The Dialectics of the Historical Process and the Methodology of Its Research

5. IN PLACE OF A CONCLUSION
The transformation of world history into general history, beginning with the development of large-scale industry already under capitalism and fully realised only in the communist formation, is the maturation of society as an ‘organic’ whole. In the field of methodology for researching society, this necessitates an increasing shift in emphasis towards the use of the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. For it is this method that predominates in the representation of a mature ‘organic’ whole.
Society as a mature ‘organic’ whole is the true history of humanity, as opposed to its prehistory. This is the communist formation. Therefore, to consider society as an ‘organic’ whole through the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, that is, through the logical method, means to characterise the communist formation in its internal (as well as external) interconnections, the interaction of its aspects, in its process of development.
It is no coincidence, then, that our attempt to present society as an ‘organic’ whole simultaneously turns out to be a characterisation of the communist formation. For example, we began by examining human needs, conditioned by their bodily organisation, then moved on to characterising production, after which we returned to the consideration of the individual with his needs, but now the individual appeared as someone who has a productive relation to nature and occupies a certain place in the relations of production. In other words, we arrived at the concept of a human being not merely as an individual, but also as a personality. A human being as a personality is an individual in whom the social is individually refracted, for whom the maintenance of physical existence is subordinate compared to the need for self-development, primarily as a social being, as a personality. (The development of man as an individual turns out to be indispensable although, in general, [it remains] a subordinate moment of his self-development as a personality.) Moreover, the self-development of each [individual] as a personality is a necessary condition for the self-development of all other human beings as personalities, and vice versa.
Thus, in characterising society as an ‘organic’ whole, we have come to discuss, in essence, the main goal of the communist formation. The development of an approach to society as an ‘organic’ whole, in other words, the development of a holistic approach to society, is extremely relevant both for the study of the entire communist formation and for the practice of socialist construction. For such an approach makes it possible to explain various social processes and phenomena more deeply and serves as a methodological basis for improving the management of the development of socialist society. Planning and managing the development of socialist society as a whole necessarily presupposes knowledge of all aspects and spheres of social life in their interconnections, interactions, functions, and development, and thus a holistic theoretical consideration of social development.
Communism (including socialism as its first phase) is the true history of humanity as the result of development, as the negation of the negation of preceding history.
If we highlight the main direction of development, the history of humanity unfolds in a spiral.
The starting point of history was the formation of the historical preconditions for the emergence of humanity within nature, and the primary emergence of humanity. Here, exists an immediate unity of the emerging human being, society, and nature (although this is an identity, a unity with difference).
Initially, objects for consumption given by nature in a ready-made form are appropriated, and tools for their extraction and gathering are created. Objects for consumption are mainly foraged, gathered, and not produced. At the same time, humans begin to produce tools for foraging and gathering. But predominantly, they still use the results of natural processes occurring without their intervention, i.e., natural processes themselves.
The links between individuals are also predominantly natural, formed naturally. The emerging production only makes these links more stable, i.e., leads to the formation of collectives in which individuals relate to each other in terms of reproduction. Relations of production initially form in the shape of clan relations, but they are hardly entirely reducible to them. In other words, relations of production appear in the form of natural, innate relations and to some extent exist alongside them.
As the production of objects for consumption becomes regular and constant[1], the difference between relations regarding reproduction and relations of production grows, and thus, between the clan and the community. In this way, the community increasingly comes to the fore compared to the clan. In the difference between the clan and the community, the differences between natural links and the relations of production are manifested. However, neither clan ties are purely natural links (they are natural ties crystallising, becoming stable under the influence of emerging production), nor community links are purely social links (the community always presupposes certain clan ties, albeit in a mediated and transformed form). The community reaches its classically developed form with the transition to animal husbandry and agriculture. But this transition is simultaneously the community’s highest development and the beginning of its decomposition (with the transition to animal husbandry and agriculture, the possibility of regular surplus production first arises, and private property begins to emerge).
For the humans of the primitive communal system, society and humanity are limited to their communal collective. At the same time, humans do not yet fully distinguish themselves from the rest of the world surrounding them.
Is Karl Marx’s remarkable thought applicable to this stage of human development? ‘It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers―a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity―which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure…’[2] In our view, yes. Of course, the great peculiarity of this stage must be taken into account.
For the first time, ownership of the means of production, as opposed to possession and use, and as an independent social relationship, as opposed to natural ties, begins to take shape in the community. This social relationship still exists in the community in its natural form and has not yet completely separated itself from purely natural ties. In fact, communal property, whether among herdsmen or farmers, presupposes first and foremost ownership of land. But land is a given of nature in its ready-made form, an unproduced means of production.[3]
Since land is used as a means of production, the relation of humans to nature is mediated, and thus humans distinguish themselves from nature, becoming aware of their distinction from nature. Since land is an unproduced, ready-made means of production taken from nature, the connection of humans with nature is unmediated, and thus humans relate to land as their own, using Karl Marx’s words, inorganic body, i.e., they do not separate themselves from the land and everything on and in it (from stones, trees, rivers, etc.). From this latter perspective, the social relations have not yet penetrated the productive relations of man towards nature.
Moreover, man as an owner is a member of the community, i.e., initially of a naturally formed collective, a collective in which natural links are always present in one form or another as an integral moment of social relations. Therefore, the relation of community members to each other is both mediated by production and given as something natural. And as long as land, as an unproduced means of production, plays the role of the decisive means of production, the basis for man’s relation to their surrounding environment as their inorganic body is preserved to some degree. For ‘The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions.’[4] In this respect, humans are still directly one with nature. The objectively existing goal of such a structure is the maintenance of the life of man as a member of the community.
The next stage of human development represents the negation of the previous one.
The transition to animal husbandry and agriculture signifies both the development of the community and the beginning of a long, epoch-spanning history of its decomposition. Private property is being developed. The development of the productive forces negates the previous level and character of their development: the possibility of regular production of means of subsistence beyond the absolutely indispensable minimum for maintaining physical existence arises, social division of labour emerges, whereas previously division of labour based on natural differences (sex, age, individual innate qualities) predominated. The improvement of individually operated tools was the basis for the development of private property.
Private property developed through the transformation of communal property, and thus at all stages of this transformation, it presupposed the existence of communal property to some extent and in some form.
With the development of private property, antagonistic classes and the exploitation of man by man emerge. Exploitation, since it was not limited to the occasional extraction of surplus product but became constant and encompassed the production process, necessarily had to include the appropriation of another human being (or other people) as an objective condition of production. But the economic appropriation of a human being as an objective condition of production is impossible without subordinating his will, without applying violence, without establishing relations of domination and coercion. Such exploitation of man inevitably requires more or less constant and direct political coercion, violence, and necessarily gives rise to such violence, i.e., economic relations of production directly appear as political, are inseparable from political relations.
This is the case everywhere and as long as land, as an unproduced means of production, plays a decisive role in production, and private property has not completely decomposed communal property, i.e., this situation is characteristic of slave-owning and feudal societies.
Although private property in these societies has not yet fully transformed the inherited basis (the relation of people to the means of production and the relations of people to each other, characteristic of the previous stage), it is the stages, steps of the development of private property, and not the forms of communal property, that should serve as the basis for dividing this stage of human history into major stages. Why? First and foremost, this is because the relation to land as an unproduced means of production and the community at this stage are generally in decline, and the leading factor in the development of society is the improvement of the means of labour produced by people, and for a long time, predominantly those means of labour that are operated individually.
The first negation of the previous stage reaches its apex under capitalism.
With the development of the productive forces, produced means of production begin to play an increasingly significant role in production. Initially, these are mainly means of production operated motion individually. Accordingly, the development of property based on one’s own labour is taking place. (Of course, the features of the previous stage do not disappear completely. An example is the medieval organisation of urban artisans.) As this property develops, the connection of individuals in production increasingly takes place through the exchange of products between isolated individual producers. Such exchange means, at the same time, the expansion of the market and the growth of the diversity of needs. Further market growth leads to production for the market, to the subordination of production to exchange. This necessitates increased production, increased scale, leads to the ruin and impoverishment of some and the concentration of means of production in the hands of others, the separation of the means of production from the producers. (Here, we are referring to the main tendency in the broadest sense.)
Produced means of production acquire a decisive role in the production process. This circumstance, as well as the connection between producers through the exchange of products of labour, represents the separation of social relations from natural links, the separation of humans from nature, and a qualitatively different level of separation compared to the dominance of the communal form of property. At the same time, this separation is not complete.
Indeed, the decisive role of produced means of production means that the relation of the producer to the means of production on the scale of society as a whole is mediated by labour, and therefore the fundamental basis for identifying the producer with the objective conditions of production, for identifying man with the means of production, disappears.
And yet the difference between man and nature, even under the conditions of the highest development of private property that takes place under capitalism, on the one hand, does not reach its end, and on the other, appears as a rupture. It does not reach its end, since people in the production process are connected only through the exchange of things, products of labour, and therefore producers act as produced things, as products of labour, and as products of labour they are bought and sold. (The product of labour is not the human body itself, but rather its capacity for labour.)
The difference between man and nature under private property is a rupture between them. The rupture between man and nature develops to the highest degree under capitalism. Nature, as a condition of production, is hostile to the worker who is deprived of the means of production. Private owners seek to use it for their own narrow, selfish interests. Under conditions of private property, the desire to enslave nature and dominate it prevails. This enslavement has two sides: on the one hand, it is the transformation of nature in the direction desired by people, and on the other, it becomes merely a slave that can be disregarded, whose forces can be mercilessly exploited. In such a situation, when the productive forces develop to such an extent that people become capable of subjugating the entire surrounding environment, a conflict arises between man and nature―an ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of humanity. The gap between people and the social forces they generate arises and grows under private ownership, reaching its peak under capitalism. The forces of human interaction increasingly oppose the people themselves, divided by private property, and the gap and contradiction between classes, between man and society, grows. Manifestations of the spontaneous action of social forces include, for example, the anarchy of production, and economic crises.
The very foundations of capitalism and its necessary development give rise to the material and spiritual preconditions for the abolition of capitalism and private property.
The most important material precondition for the abolition of capitalism and all private property is that produced means of production, having become decisive, acquire a social character. The cooperative, ultimately social character of the means of production becomes a technical necessity at the stage where production becomes mechanised: machines, and especially systems of machines, are created and set in motion by many people, collectively.
At the same time, before the advent of large-scale industry, a particular technical structure was found empirically. With the advent of large-scale industry, the situation changed dramatically: technical structures are discovered theoretically, and this is of enormous importance for the development and very existence of private property.[5] In the course of the development of large-scale industry, it is not direct labour that becomes paramount, but the technological application of natural science and that ‘general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side―a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product).’[6]. But the essence of capital is the production of surplus value, and surplus value is created by living, direct labour. Consequently, by developing large-scale industry, capital thereby prepares the conditions for its own decomposition and the preconditions for a future communist society.
Communism is the negation of the negation.
The socialist revolution marks the beginning of unity between man, society and nature, between man and society. It is as if there is a return to the initial unity with nature. But this is only a return in appearance, for unity is established while preserving all the positive achievements of the first stage of negation. People continue to strive to master nature, having enormous opportunities to do so. But this mastery must also involve the preservation and improvement of nature. This is precisely the communist attitude towards nature.
Capitalism has already created the conditions for negating the negation of the initial character of human appropriation of nature in production. If the original appropriation of nature in the history of humanity was simply as a given, unmodified entity, then humans began to transform objects by means of modified natural objects. Accordingly, the main transformer was direct labour. In the course of the development of large-scale industry, and especially at its highest stage―the automated system of machines―‘as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature (emphasis added―V.V.), transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it.’[7]. Consequently, there is a return to the starting point, to the use of natural processes, but this is not simply a return to the beginning; at the same time, the achievements of the first negation are preserved: man consciously directs natural processes to obtain the useful effect he needs.
However, under capitalism, general wealth develops in an antagonistic form. ‘On the one side, then,’ writes Karl Marx, ‘it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.’[8]
Only the socialisation of the ownership of the means of production eliminates this contradiction and opens up space for the free development of the wealth of society. The real wealth of society, if we abstract from its bourgeois form, is nothing other than the constant production and reproduction of man as a complete, universal, harmonious being.
The socialisation of the means of production, carried out for the first time in the socialist revolution, is the elimination of the social forces that are separate from and hostile to man. The establishment of public ownership of the means of production is the negation of private property and, at the same time, a return to the starting point, to communal property. Both communal and public property are the property of the collective. But public property, unlike communal property, is not the property of a group of people, but the property of the whole of society. In its most developed form, public property is the property of the whole of humanity, which has become socialised. In addition, public property preserves, in a transformed form, the positive achievements of the development of private property.
The goal of socialised humanity is the free, all-round, harmonious development of each person, which acts both as an end in itself and as a necessary condition for the same kind of development of all other people. This goal is also the negation of the negation. The starting point was the reproduction of the physical existence of a community member as the goal and condition of the physical existence of other community members and the community as a whole. As private property developed, the goal of social development became the production and reproduction of private owners as private owners, while people who were, to one degree or another, deprived of private property, the exploited classes, served as a means to this end on a scale of society as a whole. The development of private property was at the same time an increasing separation of private property from the direct link with the individuality of the owners and with natural conditions, i.e., private property acquired increasing independence in relation to the personality of the owner and to nature. Under capitalism, this independence fully develops. Therefore, the main goal of the development of society becomes not the individual consumption of private property, but its constant productive consumption as self-increasing private property. Thus, even the private owner, even if satisfied with his position, is to some extent a means of the movement of private property, of the social forces created by people, separated from people and subordinating people.
Under communism, the goal of the development of society once again becomes each and every person. However, now this person is not merely a member of a limited community, but a member of human society as a whole. The achievements of the class/antagonistic stage of the development of society are not eliminated. After all, it is precisely during the development of private property, and primarily during the development of capitalist private property, that international relations of production, universal needs, and so on are created, albeit to a limited extent. However, there is a ‘cleansing’ of the antagonistic form of development: the main goal is no longer simply the production of the individual’s physical existence, nor merely their consumption of material and spiritual goods as an isolated individual, but rather the production and reproduction of the human as a member of humanity, as a member of human society.
Since communism is the negation of the negation, it cannot be fully understood without taking into account what it negates. The theory of communist society necessarily presupposes and includes a consideration of the entire history of the emergence, formation, and development of humanity.
Thus, the issues analysed in this pamphlet turn out to be methodological questions for studying the true history of humanity―communism―as the indispensable outcome of the entire development of humanity.

Notes

[1] Under certain favourable circumstances, even gathering, hunting and fishing could provide regular yields at the dawn of human history. However, this regularity lies precisely in external natural conditions, rather than in gathering, hunting and fishing themselves. It was only with the emergence of animal husbandry and agriculture that labour arose which, by its very nature, made it possible to obtain regular means of subsistence.
[2] K. Marx, Das Kapital vol. 3, p. 519, Chapter 47. Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent
[3] As above, p. 539
[4] K. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 399, ‘Forms which precede capitalist production’
[5] K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 317-318
[6] K. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 619, ‘The Chapter on Capital (continuation)’.
[7] As above, p. 624, ‘Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.’
[8] As above, p. 625