Quotation
"Marxism tries to explain how non-material production (including the production of conceptual systems, i.e. ideologies, religions, philosophy and science) springs from the production of material life, becomes detached from it, reacts back on it, and what determines this historical movement. (...) The fact that the proletarian class struggle can only be understood as the outcome of a dialectic of objective and subjective historical factors implies in no way that Marxism reintroduces pure coincidence and indeterminacy into historical analysis so to speak 'by the back door', after having thrown it out in the name of the lawfulness of historical processes discovered by historical materialism. It means only that the process of history does not tend towards only to one possible outcome, but that it can culminate either in a historical step forwards (a successful social revolution) or in a historical regression (a disintegration of the level of material civilisation and culture that has been reached). The bounding limits of the possible variants, however, remain materially and socially predetermined. At a definite stage in the sharpening of its internal contradictions, the downfall of a social order is inevitable. Nothing could in the long run save decaying slave society from 300 BC onwards, or decaying late feudalism from the seventeenth century onwards. Only the concrete forms of their supersession were to a certain degree undetermined, i.e. dependent on the evolution of the relationship of forces between the warring social classes (a relationship of forces which incorporates elements of ideological class warfare and political initiative). Likewise the possibility of finding a way out of the social crisis is materially predetermined. Given the level of development of the productive forces prevailing at the time, the crisis of antiquity could not lead to a communist society, any more than the crisis of feudalism could have, notwithstanding all the conviction and all the efforts of the Essenes and the early Christians, the Hussites and the Anabaptists. And given the development of the productive forces in our own time, a return to petty commodity production and small-scale private production is simply utopian.
Read more about this topic: Parametric Determinism
Famous quotes containing the word quotation:
“In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
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