained in the hands of the direct producers—can only be a source of confusion.