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Introduction to Philosophy |
How for Marx is change in production, in economic organisation, initiated?
The motivating force, according to Marx, is the human being's ceaseless struggle to meet his or her human needs.
In the most primitive stages the human being lives on the brink of disaster:
the productive forces at human command are capable of generating only the most basic necessities - and only if life is restricted to almost continuous labour.
With time however ways are found of increasing 'productivity'.
In the case of Western Europe at any rate, Marx thinks tribes band together to form groups large enough for a slave based economy to flourish.
Eventually the struggle to expand the forces of production results in the development of the machine, and with it the promise for all human beings of emancipation from incessant toil.
What happens in each stage is that a conflict develops between on the one hand the structures through which production is organised and on the other people's pressure to find improved circumstances of life.
It can be argued that what keeps the mechanism in motion is the freely willed striving of individuals.
So I would argue that in Marxism you have an account of how there might be an overall pattern, but one that is conditioned by human beings' freely willed decisions.
Let me illustrate what Marx thought of as the mechanism of social change by outlining his account of the approaching collapse, as he thought, of capitalism.
Under mature capitalism, thought Marx, there is the starkly simple situation of two great classes of people locked in mortal combat.
On the one hand there are those whose labour sustains the whole system, the proletariat, and on the other are the bourgeoisie, who extort their wealth from the workers simply by charging them for access to the means of production (factories, workplaces, machines etc.).
The very structure of capitalism as an economic structure forces owners into ceaseless competition with each other.
This is because if your factory doesn't produce things at absolutely minimal cost, somebody else will enter the market - in pursuit of a living - they will produce more cheaply and undercut you.
So the market drives owners into relentless competition.
One of the ways the owner can cut costs is to pay the worker less. So the standard of living of the worker is driven relentlessly down.
This process results, says Marx, in a growing tension - to put it mildly.
The workers, swollen in numbers as bankrupt owners join their ranks, get more and more desperate as their circumstances get more and more impossible.
In the end, they can take no more.
They rise up and overturn the order which has been grinding their faces in the dirt.
The point for us is: the end is brought about by human action, according to Marx.
It is individual human beings who decide they have had enough.
And yet he makes them out to be driven to this point, and he clearly thinks that sooner or later the dynamic is such, and human beings are such, that in the end they are bound to turn.
DOES MARXISM LEAVE ROOM FOR A DEGREE OF HUMAN AUTONOMY, AT WORK WITHIN A CONSTRAINING FRAMEWORK?
Is this then an example of the kind I promised - of how you can have a predicted pattern of events but at the same time individuals playing a role as autonomous participants?
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