On May 5, 1818, a man was born who was destined to become the greatest scientist and revolutionary. K. Marx made a theoretical revolution in social science. Marx's scientific merits are recognized even by his ardent opponents. We publish articles devoted to Marx, not only by Russian scientists, but also by major Western philosophers and sociologists R. Aron and E. Fromm, who did not consider themselves Marxists, but highly valued the theoretical heritage of the great thinker.
1. Center and periphery of the materialist understanding of history
The greatest discovery of K. Marx was the materialist understanding of history created by him in collaboration with F. Engels. Its main provisions remain in force today.
In the philosophy and methodology of scientific knowledge, the view is currently widespread that each scientific theory consists, firstly, of a central core, and secondly, of the periphery surrounding it. Revealing the inconsistency of at least one idea included in the core of the theory means the destruction of this core and the refutation of this theory as a whole. The situation is different with the ideas that form the peripheral part of the theory. Their refutation and replacement with other ideas do not in themselves call into question the truth of the theory as a whole.
The core of the materialist understanding of history consists, in my opinion, of six ideas that can rightfully be called central.
First position historical materialism is that a necessary condition for the existence of people is the production of material goods. Material production is the basis of all human activity.
Second position is that production is always social in nature and always takes place in a certain social form. The social form in which the production process takes place is a system of socio-economic or, as Marxists also call them, production relations.
Third position: There is not one, but several types of economic (production) relations, and thereby several qualitatively different systems of these relations. It follows that production can and does occur in different social forms. Thus, there are several types or forms of social production. These types of social production were called modes of production. Each mode of production is production taken in a specific social form.
The existence of slave-owning, feudal and capitalist modes of production is essentially recognized now by almost all scientists, including those who do not share the Marxist point of view and do not use the term “mode of production”. Slave, feudal and capitalist modes of production are not only types of social production, but also stages of its development. After all, there is no doubt that the beginnings of capitalism appeared only in the 15th-14th centuries, that it was preceded by feudalism, which took shape, at the earliest, only in the 6th-9th centuries, and that the heyday of ancient society was associated with the widespread use of slaves in production. The existence of a continuity between the ancient, feudal and capitalist economic systems is also undeniable. And the identification of this fact inevitably raises the question: why in one era one system of economic relations dominated, in another - another, in a third - a third.
The industrial revolution took place before the eyes of K. Marx and F. Engels. And where machine industry penetrated, feudal relations inevitably collapsed and capitalist relations were established. And the question formulated above naturally suggested an answer: the nature of economic (production) relations is determined by the level of development of the social forces that create the social product, that is, the productive forces of society. The change in systems of economic relations, and thus the main methods of production, is based on the development of productive forces. That's how it is fourth position historical materialism.
As a result, not only was a solid foundation laid for the long-established belief among economists in the objectivity of capitalist economic relations, but it also became clear that not only capitalist, but all economic relations in general do not depend on the consciousness and will of people. And existing independently of the consciousness and will of people, economic relations determine the interests of both groups of people and individuals, determine their consciousness and will, and thereby their actions.
Thus, the system of economic (production) relations is nothing more than an objective source of social ideas, which the old materialists sought in vain and could not find; it represents social being (in the narrow sense), or social matter. Fifth position historical materialism is a thesis about the materiality of economic (production) relations. The system of economic relations is material in the sense that it is primary in relation to social consciousness.
With the discovery of social matter, materialism was extended to phenomena of social life and became a philosophical doctrine, equally relevant to nature and society. It is this kind of comprehensive, completed to the top materialism that is called dialectical. Thus, the idea that dialectical materialism was first created and then extended to society is deeply mistaken. On the contrary, only when the materialist understanding of history was created did materialism become dialectical, but not before. The essence of Marx's new materialism is the materialist understanding of history.
According to the materialist understanding of history, the system of economic (production) relations is the basis, the basis of any specific individual society. And it was natural to base the classification of individual specific societies, their division into types, on the character of their economic structure. Societies that have as their foundation the same system of economic relations, based on the same method of production, belong to the same type; societies based on different modes of production belong to different types of society. These types of society, identified on the basis of socio-economic structure, are called socio-economic formations. There are as many of them as there are basic production methods.
Just as the main methods of production represent not only types, but also stages of development of social production, socio-economic formations represent types of society that are also stages of world-historical development. This sixth position materialistic understanding of history.
The concept of the basic methods of production as types of production and stages of its development and the concept of socio-economic formations as the main types of society and stages of world-historical development are included in the core of historical materialism. Judgments about how many methods of production there are, how many of them are basic, and about how many socio-economic formations there are, in what order and how they replace each other, belong to the peripheral part of the materialist understanding of history.
The basis for the scheme of changes in socio-economic formations created by K. Marx and F. Engels was the periodization of world history that had been established by that time in historical science, in which three eras were initially distinguished (ancient, medieval, modern), and subsequently to them was added as a precursor to the ancient era of the Ancient East. The founders of Marxism associated a certain socio-economic formation with each of these world-historical eras. There is hardly any need to quote K. Marx’s famous statement about Asian, ancient, feudal and bourgeois modes of production. Continuing to develop their scheme, K. Marx and F. Engels later, based mainly on the work of L. G. Morgan “Ancient Society” (1877), came to the conclusion that antagonistic modes of production were preceded by primitive communal, or primitive communist . According to the concept they developed of the present and future of humanity, capitalist society should be replaced by a communist socio-economic formation. This is how a scheme for the development of mankind arose, in which five already existing and partly continuing to exist formations appear: primitive communist, Asian, ancient, feudal and bourgeois, and one more that does not yet exist, but which, according to the founders of Marxism, should inevitably arise - communist.
When one or another truly scientific theory is created, it becomes relatively independent in relation to its own creators. Therefore, not all the ideas of even its creators, not to mention their followers, which are directly related to the problems that this theory poses and solves, can be considered as components of this theory. So, for example, F. Engels once put forward the position that in the early stages of human development, social orders were determined not so much by the production of material goods, but by the production of man himself (child production). And although this position was put forward by one of the creators of the materialist understanding of history, it cannot be considered as included not only in the central core, but also in the peripheral part of this theory. It is incompatible with the basic tenets of historical materialism. This was once pointed out by G. Kunov. But the main thing is that it is false.
K. Marx and F. Engels spoke out on a wide variety of issues. K. Marx had a certain system of views on eastern (Asian), ancient and feudal societies, F. Engels - on primitive ones. But their concepts of primitiveness, antiquity, etc. are not included as constituent elements (even peripheral ones) either in the materialist understanding of history or in Marxism as a whole. And the obsolescence and even the outright fallacy of certain ideas of K. Marx and F. Engels about primitiveness, antiquity, religion, art, etc. cannot in the slightest degree indicate the inconsistency of the materialist understanding of history. Even revealing the incorrectness of certain ideas of Marx included in his theory of capitalist economics, which is one of the main parts of Marxism, does not directly affect the central core of the materialist concept of history.
In Russia before the revolution and abroad, both before and now, the materialist understanding of history has been criticized. In the USSR, such criticism began somewhere in 1989 and acquired a landslide character after August 1991. Actually, calling all this criticism can only be a stretch. It was real persecution. And they began to deal with historical materialism in the same ways in which it was previously defended. Historians in Soviet times were told: whoever is against the materialistic understanding of history is not a Soviet person. The arguments of the “democrats” were no less simple: in Soviet times there was a Gulag, which means that historical materialism is false from beginning to end. The materialist understanding of history, as a rule, was not refuted. They simply talked about its complete scientific failure as a matter of course. And those few who nevertheless tried to refute it acted according to a well-established scheme: attributing deliberate nonsense to historical materialism, they proved that it was nonsense, and celebrated victory. The attack on the materialist understanding of history that unfolded after August 1991 was met with sympathy by many historians. Some of them even actively joined the fight. One of the reasons for the hostility of a considerable number of specialists to historical materialism was that it had previously been forced upon them. This inevitably gave rise to a feeling of protest. Another reason was that Marxism, having become the dominant ideology and a means of justifying the “socialist” orders existing in our country (which in reality have nothing in common with socialism), was degenerated: from a coherent system of scientific views it turned into a set of cliched phrases used in as spells and slogans. Real Marxism was replaced by the appearance of Marxism - pseudo-Marxism. This affected all parts of Marxism, not excluding the materialist understanding of history. What F. Engels feared most of all happened. “...The materialistic method,” he wrote, “turns into its opposite when it is used not as a guiding thread in historical research, but as a ready-made template according to which historical facts are cut and reshaped.”
At the same time, not only did the actual provisions of the materialist understanding of history turn into dead schemes, but also theses that did not follow from historical materialism were presented as immutable Marxist truths. It is enough to give such an example. It has been argued for a long time: Marxism teaches that the first class society can only be slave-owning and no other. It is a fact that the first class societies were ancient Eastern ones. This led to the conclusion that these societies were slaveholding societies. Anyone who thought otherwise was automatically declared anti-Marxist. In the societies of the Ancient East there were indeed slaves, although their exploitation was never the leading form. This allowed historians to at least somehow substantiate the position that these societies belonged to the slave-owning formation. Things were worse when societies that were supposed to be slave-owning societies had no slaves. Then direct producers who were not slaves were declared slaves, and the society was characterized as early slave-owning.
Historical materialism was considered as a method that allows, even before the study of a particular society begins, to establish what the researcher will find in it. It was difficult to come up with anything more stupid. In fact, a materialistic understanding of history does not precede the results of research; it only indicates how to look in order to understand the essence of a particular society.
However, it would be wrong to believe that in order to transform historical materialism back from the template into which facts were fitted, as it has been for us for a long time, into a genuine method of historical research, it is enough to return to the roots, to restore the rights of everything that was once created K. Marx and F. Engels. The materialist understanding of history needs a serious update, which involves not only the introduction of new provisions that its founders did not have, but also the rejection of a number of their theses.
Not a single one of the ideas included in the core of the materialist understanding of history has ever been refuted by anyone. In this sense, historical materialism is unshakable. As for its periphery, much of it is outdated and needs to be replaced and supplemented.
Due to the limited volume of the article, from the large number of problems of historical materialism that need to be developed, I will take only one, but perhaps the most important one - the doctrine of socio-economic formations.
2. Socio-economic formation and sociohistorical organism
One of the important shortcomings of orthodox historical materialism was that it did not identify and theoretically develop the basic meanings of the word “society”. And this word in scientific language has at least five such meanings. The first meaning is a specific separate society, which is a relatively independent unit of historical development. I will call society in this understanding a socio-historical (sociohistorical) organism, or socior for short.
The second meaning is a spatially limited system of socio-historical organisms, or a sociological system. The third meaning is all socio-historical organisms that have ever existed and currently exist together - human society as a whole. The fourth meaning is society in general, regardless of any specific forms of its real existence. The fifth meaning is a society in general of a certain type (a special society or type of society), for example, a feudal society or an industrial society.
For the historian, the first three meanings of the term “society” are of particular importance. Socio-historical organisms are the original, elementary, primary subjects of the historical process, from which all the other, more complex subjects are formed - sociological systems of different levels. Each of the sociological systems of any hierarchical level was also a subject of the historical process. The highest, ultimate subject of the historical process is human society as a whole.
There are different classifications of socio-historical organisms (according to form of government, dominant religion, socio-economic system, dominant sector of the economy, etc.). But the most general classification is the division of sociohistorical organisms according to the method of their internal organization into two main types.
The first type is socio-historical organisms, which are unions of people that are organized according to the principle of personal membership, primarily kinship. Each such socior is inseparable from its personnel and is capable of moving from one territory to another without losing its identity. I will call such societies demosocial organisms (demosociors). They are characteristic of the pre-class era of human history. Examples include primitive communities and multi-communal organisms called tribes and chiefdoms.
The boundaries of organisms of the second type are the boundaries of the territory they occupy. Such formations are organized according to the territorial principle and are inseparable from the areas of the earth’s surface they occupy. As a result, the personnel of each such organism acts in relation to this organism as an independent special phenomenon - its population. I will call this kind of society geosocial organisms (geosociors). They are characteristic of a class society. They are usually called states or countries.
Since historical materialism did not have the concept of a socio-historical organism, it developed neither the concept of a regional system of sociohistorical organisms, nor the concept of human society as a whole as the totality of all existing and existing sociors. The last concept, although present in an implicit form (implicit), was not clearly distinguished from the concept of society in general.
The absence of the concept of a sociohistorical organism in the categorical apparatus of the Marxist theory of history inevitably interfered with the understanding of the category of socio-economic formation. It was impossible to truly understand the category of socio-economic formation without comparing it with the concept of a sociohistorical organism. Defining a formation as a society or as a stage of development of society, our specialists in historical materialism did not in any way reveal the meaning that they put into the word “society”; worse, they endlessly, without completely realizing it, moved from one meaning of this word to another, which inevitably gave rise to incredible confusion.
Each specific socio-economic formation represents a certain type of society, identified on the basis of socio-economic structure. This means that a specific socio-economic formation is nothing more than something common that is inherent in all socio-historical organisms that have a given socio-economic structure. The concept of a specific formation always captures, on the one hand, the fundamental identity of all sociohistorical organisms based on the same system of production relations, and on the other hand, a significant difference between specific societies with different socio-economic structures. Thus, the relationship between a sociohistorical organism belonging to one or another socio-economic formation and this formation itself is a relationship between the individual and the general.
The problem of the general and the separate is one of the most important problems of philosophy, and debates around it have been conducted throughout the history of this area of human knowledge. Since the Middle Ages, two main directions in solving this issue have been called nominalism and realism. According to the views of nominalists, in the objective world only the separate exists. There is either no general thing at all, or it exists only in consciousness, is a mental human construction.
Realists defended a different point of view. They believed that the general exists in reality, outside and independently of human consciousness and forms a special world, different from the sensory world of individual phenomena. This special world of the general is spiritual in nature, ideal and is primary in relation to the world of individual things.
There is a grain of truth in each of these two points of view, but both are wrong. For scientists, the existence of laws, patterns, essence, and necessity in the objective world is undeniable. And all this is common. The general, therefore, exists not only in consciousness, but also in the objective world, but only differently than the individual exists. And this otherness of the general being does not at all consist in the fact that it forms a special world opposed to the world of the individual. There is no special world in common. The general does not exist in itself, not independently, but only in the particular and through the particular. On the other hand, the individual does not exist without the general.
Thus, there are two different types of objective existence in the world: one type is independent existence, as the separate exists, and the second is existence only in the separate and through the separate, as the general exists. Unfortunately, in our philosophical language there are no terms to designate these two different forms of objective existence. Sometimes, however, they say that the individual exists as such, but the general, although actually existing, does not exist as such. In the future, I will designate independent existence as self-existence, as self-existence, and existence in another and through another as other-existence, or as other-existence.
In order to cognize the general (essence, law, etc.), you need to “extract” it from the individual, “cleanse” it from the individual, present it in a “pure” form, i.e. in such a way that it can exist only in thinking. The process of “extracting” the general from the individual, in which it actually exists, in which it is hidden, cannot be anything other than the process of creating a “pure” general. The form of existence of the “pure” general are concepts and their systems - hypotheses, concepts, theories, etc. In consciousness, the non-existent, the general appears as self-existent, as separate. But this self-existence is not real, but ideal. Here we have before us a separate thing, but not a real separate thing, but an ideal one.
After this excursion into the theory of knowledge, let us return to the problem of formation. Since each specific socio-economic formation is general, it can and always exists in the real world only in individual societies, sociohistorical organisms, and as their deep general basis, their internal essence and thereby their type.
The commonality between sociohistorical organisms belonging to the same socio-economic formation, of course, is not limited to their socio-economic structure. But what unites all these social organisms and determines their belonging to the same type, first of all, of course, is the presence in all of them of the same system of production relations. Everything else that makes them similar is derived from this fundamental commonality. That is why V.I. Lenin repeatedly defined a socio-economic formation as a set or system of certain production relations. However, at the same time, he never reduced it completely to a system of industrial relations. For him, a socio-economic formation has always been a type of society taken in the unity of all its aspects. He characterizes the system of production relations as a “skeleton” of a socio-economic formation, which is always clothed with “flesh and blood” of other social relations. But this “skeleton” always contains the entire essence of a particular socio-economic formation.
Since production relations are objective and material, then the entire system formed by them is correspondingly material. This means that it functions and develops according to its own laws, independent of the consciousness and will of people living in the system of these relations. These laws are the laws of the functioning and development of a socio-economic formation. The introduction of the concept of socio-economic formation, allowing for the first time to look at the evolution of society as a natural-historical process, made it possible to identify not only what is common between sociohistorical organisms, but at the same time what is repeated in their development.
All sociohistorical organisms belonging to the same formation, having as their basis the same system of production relations, must inevitably develop according to the same laws. No matter how different modern England and modern Spain, modern Italy and modern Japan may be from each other, they are all bourgeois sociohistorical organisms, and their development is determined by the action of the same laws - the laws of capitalism.
Different formations are based on qualitatively different systems of socio-economic relations. This means that different formations develop differently, according to different laws. Therefore, from this point of view, the most important task of social science is to study the laws of functioning and development of each of the socio-economic formations, i.e., to create a theory for each of them. In relation to capitalism, K. Marx tried to solve this problem.
The only way that can lead to the creation of a theory of any formation is to identify that essential, common thing that is manifested in the development of all sociohistorical organisms of a given type. It is quite clear that it is impossible to reveal what is common in phenomena without being distracted from the differences between them. It is possible to identify the internal objective necessity of any real process only by freeing it from the concrete historical form in which it manifested itself, only by presenting this process in a “pure” form, in a logical form, i.e., in the way in which it can exist only in theoretical consciousness.
If in historical reality a specific socio-economic formation exists only in sociohistorical organisms as their common basis, then in theory this internal essence of individual societies appears in its pure form, as something independently existing, namely as an ideal sociohistorical organism of a given type.
An example is Marx's Capital. This work examines the functioning and development of capitalist society, but not some specific, specific one - English, French, Italian, etc., but capitalist society in general. And the development of this ideal capitalism, a pure bourgeois socio-economic formation, is nothing more than a reproduction of the internal necessity, the objective pattern of evolution of each individual capitalist society. All other formations appear in theory as ideal social organisms.
It is quite clear that a specific socio-economic formation in its pure form, that is, as a special sociohistorical organism, can exist only in theory, but not in historical reality. In the latter, it exists in individual societies as their internal essence, their objective basis.
Each real concrete socio-economic formation is a type of society and thereby an objective common feature that is inherent in all sociohistorical organisms of a given type. Therefore, it may well be called a society, but in no case a real sociohistorical organism. It can act as a sociohistorical organism only in theory, but not in reality. Each specific socio-economic formation, being a certain type of society, is the same society of this type in general. The capitalist socio-economic formation is a capitalist type of society and at the same time a capitalist society in general.
Each specific formation is in a certain relationship not only to sociohistorical organisms of a given type, but to society in general, that is, that objective commonality that is inherent in all sociohistorical organisms, regardless of their type. In relation to sociohistorical organisms of a given type, each specific formation acts as a general one. In relation to society in general, a specific formation acts as a general of a lower level, that is, as special, as a specific variety of society in general, as a special society.
Speaking about the socio-economic formation, the authors of neither monographs nor textbooks have ever drawn a clear line between specific formations and formation in general. However, there is a difference, and it is significant. Each specific social formation represents not only a type of society, but also a society of this type in general, a special society (feudal society in general, capitalist society in general, etc.). The situation is completely different with the socio-economic formation in general. It is not a society in any sense of the word.
Our history-matchers never understood this. In all monographs and in all textbooks on historical materialism, the structure of the formation was always considered and its main elements were listed: base, superstructure, including social consciousness, etc. These people believed that if we highlight what is common to the primitive, slaveholding, feudal etc. societies, then the formation in general will appear before us. But in fact, in this case, what appears before us is not the formation in general, but society in general. Imagining that they were describing the structure of a formation in general, the historians in reality were drawing the structure of society in general, that is, they were talking about what was common to all sociohistorical organisms without exception.
Any specific socio-economic formation appears in two forms: 1) it is a specific type of society and 2) it is also a society in general of this type. Therefore, the concept of a specific formation is included in two different series of concepts. One row: 1) the concept of a sociohistorical organism as a separate specific society, 2) the concept of one or another specific formation as a society in general of a certain type, i.e., a special society, 3) the concept of society in general. Another series: 1) the concept of sociohistorical organisms as individual specific societies, 2) the concept of specific formations as different types of sociohistorical organisms of society, and 3) the concept of a socio-economic formation in general as a type of sociohistorical organisms in general.
The concept of a socio-economic formation in general, like the concept of society in general, reflects the general, but different from that which reflects the concept of society in general. The concept of society generally reflects what is common to all sociohistorical organisms, regardless of their type. The concept of a socio-economic formation generally reflects what is common to all specific socio-economic formations, regardless of their specific features, namely, that they are all types identified on the basis of socio-economic structure.
In all works and textbooks, when a formation was defined as a society, without indicating which formation we were talking about - a specific formation or a formation in general, it was never specified whether we were talking about a separate society or a society in general. And often both authors, and even more so readers, understood a formation as a separate society, which was completely absurd. And when some authors tried to take into account that a formation is a type of society, it often turned out even worse. Here is an example from one textbook: “Each society is... an integral organism, the so-called socio-economic formation, i.e. a certain historical type of society with its characteristic mode of production, base and superstructure.”
As a reaction to this kind of interpretation of socio-economic formations, a denial of their real existence arose. But it was not only due to the incredible confusion that existed in our literature on the issue of formations. The situation was more complicated. As already indicated, in theory, socio-economic formations exist as ideal sociohistorical organisms. Not finding such formations in historical reality, some of our historians, and after them some historians, came to the conclusion that formations in reality do not exist at all, that they are only logical, theoretical constructions.
They were unable to understand that socio-economic formations exist in historical reality, but differently than in theory, not as ideal sociohistorical organisms of one type or another, but as an objective commonality in real sociohistorical organisms of one type or another. For them, being was reduced only to self-existence. They, like all nominalists in general, did not take into account other beings, and socio-economic formations, as already indicated, do not have their own existence. They do not self-exist, but exist in other ways.
In this regard, one cannot help but say that the theory of formations can be accepted or rejected. But the socio-economic formations themselves cannot be ignored. Their existence, at least as certain types of society, is an undoubted fact.
3. The orthodox understanding of the change in socio-economic formations and its failure
In the theory of socio-economic formations of K. Marx, each formation acts as a society in general of a certain type and thereby as a pure, ideal socio-historical organism of a given type. This theory features primitive society in general, Asian society in general, pure ancient society, etc. Accordingly, the change of social formations appears in it as the transformation of an ideal socio-historical organism of one type into a pure socio-historical organism of another, higher type: ancient society in general into feudal society in general, pure feudal society into pure capitalist society, etc. In accordance with this, human society as a whole appears in theory as society in general - as one single pure socio-historical organism, the stages of development of which are societies in general of a certain type: pure primitive , pure Asian, pure ancient, pure feudal and pure capitalist.
But in historical reality, human society has never been one single socio-historical organism. It has always represented a huge variety of sociohistorical organisms. And specific socio-economic formations also never existed in historical reality as sociohistorical organisms. Each formation has always existed only as that fundamental commonality that is inherent in all socio-historical organisms, which have as their basis the same system of socio-economic relations.
And in itself there is nothing reprehensible in such a discrepancy between theory and reality. It always occurs in any science. After all, each of them takes the essence of phenomena in its pure form, and in this form the essence never exists in reality, because each of them considers necessity, regularity, law in its pure form, but pure laws do not exist in the world.
Therefore, the most important task in any science is what is commonly called the interpretation of theory. It consists in identifying how necessity, appearing in theory in its pure form, manifests itself in reality. When applied to the theory of formations, the question is how a scheme that claims to reproduce the objective necessity of the development of human society as a whole, that is, of all existing and existing socio-historical organisms, is realized in history. Does it represent an ideal development model? everyone socio-historical organism taken separately, or just all of them combined?
In our literature, the question is whether the Marxist scheme of change of socio-economic formations represents a mental reproduction of the evolution of each socio-historical organism, taken separately, or whether it expresses the internal objective logic of the development of only human society as a whole, but not the individual components of its sociors, was never presented in any clear form. This is largely due to the fact that in Marxist theory there was no concept of a socio-historical organism, and thereby the concept of a system of socio-historical organisms. Accordingly, it never made a sufficiently clear distinction between human society as a whole and society in general, did not analyze the difference between formation as it exists in theory and formation as it exists in reality, etc.
But if this question was not raised theoretically, in practice it was still resolved. In fact, it was believed that Marx’s scheme of development and change of socio-economic formations should have been realized in the evolution of each individual specific society, i.e., each socio-historical organism. As a result, world history was presented as a set of histories of many originally existing socio-historical organisms, each of which normally had to “go through” all socio-economic formations.
If not in all, then at least in some of Istmatov’s works, this view was expressed with utmost clarity. "TO. Marx and F. Engels, we read in one of them, while studying world history, came to the conclusion that with all the diversity of social development in all countries there is a general, necessary and recurring tendency: all countries go through the same events in their history. stages. The most common features of these stages are expressed in the concept of “socio-economic formation”. And further: “From this concept it follows that all peoples, regardless of the characteristics of their historical development, inevitably undergo basically the same formations.”
Thus, the change of socio-economic formations was thought of as occurring exclusively within socio-historical organisms. Accordingly, socio-economic formations acted primarily as stages of development not of human society as a whole, but of individual socio-historical organisms. The basis for considering them stages of world-historical development was given only by the fact that all, or at least the majority of socio-historical organisms “passed through” them.
Of course, researchers who consciously or unconsciously adhered to this understanding of history could not help but see that there were facts that did not fit into their ideas. But they paid attention mainly only to those of these facts that could be interpreted as a “missing” by one or another “people” of one or another socio-economic formation, and explained them as always a possible and even inevitable deviation from the norm caused by the confluence of events. certain specific historical circumstances.
The interpretation of the change of formations as a consistent change in the type of existing socio-historical organisms was to a certain extent in accordance with the facts of the history of Western Europe in modern times. The replacement of feudalism by capitalism took place here, as a rule, in the form of a qualitative transformation of existing socio-historical organisms. Qualitatively changing, turning from feudal to capitalist, socio-historical organisms at the same time remained as special units of historical development.
France, for example, having turned from feudal to bourgeois, continued to exist as France. The late feudal and bourgeois societies of France, despite all the differences between them, have one thing in common; they are successively changing stages of the evolution of the French geosocial organism. The same thing could be observed in England, Spain, and Portugal. However, with Germany and Italy the situation was different: even in the era of late feudalism, neither German nor Italian socio-historical organisms existed.
If we look at world history as it was before late feudalism, then all of it will appear, in any case, not as a process of stage-by-stage changes in a certain number of initially existing socio-historical organisms. World history was the process of the emergence, development and death of a huge variety of socio-historical organisms. The latter, thus, coexisted not only in space, next to each other. They arose and died, replaced each other, replaced each other, that is, they coexisted in time.
If in Western Europe XVI–XX centuries. While there was (and even then not always) a change in the types of socio-historical organisms while they themselves remained as special units of historical development, then, for example, the Ancient East was characterized by the exact opposite picture: the emergence and disappearance of socio-historical organisms without changing their type. The newly emerged socio-historical organisms were no different in type, i.e., formational affiliation, from the dead.
World history does not know of a single socio-historical organism that would have “passed through” not only all formations, but at least three of them. But we know many socio-historical organisms in the development of which there was no change of formations at all. They arose as socio-historical organisms of one specific type and disappeared without undergoing any changes in this regard. They arose, for example, as Asian and disappeared as Asian, appeared as ancient and died as ancient.
I have already noted that the absence in the Marxist theory of history of the concept of a socio-historical organism was a serious obstacle to any clear formulation of the problem of interpreting Marx’s scheme for the change of socio-economic formations. But at the same time, and to a significant extent, it prevented us from realizing the discrepancy that existed between the orthodox interpretation of this scheme and historical reality.
When it was tacitly accepted that all societies should normally “go through” all formations, it was never specified exactly what meaning was put into the word “society” in this context. It could be understood as a socio-historical organism, but it could also be a system of socio-historical organisms and, finally, the entire historical sequence of socio-historical organisms that replaced a given territory. It was this sequence that was most often meant when they tried to show that a given “country” had “passed through” all or almost all formations. And almost always it was this sequence that was meant when the words “regions”, “regions”, “zones” were used.
A means of consciously, and more often unconsciously, masking the discrepancy between the orthodox understanding of the change of formations and real history was also the use of the word “people”, and, of course, again without clarifying its meaning. For example, they said as a matter of course that all peoples, without the slightest exception, “passed through” the primitive communal formation. At the same time, at least such an undoubted fact was completely ignored that all modern ethnic communities (peoples) of Europe developed only in a class society.
But all these, most often unconscious, manipulations with the words “society”, “people”, “historical region”, etc. did not change the essence of the matter. And it consisted in the fact that the orthodox version of the change in socio-economic formations was undoubtedly in clear contradiction with historical facts.
It was all the above facts that gave the opponents of Marxism the basis for declaring the materialist understanding of history to be a purely speculative scheme, in striking contradiction with historical reality. Indeed, they believed that if socio-economic formations in the overwhelming majority of cases do not act as stages of development of socio-historical organisms, then they certainly cannot be stages of world-historical development.
The question arises whether the above understanding of the change in socio-economic formations was inherent in the founders of historical materialism themselves, or whether it arose later and was a coarsening, simplification or even distortion of their own views. There is no doubt that the classics of Marxism have statements that allow precisely this, and not any other interpretation.
“The general result that I arrived at,” wrote K. Marx in his famous preface “To the Critique of Political Economy,” containing an outline of the foundations of historical materialism, “and which then served as the guiding thread in my further research, can be briefly formulated as follows. In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - production relations that correspond to a certain stage of development of their productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond... At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing production relations, or - what is only the legal expression of the latter - with the property relations within which they have so far developed. From forms of development of productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution occurs more or less quickly in the entire enormous superstructure... Not a single social formation dies before all the productive forces for which it provides sufficient scope have developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence in the depths of the old society will mature.”
This statement by K. Marx can be understood in such a way that a change in social formations always occurs within society, and not only society in general, but each specific individual society. And he has a lot of statements like this. Outlining his views, V.I. Lenin wrote: “Each such system of production relations is, according to Marx’s theory, a special social organism that has special laws of its origin, functioning and transition to a higher form, transformation into another social organism.” Essentially, when speaking about social organisms, V.I. Lenin means not so much real socio-historical organisms, but socio-economic formations that actually exist in the minds of researchers as social organisms, but, of course, ideal ones. However, he does not specify this anywhere. And as a result, his statement can be understood in such a way that each specific society of a new type arises as a result of the transformation of the socio-historical organism of the previous formational type.
But along with statements similar to the one given above, K. Marx also has others. Thus, in a letter to the editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski, he objects to N.K. Mikhailovsky’s attempt to turn his “historical outline of the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical and philosophical theory about the universal path along which all peoples, no matter what their origin, are fatally doomed to go.” neither were the historical conditions in which they find themselves - in order to ultimately arrive at that economic formation that ensures, along with the greatest flowering of the productive forces of social labor, the most complete development of man.” But this idea was not specified by K. Marx, and it was practically not taken into account.
The diagram of the change of formations outlined by K. Marx in the preface to “A Critique of Political Economy” is to a certain extent consistent with what we know about the transition from primitive society to the first class society - Asian. But it doesn’t work at all when we try to understand how the second class formation arose - the ancient one. It was not at all the case that new productive forces had matured in the depths of Asian society, which became cramped within the framework of old production relations, and that as a consequence a social revolution took place, as a result of which Asian society turned into an ancient one. Nothing even remotely similar happened. No new productive forces arose in the depths of Asian society. Not a single Asian society, taken by itself, was transformed into an ancient one. Ancient societies appeared in territories where societies of the Asian type either never existed at all, or they had long since disappeared, and these new class societies arose from the pre-class societies that preceded them.
One of the first, if not the first, of the Marxists who tried to find a way out of the situation was G. V. Plekhanov. He came to the conclusion that Asian and ancient societies do not represent two successive phases of development, but two parallel existing types of society. Both of these options grew out of a primitive society to the same extent, and they owe their differences to the peculiarities of the geographical environment.
Soviet philosophers and historians for the most part took the path of denying the formational differences between ancient Eastern and ancient societies. As they argued, both ancient Eastern and ancient societies were equally slave-owning. The only difference between them was that some arose earlier and others later. In the ancient societies that arose somewhat later, slavery appeared in more developed forms than in the societies of the Ancient East. That's all, actually.
And those of our historians who did not want to put up with the position that ancient Eastern and ancient societies belonged to one formation, inevitably, most often without even realizing it, resurrected the idea of G.V. Plekhanov again and again. As they argued, two parallel and independent lines of development go from primitive society, one of which leads to Asian society, and the other to ancient society.
The situation was not much better with the application of Marx’s scheme of change of formations to the transition from ancient to feudal society. The last centuries of the existence of ancient society are characterized not by the rise of productive forces, but, on the contrary, by their continuous decline. This was fully recognized by F. Engels. “General impoverishment, the decline of trade, craft and art, population decline, desolation of cities, the return of agriculture to a lower level - this,” he wrote, “was the final result of Roman world domination.” As he repeatedly emphasized, ancient society had reached a “hopeless dead end.” Only the Germans opened the way out of this impasse, who, having crushed the Western Roman Empire, introduced a new mode of production - feudal. And they were able to do this because they were barbarians. But, having written all this, F. Engels did not in any way reconcile what was said with the theory of socio-economic formations.
An attempt to do this was made by some of our historians, who tried to comprehend the historical process in their own way. These were the same people who did not want to accept the thesis about the formational identity of ancient Eastern and ancient societies. They proceeded from the fact that the society of the Germans was undoubtedly barbaric, that is, pre-class, and that it was from this that feudalism grew. From here they concluded that from primitive society there are not two, but three equal lines of development, one of which leads to Asian society, the other to ancient society, and the third to feudal society. In order to somehow reconcile this view with Marxism, the position was put forward that Asian, ancient and feudal societies are not independent formations and, in any case, not successively changing stages of world-historical development, but equal modifications of one and the same the formation is secondary. This understanding was put forward at one time by sinologist L. S. Vasiliev and Egyptologist I. A. Stuchevsky.
The idea of one single pre-capitalist class formation has become widespread in our literature. It was developed and defended by both Africanist Yu. M. Kobishchanov and sinologist V. P. Ilyushechkin. The first called this single pre-capitalist class formation a large feudal formation, the second called it an estate-class society.
The idea of one pre-capitalist class formation was usually combined, either explicitly or implicitly, with the idea of multi-linear development. But these ideas could exist separately. Since all attempts to discover in the development of the countries of the East in the period from the 8th century. n. e. until the middle of the 19th century. n. e. ancient, feudal and capitalist stages ended in failure, a number of scientists came to the conclusion that in the case of the replacement of slavery by feudalism, and the latter by capitalism, we are not dealing with a general pattern, but only with a Western European line of evolution and that the development of mankind is not unilinear, but multilinear Of course, at that time all researchers who held similar views sought (some sincerely, and some not so much) to prove that the recognition of multilinear development was completely consistent with Marxism.
In reality, of course, this was, regardless of the desire and will of the supporters of such views, a departure from the view of human history as a single process, which constitutes the essence of the theory of socio-economic formations. It is not for nothing that L. S. Vasiliev, who at one time proved in every possible way that the recognition of multilinear development does not in the slightest degree diverge from the Marxist view of history, subsequently, when the forced imposition of historical materialism was finished, acted as an ardent opponent of the theory of social economic formations and the materialistic understanding of history in general.
The recognition of the multilinearity of historical development, which some Russian historians came to even during the time of the formally undivided dominance of Marxism, consistently carried out, inevitably leads to the denial of the unity of world history, to a pluralistic understanding of it.
But it is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that the seemingly purely unitarian understanding of history outlined above in fact also ultimately turns into multi-linearity and the actual denial of the unity of history. After all, in essence, world history, with this understanding, appears as a simple sum of parallel, completely independent processes of development of individual socio-historical organisms. The unity of world history is thus reduced only to the community of laws that determine the development of socio-historical organisms. Thus, we have before us many lines of development, but absolutely identical ones. This, in fact, is not so much unilinearity as multi-identical linearity.
Of course, there is a significant difference between such multilinearity and multilinearity in the usual sense. The first assumes that the development of all socio-historical organisms follows the same laws. The second admits that the development of different societies can proceed in completely different ways, that there are completely different lines of development. Multilinearity in the usual sense is multilinearity. The first understanding presupposes the progressive development of all individual societies, and thereby human society as a whole, the second excludes the progress of mankind.
True, with the progressive development of human society as a whole, supporters of the orthodox interpretation of the change of formations also had serious problems. After all, it was quite obvious that the change in stages of progressive development in different societies did not occur synchronously. Let's say, by the beginning of the 19th century. some societies were still primitive, others were pre-class, others were “Asian,” others were feudal, and others were already capitalist. The question arises, at what stage of historical development was human society as a whole at that time? And in a more general formulation, it was a question about the signs by which one could judge what stage of progress human society as a whole had reached over a given period of time. And the supporters of the orthodox version did not give any answer to this question. They completely bypassed him. Some of them did not notice him at all, while others tried not to notice him.
To summarize, we can say that a significant drawback of the orthodox version of the theory of socio-economic formations is that it focuses attention only on “vertical” connections, connections in time, diachronic, and even then understood extremely one-sidedly, only as connections between different stages of development within the same socio-historical organisms. As for “horizontal” connections, that is, connections between socio-historical organisms coexisting in space, synchronous, intersocioral connections, they were not given any importance in the theory of socio-economic formations. This approach made it impossible to understand the progressive development of human society as a single whole, the changing stages of this development on the scale of all humanity, i.e., a true understanding of the unity of world history, and closed the road to true historical unitarianism.
4. Linear-stage and plural-cyclic approaches to history
The Marxist theory of socio-economic formations is one of the varieties of a broader approach to history. It lies in looking at world history as one single process of progressive, upward development of humanity. This understanding of history presupposes the existence of stages in the development of humanity as a whole. The unitary-stage approach arose a long time ago. It found its embodiment, for example, in the division of human history into such stages as savagery, barbarism and civilization (A. Ferguson and others), as well as in the division of this history into hunting-gathering, pastoral (pastoral), agricultural and trading. industrial periods (A. Turgot, A. Smith, etc.). The same approach was expressed in the identification of first three and then four world-historical eras in the development of civilized humanity: ancient oriental, ancient, medieval and modern (L. Bruni, F. Biondo, K. Köhler, etc.).
The defect that I just spoke about was inherent not only in the orthodox version of the theory of socio-economic formations, but also in all the concepts mentioned above. This kind of version of the unitary-stage understanding of history should most accurately be called unitary-plural-stage. But this word is overly clumsy. Based on the fact that the words “linear” or “linear” are sometimes used to designate this view of history, I will call it linear-stadial. It is precisely this understanding of development that is practically most often meant when they talk about evolutionism in the historical and ethnological sciences.
As a peculiar reaction to this kind of unitary-stage understanding of history, a completely different general approach to history arose. Its essence is that humanity is divided into several completely autonomous formations, each of which has its own, absolutely independent history. Each of these historical formations arises, develops, and sooner or later inevitably dies. The dead formations are replaced by new ones that complete exactly the same development cycle.
Due to the fact that each such historical formation starts everything from the beginning, it cannot introduce anything fundamentally new into history. It follows that all such formations are completely equivalent, equivalent. None of them is either lower or higher than all the others in terms of development. Each of these formations develops, and for the time being even progressively, but humanity as a whole does not evolve, much less progress. There is an eternal rotation of many squirrel wheels.
It is not difficult to understand that according to such a point of view, there is neither human society as a whole, nor world history as a single process. Accordingly, there can be no talk about the stages of development of human society as a whole and, thereby, about the eras of world history. Therefore, this approach to history is pluralistic.
The pluralist understanding of history did not arise today. At its origins stand J. A. Gobino and G. Rückert. The main provisions of historical pluralism were quite clearly formulated by N. Ya. Danilevsky, taken to the extreme limit by O. Spengler, significantly softened by A. J. Toynbee and, finally, acquired caricatured forms in the works of L. N. Gumilyov. The named thinkers named the historical formations they identified differently: civilizations (J. A. Gobineau, A. J. Toynbee), cultural and historical individuals (G. Rückert), cultural and historical types (N. Ya. Danilevsky), cultures or great cultures (O. Spengler), ethnic groups and super-ethnic groups (L. N. Gumilyov). But this did not change the very essence of this understanding of history.
The own constructions of even the classics of the pluralistic cyclic approach (not to mention their many admirers and epigones) were not of particular scientific value. But the criticism they subjected to the linear-stage understanding of the historical process was valuable.
Before them, many thinkers in their philosophical and historical constructions proceeded from society in general, which acted for them as the only subject of history. Historical pluralists showed that humanity is actually divided into several largely independent entities, that there is not one, but several subjects of the historical process, and thus, without realizing it, they switched attention from society in general to human society as a whole.
To some extent, their work contributed to the awareness of the integrity of world history. All of them, as independent units of historical development, singled out not so much socio-historical organisms as their systems. And although they themselves were not involved in identifying connections between the socio-historical organisms that form one or another specific system, such a question inevitably arose. Even when they, like O. Spengler, insisted on the absence of connections between the selected units of history, it still made them think about the relationships between them and oriented toward identifying “horizontal” connections.
The works of historical pluralists not only drew attention to the connections between simultaneously existing individual societies and their systems, but also forced a new look at the “vertical” connections in history. It became clear that in no case can they be reduced to relations between stages of development within certain individual societies, that history is discrete not only in space, but also in time, that subjects of the historical process arise and disappear.
It became clear that sociohistorical organisms most often did not transform from societies of one type into societies of another, but simply ceased to exist. Socio-historical organisms coexisted not only in space, but also in time. And therefore, the question naturally arises about the nature of the connections between the disappeared societies and the societies that took their place.
At the same time, historians faced the problem of cycles in history with particular urgency. The sociohistorical organisms of the past actually went through periods of prosperity and decline in their development, and often died. And the question naturally arose about how compatible the existence of such cycles is with the idea of world history as a progressive, ascending process.
By now, the plural-cyclical approach to history (in our country it is usually called “civilizational”) has exhausted all its possibilities and has become a thing of the past. Attempts to revive it, which are now being undertaken in our science, cannot lead to anything other than embarrassment. This is clearly evidenced by the articles and speeches of our “civilizationists.” Essentially, they all represent a pouring from empty to empty.
But even that version of the unitary-stage understanding of history, which was called linear-stage, is in conflict with historical reality. And this contradiction was not overcome even in the most recent unitary-stage concepts (neo-evolutionism in ethnology and sociology, the concept of modernization and industrial and post-industrial society). All of them remain in principle linear-stage.
5. Relay-formation approach to world history
Currently, there is an urgent need for a new approach that would be unitary-stage, but at the same time take into account the entire complexity of the world-historical process, an approach that would not reduce the unity of history only to a community of laws, but would involve understanding it as a single the whole. The real unity of history is inseparable from its integrity.
Human society as a whole exists and develops not only in time, but also in space. And the new approach should take into account not only the chronology of world history, but also its geography. It necessarily presupposes historical mapping of the historical process. World history moves simultaneously in time and space. A new approach will have to capture this movement in both its temporal and spatial aspects.
And all this necessarily presupposes a deep study of not only “vertical”, temporal, diachronic connections, but also “horizontal”, spatial, synchronous connections. “Horizontal” connections are connections between simultaneously existing sociohistorical organisms. Such connections have always existed and exist, if not always between everyone, then at least between neighboring sociors. Regional systems of sociohistorical organisms have always existed and exist, and by now a worldwide system of them has emerged. The connections between sociors and their systems are manifested in their mutual influence on each other. This interaction is expressed in a variety of forms: raids, wars, trade, exchange of cultural achievements, etc.
One of the most important forms of intersocioral interaction consists in the influence of some sociohistorical organisms (or systems of sociohistorical organisms) on others, in which the latter are preserved as special units of historical development, but at the same time, under the influence of the former, they either undergo significant, long-lasting changes, or, conversely, , lose the ability to further develop. This is an intersocial induction that can occur in different ways.
It cannot be said that “horizontal” connections have not been studied at all. They were even the focus of attention of supporters of such trends in ethnology, archeology, sociology, history as diffusionism, migrationism, the concept of dependence (dependent development), and the world-system approach. But if the supporters of the linear-stage approach absolutized the “vertical” connections in history, neglecting the “horizontal” ones, then the proponents of a number of the above-mentioned trends, in contrast to them, absolutized the “horizontal” connections and paid clearly insufficient attention to the “vertical” ones. Therefore, neither one nor the other developed a picture of the development of world history that would correspond to historical reality.
The way out of the situation can only be in one thing: in creating an approach in which stadiality and intersocio induction would be synthesized. No general reasoning about stadiality can help in creating such a new approach. The basis should be a fairly clear stage typology of sociohistorical organisms. To date, only one of the existing stage typologies of society deserves attention - the historical-materialist one.
This does not mean that it should be accepted in the form in which it now exists in the works of both the founders of Marxism and their many followers. An important feature that K. Marx and F. Engels based the typology is the socio-economic structure of a sociohistorical organism. It is necessary to identify socio-economic types of sociohistorical organisms.
The founders of the materialist understanding of history identified only the main types of society, which were simultaneously stages of world-historical development. These types were called socio-economic formations. But besides these main types, there are also non-main socio-economic types, which I will call socio-economic paraformations (from the Greek. pair- near, nearby) and socio-economic proformations (from Lat. pro- instead of). All socio-economic formations are on the highway of world-historical development. The situation is more complicated with paraformations and proformations. But for us, in this case, the difference between socio-economic formations, paraformations and proformations is not significant. It is important that they all represent socio-economic types of sociohistorical organisms.
Starting from a certain point, the most important feature of world history was the uneven development of sociohistorical organisms and, accordingly, their systems. There was a time when all sociohistorical organisms belonged to one type. This is the era of early primitive society. Then some societies turned into late primitive ones, while the rest continued to maintain the same type. With the emergence of pre-class societies, societies of at least three different types began to exist simultaneously. With the transition to civilization, the first class sociohistorical organisms were added to several types of pre-class society, which belonged to the formation that K. Marx called Asian, and I prefer to call polytar (from the Greek. palitia- state). With the emergence of ancient society, class sociohistorical organisms of at least one more type arose.
I will not continue this series. The important conclusion is that throughout a significant part of world history, sociohistorical organisms of new and older types simultaneously existed. When applied to modern history, they often spoke about advanced countries and peoples and about backward, or backward, countries and peoples. In the 20th century the latter terms began to be seen as offensive and were replaced by others - “underdeveloped” and, finally, “developing” countries.
We need concepts that are suitable for all eras. I will call sociohistorical organisms of the most advanced type for a particular era superior (from lat. super- above, above), and all the rest - inferior (from lat. infra- under). Of course, the difference between the two is relative. Sociors who were superior in one era may become inferior in another. Many (but not all) inferior organisms belong to types that were on the main line of world-historical development, but whose time has passed. With the advent of the higher mainline type, they turned into extra-mainline ones.
Just as superior sociohistorical organisms can influence inferior ones, so the latter can influence the former. The process of influence of some sociors on others, which has significant consequences for their destinies, has already been called above intersocio induction. In this case, we are primarily interested in the impact of superior sociohistorical organisms on inferior ones. I deliberately use the word “organism” here in the plural, because inferior organisms are usually influenced not by a single superior socior, but by their entire system. I will call the influence of superior organisms and their systems on inferior organisms and their systems superinduction.
Superinduction may result in the improvement of the inferior organism. In this case, this impact can be called progression. In case of the opposite result, we can talk about regression. This impact may result in stagnation. This is stagnation. And finally, the result of superinduction can be partial or complete destruction of the inferior socior - deconstruction. Most often, the process of superinduction includes all three first moments, usually with a predominance of one of them.
The concepts of superinduction were created only in our time and in relation only to modern and recent history. These are some concepts of modernization (Europeanization, Westernization), as well as the theory of dependent development and world-systems. In the concepts of modernization, progress comes to the fore, in the concepts of dependent development - stagnation. The classical world-system approach tried to reveal the complexity of the superinduction process. A unique assessment of modern superinduction is given in the concept of Eurasianism and in modern Islamic fundamentalism. In them, this process is characterized as regression or even deconstruction.
In application to more distant times, no developed concepts of superinduction were created. But this process was noticed by diffusionists and absolutized by hyperdiffusionists. Supporters of panegyptism painted a picture of the “Egyptianization” of the world, while advocates of pan-Babylonism painted a picture of its “Babylonization.” Historians who stuck to facts did not create such concepts. But they could not help but notice the processes of superinduction. And if they did not develop special concepts of superinduction, then they introduced terms to designate specific processes of this kind that took place in certain epochs. These are the terms “Orientalization” (in relation to archaic Greece and early Etruria), “Hellenization”, “Romanization”.
As a result of progression, the type of inferior organism may change. In some cases, it can turn into a sociohistorical organism of the same type as those influencing it, that is, rise to a higher stage of main development. This process of “pulling up” inferior organisms to the level of superior ones can be called superiorization. Modernization concepts have in mind precisely this option. Societies that are lagging behind in their development (traditional, agrarian, pre-modern) are turning into capitalist (industrial, modern).
However, this is not the only possibility. The other is that under the influence of superior sociors, inferior sociors can turn into sociohistorical organisms of a higher type than the original one, but this stage type does not lie on the main road, but on one of the side paths of historical development. This type is not main, but lateral (from lat. lateralis– lateral). I will call this process lateralization. Naturally, lateral types are not socio-economic formations, but paraformations.
If we take into account superiorization, then the process of world history can be depicted as one in which a group of sociohistorical organisms develops, rises from one stage of development to another, higher one, and then “pulls up” the remaining sociors who are lagging behind in their development to the levels it has achieved. There is an eternal center and an eternal periphery: But this does not solve the problem.
As already indicated, there is not a single sociohistorical organism in the development of which more than two formations have occurred. And there are many sociors within which a change of formations did not take place at all.
It can be assumed that when a group of superior organisms “pulled up” a certain number of inferior organisms to their level, the latter, in their subsequent development, were able to independently rise to a new, higher stage of development, while the former were unable to do this and thereby fell behind. Now the former inferior organisms have become superior, and the former superior organisms have become inferior. In this case, the center of historical development moves, the former periphery becomes the center, and the former center turns into the periphery. With this option, a kind of transfer of the historical baton occurs from one group of sociohistorical organisms to another.
All this brings the picture of the world historical process closer to historical reality. The fact that in the development of not a single sociohistorical organism there was a change in more than two formations does not in the least prevent the change of any number of them in the history of mankind as a whole. However, in this version, the change of socio-economic formations is conceived as occurring primarily within sociohistorical organisms. But in real history this is not always the case. Therefore, this concept does not provide a complete solution to the problem.
But besides those discussed above, there is another development option. And with it, the system of superior sociohistorical organisms influences the inferior sociors. But these latter, as a result of such influence, undergo more than a peculiar transformation. They do not transform into the same type of organisms as those affecting them. Superiorization does not occur.
But the type of inferior organisms changes. Inferior organisms turn into sociors of a type that, if approached purely externally, should be classified as lateral. This type of society is indeed not a formation, but a paraformation. But this society, which arose as a result of progressivization, i.e., progressed, turns out to be capable of further independent progress, and of a special kind. As a result of the action of purely internal forces, this progressed society is transformed into a society of a new type. And this type of society is undoubtedly already on the highway of historical development. It represents a higher stage of social development, a higher socio-economic formation than that to which the superior sociohistorical organisms belonged, the influence of which served as the impetus for such development. This phenomenon can be called ultrasuperiorization.
If, as a result of superiorization, inferior sociohistorical organisms are “pulled up” to the level of superior sociors, then as a result of ultrasuperiorization they “jump over” this level and reach an even higher level. A group of sociohistorical organisms appears that belong to a socio-economic formation higher than that to which the previously superior sociors belonged. Now the former become superior, main, and the latter turn into inferior, exmagistral. There is a change in socio-economic formations, and it occurs not within one or another sociohistorical organism, but on the scale of human society as a whole.
It can be said that at the same time, a change in types of society also occurred within sociohistorical organisms. Indeed, within the inferior sociohistorical organisms there was a change from one socio-economic type of society to another, and then to another. But none of the sociors that replaced within these was the formation that previously dominated, which was previously supreme. The replacement of this previously dominant formation with a new one, to which the leading role has now passed, did not occur within one sociohistorical organism. It occurred only on the scale of human society as a whole.
With such a change in socio-economic formations, we are faced with a genuine transfer of the historical baton from one group of sociohistorical organisms to another. The latest sociors do not go through the stage at which the first ones were, and do not repeat their movement. Entering the highway of human history, they immediately begin to move from the place where the previously superior sociohistorical organisms stopped. Ultrasuperiorization occurs when existing superior sociohistorical organisms themselves are not capable of transforming into organisms of a higher type.
An example of ultrasuperiorization is the emergence of ancient society. Its appearance was completely impossible without the influence of Middle Eastern sociohistorical organisms on the previously pre-class Greek sociohistorical organisms. This progressive influence has long been noticed by historians, who called this process Orientalization. But as a result of Orientalization, the pre-class Greek sociors did not become political societies like those that existed in the Middle East. From pre-class Greek society arose first archaic Greece and then classical Greece.
But in addition to what was discussed above, history also knows one more type of ultrasuperiorization. It took place when geosocial organisms collided, on the one hand, and demosocial ones, on the other. There can be no question of joining the demosocior to the geosocior. It is only possible to annex to the territory of the geosocior the territory in which the demosocior lives. In this case, the demosocior, if it continues to remain in this territory, is included, introduced into the geosocior, continuing to survive as a special society. This is demosocior introduction (lat. introduction– introduction). It is possible for both penetration and settlement of demosocior people on the territory of geosocior - demosocior infiltration (from lat. in– at and wed. lat. filtratio- straining). In both cases, only subsequently, and not always and not soon, does the destruction of the demosocior and the direct entry of its members into the geosocior occur. This is geosocior assimilation, also known as demosocior annihilation.
Of particular interest is the invasion of demosociors into the territory of geosociors with the subsequent establishment of their dominance over it. This is democior intervention, or democior intrusion (from lat. intrusus– pushed). In this case, there is an overlap of demosocior organisms with geosocior organisms, the coexistence of two different types of sociors on the same territory. A situation is created when, on the same territory, some people live in a system of one social relations (primarily socio-economic), while others live in a system of completely different ones. This cannot last too long. Further development follows one of three options.
The first option: demosociors are destroyed, and their members become part of the geosocior, i.e. geosocior assimilation, or demosocior annihilation, occurs. The second option: the geosocior is destroyed, and the people who composed it become members of demosocior organisms. This is demosocior assimilation, or geosocior annihilation.
In the third option, there is a synthesis of geosocior and demosocior socio-economic and other social structures. As a result of this synthesis, a new type of society emerges. This type of society is different from both the type of the original geosocior and the type of the original demosocior. Such a society may be capable of independent internal development, as a result of which it rises to a higher stage of mainstream development than the original superior geosocial organism. As a consequence of such ultrasuperiorization, there will be a change in socio-economic formations on the scale of human society as a whole. And again this happens when the original superior organism is not able to transform into a society of a higher type. This process took place during the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Historians talk about the Romano-Germanic synthesis.
Ultrasuperiorization in both of its variants is the process of passing the baton on the historical highway from superior sociohistorical organisms of the old type to superior sociohistorical organisms of the new, higher type. The discovery of ultrasuperiorization makes it possible to create a new version of the unitary-stage understanding of world history, which can be called unitary-relay-stage, or simply relay-stage.
Let me remind you that in application to the theory of socio-economic formations, the question was posed: does the scheme of change of formations represent an ideal model of the development of each socio-historical organism taken separately, or does it express the internal need for the development of only all of them together, i.e. .i.e. only the entire human society as a whole? As has already been shown, almost all Marxists were inclined to the first answer, which made the theory of socio-economic formations one of the options for a linear-stage understanding of history.
But the second answer is also possible. In this case, socio-economic formations act primarily as stages of development of human society as a whole. They can also be stages of development of individual socio-historical organisms. But this is optional. The linear-stage understanding of the change in socio-economic formations is in conflict with historical reality. But besides this, something else is possible - relay-stage.
Of course, the relay-formation understanding of history is only emerging now. But the idea of a historical relay race and even the relay-stage approach to world history arose quite a long time ago, although they never enjoyed wide recognition. This approach arose from the need to combine the ideas of the unity of humanity and the progressive nature of its history with facts indicating the division of humanity into separate entities that arise, flourish and die.
This approach first arose in the works of French thinkers of the 16th century. J. Bodin and L. Leroy. In the 17th century it was adhered to by the Englishman J. Hakewill in the 18th century. – Germans I. G. Herder and I. Kant, Frenchman K. F. Volney. This approach to history was deeply developed in G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and in the first half of the 19th century. was developed in the works of such Russian thinkers as P. Ya. Chaadaev, I. V. Kireevsky, V. F. Odoevsky, A. S. Khomyakov, A. I. Herzen, P. L. Lavrov. After this he was almost completely forgotten.
Now the time has come to revive it on a new basis. A new version of the relay-stage approach is a relay-formational understanding of world history. This is a modern form of the theory of socio-economic formations, corresponding to the current level of development of historical, ethnological, sociological and other social sciences.
There is only one way to prove the correctness of this approach to world history: to draw, guided by it, such a holistic picture of world history that would be in greater accordance with the facts accumulated by historical science than all currently existing ones. I have made such an attempt in a number of works, to which I refer the reader 24
The concept of socio-economic formation(economic society) can be formulated on the basis of studying specific types of such a formation: ancient and capitalist. Marx, Weber (the role of Protestant ethics in the development of capitalism) and other scientists played a major role in understanding these.
The socio-economic formation includes: 1) demosocial community of market-mass consumption ( original system); 2) a dynamically developing market economy, economic exploitation, etc. ( basic system); 3) democratic rule of law, political parties, church, art, free media, etc. ( auxiliary system). The socio-economic formation is characterized by purposeful and rational activity, the prevalence of economic interests, and a focus on profit.
The concept of private property and Roman law distinguish Western (market) societies from Eastern (planned) societies, which do not have the institution of private property, private law, or democracy. A democratic (market) state expresses the interests primarily of the market classes. Its foundation is formed by free citizens who have equal political, military and other rights and responsibilities and control power through elections and municipal self-government.
Democratic law acts as a legal form of private property and market relations. Without support from private law and power, the market basis cannot function. The Protestant Church, unlike the Orthodox Church, becomes the mental basis of the capitalist mode of production. This was shown by M. Weber in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Bourgeois art comprehends and imagines bourgeois existence in its works.
The private life of citizens of an economic society is organized into a civil community that opposes the socio-economic formation as an institutional system organized on a market basis. This community is partly included in the auxiliary, basic and demosocial subsystems of economic society, representing in this sense a hierarchical formation. The concept of civil society (community) appeared in the 17th century in the works of Hobbes and Locke, and was developed in the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Vico, Kant, Hegel and other thinkers. It got the name civil Unlike class society subjects under feudalism. Marx considered civil society together with bourgeois state, as part of the superstructure, and the revolutionary proletariat considered both bourgeois civil society and the liberal state to be the gravedigger. Instead, communist self-government should appear.
Thus, the concept of socio-economic formation is a synthesis of Spencer's industrial society, Marx's socio-economic formation and Parsons' social system. It is more adequate to the laws of development of living nature, based on competition, than political, based on monopoly. In social competition, the victory is won by a free, intellectual, enterprising, organized, self-developing community, for which the dialectical negation of traditionality for the sake of modernity, and modernity for the sake of post-modernity, is organic.
Types of socio-economic formations
The socio-economic formation is known in the form of (1) ancient, agrarian-market (Ancient Greece and Rome) and (2) capitalist (industrial-market). The second social formation arose from the remnants of the first in feudal Europe.
The ancient formation (1) arose later than the Asian one, around the 8th century BC. e.; (2) from some primitive communal societies living in favorable geographical conditions; (3) influenced by Asian societies; (4) as well as the technical revolution, the invention of iron tools and war. New tools became the reason for the transition of the primitive communal formation into the ancient one only where there were favorable geographical, demographic and subjective (mental, intellectual) conditions. Such conditions developed in ancient Greece, and then in Rome.
As a result of these processes, arose ancient community free private landowner families, significantly different from the Asian one. Ancient city policies appeared - states in which the veche assembly and elected government constituted the two poles of the ancient democratic state. A sign of the emergence of such societies can be considered the appearance of coins at the turn of the 8th-7th centuries BC. e. Ancient societies were surrounded by many primitive communal and Asian societies, with which they had complex relationships.
In the Greek policies there was an increase in population, the withdrawal of excess population to the colonies, and the development of trade, which transformed the family economy into a commodity-money economy. Trade quickly became the leading sector of the Greek economy. The social class of private producers and traders became the leading one; his interests began to determine the development of ancient policies. There was a decline in the ancient aristocracy, based on the clan system. The excess population was not only sent to the colonies, but also recruited into the standing army (as, for example, Philip, the father of Alexander the Great). The army became the leading instrument of “production” - the robbery of slaves, money and goods. The primitive communal system of Ancient Greece turned into an ancient (economic) formation.
The original the system of the ancient system was made up of families of free Greek or Italian community members who could feed themselves in favorable geographical conditions (sea, climate, land). They satisfied their needs through their own farming and commodity exchange with other families and communities. The ancient demosocial community consisted of slave owners, free community members and slaves.
Basic The system of the ancient formation consisted of a privately owned economy, the unity of productive forces (land, tools, livestock, slaves, free community members) and market (commodity) relations. In Asian formations, the market group encountered resistance from other social and institutional groups when it became rich because it encroached on the power hierarchy. In European societies, due to a random combination of circumstances, the trade and craft class, and then the bourgeoisie, imposed their own type of purposeful, rational market activity as the basis for the entire society. Already in the 16th century, European society became capitalist in type of economy.
Auxiliary the system of ancient society consisted of: a democratic state (ruling elite, branches of government, bureaucracy, law, etc.), political parties, community self-government; religion (priests), which affirmed the divine origin of ancient society; ancient art (songs, dances, painting, music, literature, architecture, etc.), which substantiated and elevated ancient civilization.
Ancient society was civil, representing a set of demosocial, economic, political and religious amateur organizations of citizens in all systems of the social system. They had freedom of speech, access to information, the right of free exit and entry and other civil rights. Civil society is evidence of individual liberation, something the traditional East is not familiar with. It opened up additional opportunities for unleashing the energy, initiative, and entrepreneurship of individuals, which significantly affected the quality of the demographic sphere of society: it was formed by the economic classes of the rich, wealthy, and poor. The struggle between them became the source of the development of this society.
The dialectics of the initial, basic and auxiliary systems of the ancient formation determined its development. The increase in the production of material goods led to an increase in the number of people. The development of the market basis affected the growth of wealth and its distribution between social classes. Political, legal, religious, artistic spheres of the socio-economic formation ensured the maintenance of order, legal regulation of the activities of owners and citizens, and ideologically justified the commodity economy. Due to its independence, it influenced the basis of commodity society, inhibiting or accelerating its development. The Reformation in Europe, for example, created new religious and moral motives for work and the ethics of Protestantism, from which modern capitalism grew.
In a feudal (mixed) society, the foundations of a liberal-capitalist system gradually emerge from the remnants of antiquity. A liberal-capitalist worldview and the spirit of the bourgeoisie appear: rationality, professional duty, the desire for wealth and other elements of Protestant ethics. Max Weber criticized the economic materialism of Marx, who considered the consciousness of the bourgeois superstructure above the spontaneously formed market-economic basis. According to Weber, first appear single bourgeois adventurers and capitalist farms influencing other entrepreneurs. Then they become massive in the economic system and form capitalists from non-capitalists. Simultaneously An individualistic Protestant civilization emerges in the form of its individual representatives, institutions, and way of life. It also becomes the source of market-economic and democratic systems of society.
Liberal-capitalist (civil) society arose in the 18th century. Weber, following Marx, argued that it appeared as a result of a combination of a number of factors: experimental science, rational bourgeois capitalism, modern government, rational legal and administrative systems, modern art, etc. As a result of the combination of these social systems, capitalist society does not know itself equal in adaptation to the external environment.
The capitalist formation includes the following systems.
Original the system is formed by: favorable geographical conditions, colonial empires; the material needs of the bourgeoisie, peasants, workers; inequality of demo-social consumption, the beginning of the formation of a mass consumption society.
Basic the system is formed by the capitalist mode of social production, which is the unity of capitalist productive forces (capitalists, workers, machines) and capitalist economic relations (money, credit, bills, banks, world competition and trade).
Auxiliary The system of capitalist society is formed by a democratic legal state, a multi-party system, universal education, free art, church, media, science. This system determines the interests of capitalist society, justifies its existence, comprehends its essence and development prospects, and educates the people necessary for it.
Features of socio-economic formations
The European path of development includes the following: primitive communal, ancient, feudal, capitalist (liberal-capitalist), bourgeois socialist (social democratic). The last of them is convergent (mixed).
Economic societies differ: high efficiency (productivity) of the market economy, resource conservation; the ability to satisfy the growing needs of people, production, science, education; rapid adaptation to changing natural and social conditions.
A process of transformation has taken place in socio-economic formations informal values and norms characteristic of a traditional (agrarian) society, in formal. This is the process of transforming a status society, where people were bound by many informal values and norms, into a contract society, where people are bound by a contract for the duration of the realization of their interests.
Economic societies are characterized by: economic, political and spiritual inequality of classes; exploitation of workers, colonial peoples, women, etc.; economic crises; formational evolution; competition due to markets and raw materials; possibility of further transformation.
In economic society, the civil community assumes the function of expressing and protecting the interests and rights of citizens before a democratic, legal, social state, forming a dialectical opposition with the latter. This community includes numerous voluntary non-governmental organizations: a multi-party system, independent media, socio-political organizations (trade unions, sports, etc.). Unlike the state, which is a hierarchical institution and based on orders, civil society has a horizontal structure, based on conscious voluntary self-discipline.
The economic system is based on a higher level of people's consciousness than the political one. Its participants act primarily individually, rather than collectively, based on personal interests. Their collective (joint) action is more consistent with their common interests than what occurs as a result of centralized government intervention (in political society). Participants in a socio-economic formation proceed from the following position (I have already quoted): “Many of his greatest achievements are due not to conscious aspirations and, especially not to the deliberately coordinated efforts of many, but to the process in which the individual plays a role that is not entirely comprehensible to himself. role". They are moderate in rationalistic pride.
In the 19th century In Western Europe, a deep crisis of liberal capitalist society arose, which was severely criticized by K. Marx and F. Engels in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In the 20th century it led to the “proletarian-socialist” (Bolshevik) revolution in Russia, the fascist one in Italy and the national socialist one in Germany. As a result of these revolutions, there was a revival of the political, Asian type of society in its Soviet, Nazi, fascist and other totalitarian forms.
In World War II, Nazi and fascist societies were destroyed. The union of Soviet totalitarian and Western democratic societies won. Then Soviet society was defeated by Western society in the Cold War. In Russia, the process of creating a new state-capitalist (mixed) formation has begun.
A number of scientists consider societies of the liberal-capitalist formation to be the most advanced. Fukuyama writes: “All modernizing countries, from Spain and Portugal to the Soviet Union, China, Taiwan and South Korea, have moved in this direction.” But Europe, in my opinion, has gone much further.
The theory of socio-economic formations is the cornerstone of the materialist understanding of history. As secondary basic relations in this theory, material relations are used, and within them, first of all, economic and production ones. All the diversity of societies, despite the obvious differences between them, belong to the same stage of historical development if they have the same type of production relations as their economic basis. As a result, all the diversity and multitude of social systems in history were reduced to several basic types, these types were called “socio-economic formations.” Marx in “Capital” analyzed the laws of formation and development of the capitalist formation, showed its historically coming nature, the inevitability of a new formation - communist. The term “formation” was taken from geology; in geology, “formation” means the stratification of geological deposits of a certain period. In Marx, the terms “formation”, “socio-economic formation”, “economic formation”, “social formation” are used in an identical sense. Lenin characterized the formation as a single, integral social organism. A formation is not an aggregate of individuals, not a mechanical collection of disparate social phenomena, it is an integral social system, each component of which should not be considered in isolation, but in connection with other social phenomena, with the entire society as a whole.
At the foundation of each formation lie certain productive forces (i.e. objects of labor, means of production and labor), their nature and level. As for the basis of the formation, these are relations of production; these are the relationships that develop between people in the process of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods. In a class society, economic relations between classes become the essence and core of production relations. The entire building of the formation grows on this basis.
The following elements of the formation as an integral living organism can be distinguished:
The relations of production determine the superstructure that rises above them. The superstructure is the totality of political, legal, moral, artistic, philosophical, religious views of society and the corresponding relations and institutions. In relation to the superstructure, production relations act as an economic basis; the main law of formational development is the law of interaction between the base and the superstructure. This law determines the role of the entire system of economic relations, the main influence of ownership of the means of production in relation to political and legal ideas, institutions, social relations (ideological, moral, religious, spiritual). There is a total interdependence between the base and the superstructure: the base is always primary, the superstructure is secondary, but in turn it affects the base, it develops relatively independently. According to Marx, the influence of the base on the superstructure is not fatal, not mechanistic, and not unambiguous under different conditions. The superstructure encourages the base to develop it.
The composition of the formation includes ethnic forms of community of people (clan, tribe, nationality, nation). These forms are determined by the method of production, the nature of production relations and the stage of development of the productive forces.
And finally, this is the type and form of family.
They are also predetermined at every stage by both sides of the mode of production.
An important question is the question of patterns, general trends in the development of a specific historical society. Formation theorists believe:
- 1. That formations develop independently.
- 2. There is continuity in their development, continuity based on the technical and technological basis and property relations.
- 3. The pattern is the completeness of the development of the formation. Marx believed that not one formation dies before all the productive forces for which it provides enough scope are destroyed.
- 4. The movement and development of formations is carried out stepwise from a less perfect state to a more perfect one.
- 5. Countries of a high formation level play a leading role in development; they influence less developed ones.
Usually the following types of socio-economic formations are distinguished: primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist and communist (includes two phases - socialism and communism).
To characterize and compare different types of socio-economic formations, we will analyze them from the point of view of types of production relations. Dovgel E.S. distinguishes two fundamentally different types:
- 1) those in which people are forced to work by force or economically, while the results of labor are alienated from them;
- 2) those in which people work of their own free will, interestedly and reasonably participate in the distribution of the results of labor.
The distribution of the social product under slaveholding, feudal and capitalist relations is carried out according to the first type, under socialist and communist relations - according to the second type. (In primitive communal social relations, distribution is carried out unsystematically and it is difficult to single out any type). At the same time, Dovgel E.S. believes that both “capitalists” and “communists” have to admit: capitalism in economically developed countries today is just traditional words and “tablets in the brains”, as a tribute to an irrevocably past History, in essence, social-production relations of high levels of development (socialist and communist) are already very common in countries with the highest level of efficiency in production and people’s lives (USA, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Canada, France, Japan, etc.). In the case of the USSR, the definition of a country as socialist was applied unreasonably. Dovgel E.S. Theory of socio-economic formations and convergence of ideologies in economics. “Organization and Management”, international scientific and practical journal, 2002, No. 3, p. 145. The author of this work agrees with this position.
Among the main disadvantages of the formational approach are the underestimation of the ability of capitalist society to change independently, the underestimation of the “developability” of the capitalist system, this is Marx’s underestimation of the uniqueness of capitalism in a number of socio-economic formations. Marx creates a theory of formations, considering them as stages of social development, and in the preface “To the Critique of Political Economy” he writes “The prehistory of human society ends with the bourgeois economic formation.” Marx established an objective interdependence between the level of development and the state of society, the change in the types of its economic argumentation, he showed world history as a dialectical change of social structures, he sort of streamlined the course of world history. This was a discovery in the history of human civilization. The transition from one formation to another took place through revolution; the disadvantage of the Marxist scheme is the idea of the same type of historical destinies of capitalism and pre-capitalist formations. Both Marx and Engels, fully aware and repeatedly revealing the deepest qualitative differences between capitalism and feudalism, with amazing consistency, emphasize the uniformity, uniformity of the capitalist and feudal formations, their subordination to the same general historical law. They pointed to contradictions of the same type between productive forces and production relations, here and there they recorded the inability to cope with them, here and there they recorded death as a form of society’s transition to another, higher stage of development. Marx’s change of formations resembles the change of human generations; more than one generation is not given the opportunity to live two life spans, so formations come, flourish, and die. This dialectic does not concern communism; it belongs to a different historical era. Marx and Engels did not allow the idea that capitalism could discover fundamentally new ways of resolving its contradictions, could choose a completely new form of historical movement.
None of the named main theoretical points underlying the theory of formations is now indisputable. The theory of socio-economic formations is not only based on the theoretical conclusions of the mid-19th century, but because of this cannot explain many of the contradictions that have arisen: the existence, along with zones of progressive (ascending) development, of zones of backwardness, stagnation and dead ends; the transformation of the state in one form or another into an important factor in social relations of production; modification and modification of classes; the emergence of a new hierarchy of values with the priority of universal values over class values.
In conclusion of the analysis of the theory of socio-economic formations, it should be noted: Marx did not claim that his theory would be made global, to which the entire development of society on the entire planet is subject. The “globalization” of his views occurred later, thanks to the interpreters of Marxism.
The shortcomings identified in the formational approach are taken into account to some extent by the civilizational approach. It was developed in the works of N. Ya. Danilevsky, O. Spengler, and later A. Toynbee. They put forward the idea of a civilizational structure of social life. According to their ideas, the basis of social life is made up of “cultural-historical types” (Danilevsky) or “civilizations” (Spengler, Toynbee), more or less isolated from each other, going through a number of successive stages in their development: origin, flourishing, aging, decline.
All these concepts are characterized by such features as: rejection of the Eurocentric, unilinear scheme of social progress; conclusion about the existence of many cultures and civilizations, which are characterized by locality and different quality; a statement about the equal importance of all cultures in the historical process. The civilizational approach helps to see history without discarding certain options as not meeting the criteria of any one culture. But the civilizational approach to understanding the historical process is not without some shortcomings. In particular, it does not take into account the connection between different civilizations and does not explain the phenomenon of repetition.
Socio-economic formation- according to the Marxist concept of the historical process, society is at a certain stage of historical development, characterized by the level of development of the productive forces and the historical type of economic relations of production. Each socio-economic formation is based on a certain method of production (basis), and production relations form its essence. The system of production relations that forms the economic basis of the formation corresponds to a political, legal and ideological superstructure. The structure of the formation includes not only economic, but also social relations, as well as forms of life, family, and lifestyle. The reason for the transition from one stage of social development to another is the discrepancy between the increased productive forces and the remaining type of production relations. According to Marxist teaching, humanity in the course of its development must go through the following stages: primitive communal system, slave system, feudalism, capitalism, communism.
The primitive communal system in Marxism is considered as the first non-antagonistic socio-economic formation through which all peoples without exception passed. As a result of the decomposition of the primitive communal system, a transition to class, antagonistic socio-economic formations took place. Early class formations include the slave system and feudalism, while many peoples moved from the primitive communal system directly to feudalism, bypassing the stage of slavery. Pointing to this phenomenon, Marxists substantiated for some countries the possibility of a transition from feudalism to socialism, bypassing the stage of capitalism. Karl Marx himself, among the early class formations, singled out a special Asian mode of production and a corresponding formation. The question of the Asian mode of production remained controversial in philosophical and historical literature, without receiving a clear solution. Capitalism was considered by Marx as the last antagonistic form of the social process of production; it was to be replaced by a non-antagonistic communist formation.
The change in socio-economic formations is explained by the contradictions between new productive forces and outdated production relations, which are transformed from forms of development into fetters of productive forces. The transition from one formation to another takes place in the form of a social revolution, which resolves the contradictions between productive forces and production relations, as well as between the base and the superstructure. Marxism pointed to the presence of transitional forms from one formation to another. Transitional states of society are usually characterized by the presence of various socio-economic structures that do not cover the economy and everyday life as a whole. These structures can represent both the remnants of the old and the embryos of a new socio-economic formation. The diversity of historical development is associated with the uneven pace of historical development: some peoples rapidly progressed in their development, others lagged behind. The interaction between them was of a different nature: it accelerated or, conversely, slowed down the course of historical development of individual peoples.
The collapse of the world system of socialism at the end of the 20th century and disappointment in communist ideas led to a critical attitude of researchers towards the Marxist formational scheme. Nevertheless, the idea of identifying stages in the world historical process is recognized as sound. In historical science and in teaching history, the concepts of primitive communal system, slave system, feudalism and capitalism are actively used. Along with this, the theory of stages of economic growth developed by W. Rostow and O. Toffler has found wide application: agrarian society (traditional society) - industrial society (consumer society) - post-industrial society (information society).
One of the ways to study society is the formational path.
Formation is a word of Latin origin, meaning “formation, form.” What is a formation? What types of formations are there? What are their features?
Formation
Formation is a society at a certain stage of historical development, main criterion which is the development of the economy, the method of production of material goods, the level of development of the productive forces, the totality of production relations. This all adds up basis, that is, the basis of society. Towers over him superstructure.
Let us consider in more detail the concepts of “base” and “superstructure” put forward by K. Marx.
Basis – these are different material relations in society, that is, production relations that develop in the process of production of material goods, their exchange and distribution.
Superstructure includes various ideological relations(legal, political), related views, ideas, theories, as well as relevant organizations - the state, political parties, public organizations and foundations, etc.
The formational approach to the study of society was put forward in the 19th century Karl Marx. He also identified types of formations.
Five types of formations according to K. Marx
- Primitive communal formation: low level of development of productive forces and production relations, ownership of tools and means of production is communal. Management was carried out by all members of society or by the leader, who was elected as an authoritative person. The superstructure is primitive.
- Slave formation: the means of production, tools were in the hands of slave owners. They also owned slaves whose labor was exploited. The superstructure expressed the interests of slave owners.
- Feudal formation: the means of production, and most importantly the land, belonged to the feudal lords. The peasants were not the owners of the land; they rented it and paid quitrents for it or worked corvee labor. Religion played a huge role in the superstructure, protecting the interests of those in power and at the same time uniting feudal lords and peasants into spiritual unity.
- Capitalist formation: the means of production belonged to the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, the working class, the producer of material goods, was deprived of the right of ownership of the means of production by selling their labor power, working in factories. Personally, the proletariat is free. The superstructure is complex: all members of society participate in the political struggle and movement, public organizations and parties appear. The main contradiction of the formation arose: between the social nature of production and the private form of appropriation of the produced product. Only a socialist revolution could resolve it, and then the next formation would be established.
- Communist formation: characterized by a social form of ownership of the means of production. All members of society participate in the creation of goods and their distribution, and all the needs of society are fully satisfied. Today we understand that communism is a utopia. However, they believed in him for a long time, even N.S. Khrushchev. hoped that by 1980 communism would be built in the USSR.
Material prepared by: Melnikova Vera Aleksandrovna