Marxism had an impact in the 20th century. a powerful impact on both world economic science and the course of history of all mankind. Its influence is largely due to the fact that it was adopted in the USSR and people's democracies as an ideological justification for state policy, called “real socialism.” Even after the collapse of the USSR, a significant part of the world's population (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba) shares Marxist ideas about socialism as a more just society than capitalism.
Karl Marx(1818–1883) was the son of a wealthy German lawyer of Jewish origin. As a young man, Marx was interested in Greek materialism, and his doctoral dissertation was on the teachings of Democritus and Epicurus. He was significantly influenced by contemporary left-wing Hegelianism.
At one time he worked as a journalist for the liberal Rheinische Gazeta. After it was banned by the Prussian government in 1843, Marx went to Paris, where he established connections with French socialists. In France he met Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), with whom he developed a lifelong friendship and close collaboration. Through Engels, Marx became acquainted with British economic theory, as well as with economic and social conditions in England (Engels was the owner of a factory in Manchester for a long time).
During the revolution of 1848, Marx returned to the Rhineland, but after its defeat he left for London, where he spent almost the rest of his life. Of his most famous works, we mention the following: “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844–1845), “German Ideology” (1845–1846), “Introduction to the Criticism of Political Economy” (1859) and “Capital” (1867).
In the spirit of the Greek philosophical tradition, Marx considered economic theories as theories of managing (manipulating) people, as politics. Accordingly, he classified political economy not only as a “pure” science, but also as a political activity. Political theory is not, as we know, the contemplation of truth. Political theory is a weapon of political struggle for or against social change.
Marx's scientific research, while not purely economic or philosophical, covers history, sociology, economic theory and philosophy itself. The transitions between philosophical analysis, empirical research and topical political problems in Marx are fluid. As a Hegelian, he did not want to single out, for example, a separate philosophical theory. Indeed, in reality, economics, sociology, history and philosophy are inseparable from each other.
Marx was able to fully prepare for publication only the first volume of Capital, the second and third volumes were edited by Engels after Marx's death, and the fourth volume of The Theory of Surplus Value was published under the editorship of Kautsky 25 years after Marx's death. He did not have time to complete them due to poor health in the last years of his life. It was “Capital” that was used as the basis for the revolutions that took place after the First World War and for the construction of socialism in Soviet Russia, and then in other countries.
K. Marx believed that socialism, based on the teachings of Saint-Simon and other prophets of “secular Christianity,” is nothing more than amateurism, since socialism as a new social system should not be summed up by some kind of spiritual community of people, but by a real material basis, and this basis must reproduce itself constantly, and not be a one-time act: “take away and divide.” In this sense, Marx drew a line between utopian and scientific communism, although there is no reason to consider him the only creator of the theory of scientific communism.
Marx created a theory of the development of the capitalist system under the influence of the internal forces of the system itself (the law of concentration of capital and growing property inequality). His theory is consistent, since he “carried out a chemical combination” (J. Schumpeter’s expression) of economic theory and historical facts, which no one had managed to do before him. To theoretically refute the inevitability of socialism means to prove the falsity of Marx's theory in relation to his analysis of capitalist reproduction. Until now, not a single well-known economist has proven the opposite, that capital in the process of reproduction does not reproduce itself, and workers who receive wages for work in the process of capitalist reproduction turn into capitalists.
According to Marx, political economy - the scientific theory of the capitalist mode of production - is extremely important. Marxism is a theory that claims, firstly, to unify historical, social and philosophical issues and, secondly, to explain them in a way that philosophy alone is not capable of. It is political economy as a science that is considered to provide a new point of view both on philosophy and on the history of philosophy. Marx cannot be understood outside the philosophical tradition of Germany and, above all, the philosophy of Hegel, the “transition” from Hegel to Marx. The stages of this transition are: Marx's development of dialectics and the concept of alienation; his proposed understanding of history based on the doctrine of base and superstructure, as well as the development of political economy as a theory of profit, the concept of the interaction of productive forces and production relations.
For Hegel, the world was a historical process, the basis of which is the development of ideas. Marx retains Hegel's idea of the world as a dialectical historical process, but argues that its core is the development not of spiritual, but of material life.
Portraying Hegel as an idealist and Marx as a materialist is at best a simplification. Hegel was engaged in the study of social and material factors, otherwise he would not have called his philosophy a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism.
Marx is a materialist in the sense that he assigns economics a decisive role in determining religious and spiritual life. By economy he understands, first of all, material production, which uses the “raw materials” of nature, influences nature and transforms it. But man, as a part of nature, does not himself remain unchanged. The relationship between man and nature becomes a dialectical reciprocity in which each side modifies the other. History is precisely this irreversible, dialectical process of development, in which nature is increasingly modified through human labor, and human existence is increasingly mediated by the sphere of manufactured products.
Capitalist society has significantly transformed nature. People surrounded themselves with factories and cities. However, the most radical contradictions arose between capitalists and proletarians, as well as between man and the product of his labor. Man is no longer the master of his own creations. They appear before him as an independent force that forces man to work for their production. The capitalist must invest capital and, because of competition with his own kind, on an ever-increasing scale, while the worker exists on the brink of survival. Machines, technologies and their development determine what happens to humans, and not vice versa.
Man is degrading in the modern capitalist society of Marx. At the same time, he believed that this degradation affects both the capitalist and the worker. They are both enslaved by the economic system. Degradation is expressed in the “impoverishment of the spirit” not only of the worker, but of man in general. A person is subject to external forces - reification and pressure from the labor process, which prevent him from realizing himself as a free and creative being. People are forced to function like machines and submit to forces of their own making, over which they are no longer masters. People - both capitalists and workers - are shaped by this materialized world. They feel powerless over the "transformed" nature as it functions in capitalist society. People view themselves and their fellows as “things”: labor, employees, competitors, “commodities”.
So, alienation refers both to the relative impoverishment of the working people, which is expressed, among other things, in the ever-increasing gap in the income of the “golden billion” from the rest of the planet’s population, and to the human degradation of the capitalist and the worker, which occurs under the pressure of materialist forces. In this sense, Marx is a materialist. But he is not a materialist in the sense that he does not consider so-called material values, the possession of money and things as ideal, as liberal economists view it. On the contrary, he interprets the attitude of “possession” as an expression of degradation. Here Marx shares Aristotle's classical ideal that man is conscious and a free and creative being. Powerlessness and reification distort these fundamental human attributes.
The economic meaning of the concept “materialist” is associated with the interpretation of man as an individual, as a being who always and primarily proceeds from his material gain. Marx is not a materialist in this sense. On the contrary, he argues that such human behavior is characteristic of that phase of history represented by capitalist society. According to Marx, material gain is the main motivating factor under capitalism. Indeed, proletarians must fight to survive and not die, and capitalists are forced to create profits and make investments in order not to disappear from the market. Under capitalism, everyone must "increase money" in order to stay alive. Reification and greed in both the capitalist and the consumer are part of the system. Marx was an idealist in the sense that he believed that in the future there would be some kind of ideal society - a communist one, in which there would not be the above-described vices of man's relationship with nature, machines, technology, the desire of some human groups or strata to live at the expense of other groups and strata.
Marx believed that economic factors play a decisive role in the historical process. History is the history of economics, the history of labor. Qualitative changes in economic life transform history into an irreversible process moving forward. Forms of labor play an important role in the history of man; primitive man corresponded to primitive forms and, accordingly, primitive man could be satisfied with primitive forms of labor. But this did not happen in real human history. The progress of labor occurs in an ascending line. This is what opposes the degradation of man in history. The progress of labor has a certain format, which formats society (hence, Marx calls the stages of history “formations”).
Irreversible formative labor progress passes through the following economic formations: primitive society → → slave society → feudal society → capitalism → (communism).
The transition from one economic formation to another is a qualitative leap that occurs as the economy develops to a certain saturation point. These qualitative leaps occur in a dialectical manner, when one formation is negated and “sublated” by a higher formation.
The negation of the previous formation does not simply replace one system of power with another, as happens when one king is deposed and another is placed on the throne. Denial here is withdrawal, in which more rational relationships are established between significant aspects. The history of mankind, therefore, loses nothing from the path traveled. Thus, communism presupposes a classless society from the primitive stage, close ties from the feudal stage, as well as formal rights and developed production potential from the bourgeois-capitalist stage of historical development. However, communism combines these factors into a system in which there is rational and democratic control of the economy.
Like Hegel, Marx believed that the process of one economic system superseding another occurs necessarily in the sense that labor and economics ultimately produce corresponding changes regardless of what the individual thinks or imagines. Individuals cannot in any way influence this process with their subjective whims. It will continue even if people do not realize that they are participating in it.
For Marx, economics is fundamental, and not spirit, as for Hegel. In a certain sense, people's thoughts are a reflection of economic and material conditions. Therefore, economic and material factors are called the basis, and cultural phenomena such as religion, philosophy, ethics, literature, etc. are called the superstructure.
In its extreme form, historical materialism entails the following provisions: 1) the base, not the superstructure, is the driving force of history; 2) the base determines the superstructure, and not vice versa. Historical materialism understood in this way becomes, in a certain sense, economic determinism. Both the course of history and human thoughts are determined by economic and material circumstances, i.e. people are unable to think freely, and their thoughts cannot influence events.
In its extreme form, economic determinism becomes unacceptable because:
- 1) it involves giving up everything sovereign rationality. It turns out that our thoughts are always determined by economic reasons, and not by rational considerations. We think what we should think, not what we reasonably believe to be true. This interpretation of the theory of Marxism knocks the support out from under itself, since it turns out that the economic theory of Marxism itself is only the result of certain economic reasons. There is then no reason to consider this theory to be true, since the material conditions that determine today are different from those that determined Marx's thoughts;
- 2) economic determinism not dialectical because he draws a sharp line between two different phenomena: economics and thinking, and then claims that one phenomenon causally determines the other. Such a sharp dualism of two independent phenomena contradicts dialectics. After all, one of the starting points of dialectical thinking is that one phenomenon (the economy) cannot be perceived as relatively isolated. After all, the economy is part of society. Since economic determinism does not presuppose a dialectical opposition between economics and thinking, and Marx definitely pointed out the interconnection of these factors, it is clearly groundless to attribute such economic determinism to him;
- 3) Marx’s works contain provisions confirming that he was not an economic determinist, although he was sometimes expressed ambiguously. In particular, if you read The German Ideology, it becomes clear that a simplified understanding of the dialectical relationship between basis and adjustment is based on a literal interpretation of some metaphorical passages in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. In The German Ideology, these passages are corrected by indicating the reverse (sometimes decisive) impact of ideas (the spiritual factor in general) on economic relations.
The simplified statement that only the base causally determines the superstructure belongs to vulgar Marxism. It is reasonable to offer this interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism: economics and thinking mutually determine each other, but economics plays a decisive role. However, in this case there is some simplification of Marx’s philosophical dialectics. The following statement expresses it more precisely: “The superstructure influences the base in the sense that it is necessary for it, but is not able to dictate the direction of its change.” Thus, the superstructure - the state, ideology, thinking - is recognized as a necessary part of the whole, but changes, new directions of development are generated by the base. Or we can say that “the superstructure can exist in addition to serving the base, but it cannot develop itself.” The ability to renew, to generate a new stage of history belongs to the basis, labor, production innovations, and new technologies.
The economy, according to Marx, is based on labor, which is not considered as only physical, mental labor and any other ahistorical (anthropological) activity. Labor is a process defined by the economic system and included in the fabric of the socio-economic formation. Labor is not a blind natural process, but a social, human process. Labor is a specifically human activity through which a person interacts with reality. Through work we learn things and indirectly ourselves. And since labor gives rise to new products and new social conditions, through this historical process we learn more and more about ourselves and about the world. Thus, for Marx, work is the basic epistemological concept. This view contradicts the static and individual-centered model of cognition put forward by classical empiricists, according to which a person is basically like a simple camera, passively perceiving optical images.
If this epistemological interpretation of the relationship between labor and cognition is correct, then it is another argument for abandoning, firstly, the sharp opposition between base and superstructure and, secondly, economic determinism based on such a distinction. Labor and knowledge are sides of the same dialectical process. Therefore, it would be wrong to say that labor causally determines cognition.
It is now possible to point out the distinctly different political implications of the two positions advocated by orthodox Marxists. The first is the defense of strict economic determinism, and the second is the attribution to the superstructure of a certain ability to actively influence the base. The first position leads to political passivity. "We have to wait until conditions are ripe." The second position assumes that political activity is inappropriate in different economic situations.
If we assume that the superstructure is essentially determined by the basis, economic conditions, then entering into a discussion with the “sharks of capital” is useless. Their point of view is determined by capital, property, material situation, and no theoretical arguments can change it. Only a change in financial situation can lead to a change in point of view. So, do not argue with the owner of a company who lives on unearned income, on interest on invested capital, but confiscate his property and force him to work. Only after being educated by labor and living on labor income will he understand his opponent’s argument. This is the meaning of social revolution according to Marx.
This also means that political agreements cannot be trusted. Everything is decided by economic power, not agreements. This also means that parliament cannot be taken seriously. Real power is "outside parliament" because it is based on economic power. Parliament is just a political screen for prevailing economic relations and conditions. Neither debates, nor the subjective opinions of people, nor the parliamentary system matter. All these factors are basically a passive reflection of the basis.
In other words, there are some unpleasant political consequences of economic determinism. Therefore, one might say, the problem of finding a reasonable balance arises. Although radical economic determinism is problematic, it is still clear that the idea of the influence of economic-material conditions on our forms of knowledge contains a certain amount of truth.
(However, the answer to the question of what this reasonable balance is is complex and not yet resolvable.)
The above arguments are conclusions from Marx's theory of surplus value. Until now, it is the biggest stumbling block for modern methodologists and historians - economists specializing in the field of criticism of Marxism. Its development was the antithesis of mainstream liberal theories. One of Marx's main arguments against classical liberal economists (Smith, Ricardo) was that they think abstractly, atomistically. They mainly operate with the concepts of an ahistorical individual and ahistorical laws. These economists misunderstand how the economy functions in society and history because they determine price based on supply and demand, with demand in turn being determined by need. In this case, need means abstract purchasing power. However, people are in great need of a specific product, such as food, without being able to buy it due to poverty (a situation all too common in the “third” world). In this case, our need due to lack of money does not act as a demand. On the other hand, the "purchasing power" of an eight-year-old girl to purchase a bra will be recorded as a demand, even if she does not need such a product.
Needs and especially purchasing power are not ahistorical. According to Marx, one should think: how are they formed and by whom? To overlook such points would be to engage in vulgar economic theory. In Marxist literature (for example, F. Engels' "Preface" to the second edition of "Capital"), on this basis, a distinction is made between vulgar economic theory and political economy.
Marx never hid the fact that he studied with Smith and Ricardo. In Marxist literature it is customary to speak of classical English political economy as one of the three sources of Marxism. The latter include: 1) German classical philosophy (Hegel) with the concepts of dialectics, negation, integrity, etc.; 2) French socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier, etc.) with the concepts of the bourgeoisie, working class, revolution, etc. and 3) English political economy (Smith, Ricardo) with the concepts of exchange value, consumer value, capital, production, distribution, etc.
What then is Marx's contribution to classical political economy? Marx himself believed that one of his most significant contributions was the distinction between labor And labor force. Labor power is a commodity that has value, namely the cost of consumer goods necessary for the reproduction of labor power. The use of labor is labor that creates value.
On the one hand, as a need that it satisfies, the product acts as a consumer value, on the other hand, as an exchange value. It is exchange value that is determined through the market. Under capitalism, in principle, everything is a commodity, including labor. Within this comprehensive commodity market we exchange not only things for things, but also labor for wages. Often the worker possesses nothing but labor power, and sells it to someone who wants to purchase it, i.e. to those who own jobs and means of production.
The price of labor power is the worker's wages. When we exchange things for things, for example a bag of salt for two goatskins, the value does not increase. Either each receives as much as he gives, or one receives more at the expense of the other, but overall the value (in the social sense) does not increase. How, then, can we explain the increase in value? Some thinkers point to division of labor or specialization, others to the use of new land and natural resources. Marx's starting point is that the creation of surplus value occurs in the labor process. In other words, the commodity “employee labor power” is unique. This uniqueness of labor is not something fantastic, but a natural gift, the same as the fertility of the soil. Thanks to it, a grain planted in the soil grows into an ear and causes self-expansion of one planted grain to 15–20 grains. Something similar happens in the labor process, because when labor is consumed, more products are created than are consumed, i.e. in the national economy as a whole, both material growth and an increase in value occur (liberal political economy attributes the same properties to capital, calling it a factor of production, but capital, for example, in the form of a bank loan, does not have capital-creative ability, since it only redistributes existing financial material flows).
What then happens to the values created by the wage workers? After production costs have been reimbursed and the worker has received the wages necessary for the reproduction of his labor power, including the maintenance of his family, a certain surplus value remains, which is an expression of the part of his labor that is not paid to the worker, as a natural gift. This surplus value is appropriated in the form of profit to those who bought labor power. Since surplus value as unpaid labor passes to those who did not personally create it, according to Marx, workers, regardless of their standard of living, are always exploited by capitalists. The capitalist system is based on the appropriation of surplus value. Exploitation is nothing more than the process of relative impoverishment of workers, the theft of the natural gift (in the form of labor, including knowledge and talent) of the hired worker.
Those who purchase labor on the market compete with each other. The threat of bankruptcy forces them to avoid excessive consumption and reinvest capital in areas such as technology to increase their competitiveness with other buyers of labor. Consequently, through competition, part of the surplus value stolen from the wage worker is reinvested (put back into capital) and thus provides a continuous basis for the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist system.
Surplus value is the basic concept of Marx’s theory of capitalist society; it simultaneously points to the objective exploitation that occurs in this society. Labor power is a commodity. The one who owns the means of production acquires this product. In the labor process, this commodity creates surplus value, which is appropriated in the form of profit by the buyer of labor power. Profit is the result of the exploitation of the worker. Due to competition, part of the profit must be invested in capital. In general, this process supports itself: new purchases of labor, increased surplus value, new capital investments, etc. Money is growing. In other words, they are capital. What emerges is an expanding economic system that, at the level of private enterprise, is “guided by rational considerations of profit,” but at the level of the entire economy is not politically controlled. This system - capitalism - is self-destructive. It leads to crises that cannot be resolved within it. The only way out is the introduction of fair economic rules “from above” or “from below”. However, “on top” is the superstructure purchased by the capitalist.
Marx's concepts of labor power, value, surplus value, etc. entail an understanding of the capitalist economy as a comprehensive social practice containing objective contradictions. Based on this, Marx formulates concepts that are more adequate than those of contemporary liberal economists. Marx distinguishes three aspects of the basis: productive forces, production relations and natural conditions. In short, productive forces are labor (possessing knowledge and skills) and means of production (technology and tools), which reveal themselves in the mutual development of man and nature.
Production relations are organized forms, primarily relations of ownership of the means of production. Industrial relations are not entirely material. Property relations are partly institutional or legal relations. The phenomenon of property is hardly possible if people do not implicitly possess the concept of property. Thus, if people do not have the concept of politeness, then raising your hat does not mean greeting an acquaintance. Likewise, taking someone's bicycle does not mean stealing it if people have, among other things, no concept of property. We cannot separate understanding as a component of the superstructure from the base: without a certain understanding and a certain motivation there is no economy. Consequently, the dialectical whole is more fundamental than a simple division into a material base and a passive superstructure.
Natural conditions are naturally given natural resources. Marx viewed the basis, the economy, as the decisive driving force of history. Let us express this idea in more detail. The real driving force is the productive forces. But the interaction between man and nature, which is mediated by productive forces, occurs within a certain organizational form (form of ownership). Up to a certain point, the productive forces develop freely, or at least without resistance, within the existing relations of production. But sooner or later, production relations begin to slow down the further growth of the productive forces. As a result, tension arises between them: prevailing property relations impede the further development of productive forces. The changes that have arisen in the productive forces urgently require new and more appropriate productive relations. A revolution is happening. After the establishment of new productive relations, the productive forces develop until these productive relations again begin to limit them. A new revolution is taking place.
In other words, the productive forces are developing. Conflicts arise between them and the prevailing relations of production. Tensions are resolved by the emergence of new and better industrial relations.
Closely related to the concept of production relations is Marx’s concept class. Class is determined through its relationship to the means of production (raw materials and instruments of production). Those who own the means of production are in class opposition to those who do not own these means.
This is an important point because many people think they are refuting Marx's concept of class by pointing out the high level of consumption of those who do not possess the means of production. But Marx's concept of class does not appeal to consumption, subjective experience or individual rights. It primarily concerns ownership of the means of production. According to Marx, as long as some own and others do not own the means of production, class antagonism and class conflicts will exist.
The above means that a better distribution of consumer goods and a higher standard of living do not abolish class differences (this is where Marxism differs from social democracy). Even if many workers own cars, houses and household appliances, e.g. have a high level of consumption, then, according to Marx, they are still in opposition to the capitalists - after all, the workers do not own the means of production.
Of course, there are many types of opposition that are not bound by control over the means of production. They are, so to speak, “soft” types of opposition. The class opposition is irresistible in the sense that it can only be overcome with the help of revolution, through changes in property relations.
Since those who own the means of production generally oppose such changes, revolutions will most often be violent. But violence is not a necessary feature of revolutions.
In the capitalist phase of the development of society, there are two classes: capitalists, who have capitalist means of production, and proletarians, who are deprived of these means. According to Marx, capitalism will suffer internal crises and the proletariat will be relatively impoverished. The lower middle class will join the ranks of the proletariat due to the concentration of capital of a few. Large companies will produce surplus products. The situation will get worse and worse until the proletariat takes control of industrial production. At the same time, the international economy will be under his political control and will serve to satisfy genuine human needs. So, the historical mission of the working class is to accomplish a revolution and build a classless society.
Marx's socio-economic teaching presupposes the ascent of the human model from the abstract to the concrete, from the so-called “simple commodity owner” to the capitalists representing industrial, commercial and loan capital.
In Marx's teachings, man appears as a personification of objective economic categories. A capitalist is the personification of capital, capital endowed with will and consciousness. A worker is personified hired labor. Analysis of the dependence of human behavior on objective conditions, on his class affiliation and the resulting specific forms of economic and social behavior is, to a certain extent, very legitimate. At the same time, those aspects of the motivation of human activity, his goal-setting, features of consciousness and behavior that lie beyond subordination to objective economic relations have not received a clear interpretation in Marxist teaching. Marx considered the most important human need to be the altruistic need to act for the common good.
Capital, as already said, is Marx's most significant work, in which his views on capitalist society and its evolution are most fully developed. Here Marx analyzes the essence of capitalist society, its main driving causes and development prospects. "Capital" acted as the theoretical foundation for a large-scale critique of capitalist society, which was launched by the followers of Marx, and as a result itself came under the radar of counter-criticism. Unfortunately, the extraordinary depth of the problems raised by Marx made it difficult to find perfect solutions from both sides, and the difference in methodology and conceptual apparatus led to the fact that criticism often missed the mark. Mutual misunderstanding was also facilitated by differences in the subject and method of Capital and neoclassical economic theory, which had already appeared by the time the third volume was published. Marx often emphasized that it was not his task to study the market mechanism of price formation - the central problem of economic theory. Marx's "Capital" is devoted to a socio-philosophical analysis of society in which economics plays a leading role, and that is why "Capital" can be called an economic work.
Of great importance for Marx was the moral and ethical criticism of capitalism, criticism of the failure of such a society from a humanistic point of view. According to Marx, the economic inefficiency and doom of capitalism are a consequence of its inhumane nature. In a broad sense, the subject of study of "Capital" can be called production relations between classes that arise in connection with relations of ownership of the means of production. In a narrow sense, the subject of the study of “Capital” is the process of creation and accumulation of capital based on the exploitation of labor. The inhumanistic nature of capitalism lies precisely in the fact that the main goal of such a society is not human well-being, but the accumulation of capital, which is achieved by inhuman means.
"Capital" is also characterized by a special methodology. As is known, V.I. Lenin identified German philosophy, French utopian socialism and English classical political economy as three sources and three components of Marxism. The dialectical method, borrowed from Hegel, is the basis of Capital: Marx examines in detail the contradictions contained in every phenomenon, be it labor, a commodity or society as a whole, often launching into lengthy discussions of the nuances of the meaning of a particular concept. The utopian ideas of French socialism were of just as great importance for Marx, and when reading Capital, it is impossible not to note that it was precisely the associations of workers who owned the means of production that Marx considered as an alternative to capitalism.
Finally, in terms of the set of problems raised and the analytical hypotheses used, Capital is certainly a work that has much in common with classical political economy, and Marx could well have called his work “A New Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” since Capital is dedicated to the study of the classical problem of what wealth is, how it is created and distributed, and the basis of many theoretical solutions (for example, the theory of value, rent, wages) was borrowed from Smith and Ricardo. All analysis is carried out in terms of averages; Marx even tries to construct a theory of value on the basis of average costs - in a word, in the field of developing a marginal method of analysis, he was in no way superior to Ricardo. But where Marx was far ahead of Ricardo was in the ability to see society in its integrity: as a true philosopher, Marx was able to discern the presence of utility behind each economic category into which the newly produced value “breaks up.” Therefore, value can only be measured by abstract labor, which is simple, elementary labor in the form of the effort of the worker.
These arguments raise two problems that Marx tries to solve. The first problem is related to the fact that the production of goods uses labor of different quality: some goods require simpler labor, while others require more complex labor. How to compare the amount of labor of different complexity? Marx suggests that this problem is solved by reduction, or reduction, complex labor to simple labor and subsequent comparison of the resulting quantities of simple labor, which is how this operation occurs on the market. A similar answer was given by Smith and Ricardo, who also limited themselves to pointing out the role of market competition without delving into this issue, which is understandable given that they did not pay so much attention to the justification of the labor theory of value. However, for Marx, who developed a special conceptual apparatus to substantiate labor theory, everything related to the formation of labor prices should have been of fundamental importance, and therefore his superficial interest in this issue is not entirely clear. Relative prices in the labor market are formed taking into account the demand for labor and the supply of labor. The demand for labor depends on the need ("social necessity" - in Marx's terminology) for the goods produced with its help. The supply of labor over a long period is determined not only by the pleasantness or unpleasantness of work, but also by the rarity of labor skills of a given kind, as well as other factors. In general, we can say that in the labor market, as in other markets, the pricing formula “utility plus scarcity” operates - one of the ideas of Say’s followers, whom Marx called vulgar.
The lucky ones, who by coincidence have rare qualities, can, without significant effort, perform work that seems difficult or impossible for the majority, thus receiving rent. No fairness in the sense of “wages according to work” is achieved in the labor market, and the final estimates are arbitrary and do not imply the existence of a fair standard for measuring labor inputs. A system of competitive markets guarantees only the presence of market equilibrium; the amount of rewards, as well as the price of goods, are determined by factors that have nothing to do with justice. In this regard, Marx’s confidence that the market system is capable of solving the problem of reducing labor (“labor price”) looks strange.
The second problem is related to determining the amount of labor that will represent the cost (value) of a given product. The value of a product cannot be determined by individual labor costs at a given enterprise, since in such a case enterprises with poor labor organization will be able to sell their products at a higher price and enterprises will tend to increase the labor intensity of production. As a solution, Marx resorts to the concept socially necessary labor, those. one that, on average, is used for the production of any use value under the existing socially normal conditions of production and at the average level of skill and intensity of labor in a given society. Marx’s final conclusion is as follows: the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor, i.e. labor with average intensity, qualifications and capital ratio for a given state of society.
The theory of surplus value is the sacred center of the entire edifice erected by Marx: it is here that Marx invades the holy of holies of capitalist society, setting out the scheme for the creation of surplus value and the exploitation of labor by the capitalist. Surplus value is the value of the product produced by the worker and retained by the capitalist for his own benefit, i.e. surplus value is the unpaid product of labor, which is used for personal consumption of capitalists and for the accumulation of capital.
Capital is the quintessence of capitalism, an object of universal desire and veneration, capital is an object of cult, the great upheavals and split of the Catholic Church occurred for the sake of the sacralization of capital and the process of its accumulation. Capital is the highest value of a capitalist society, and its accumulation justifies everything. Capital drives the most important relationships of capitalist society. Thus, according to Marx, capital is primarily the relationship between groups of people, or classes, arising in the course of the production of surplus value, and since so much importance is attached to the accumulation of surplus value, capital as a production relation permeates throughout capitalist society.
In addition to the production relation, capital for Marx is also self-increasing cost. Marx analyzes the process of capital growth and the emergence of surplus value using formulas for the circulation of capital, which take different forms depending on the socio-economic characteristics of a particular era. Marx begins with simple commodity circulation, which is carried out according to the formula "commodity - money - commodity", or C - M - C: the artisan produces a product, sells it, receiving money in return, then buys the necessary goods with the proceeds. Simple commodity circulation is carried out not for the sake of creating capital, but for the sake of production and consumption. However, the activity of a merchant or moneylender - these representatives of “antediluvian”, in Marx’s words, capital - is expressed by the formula: M - T - M", where D" = D + AD. The formula changes because the meaning of the process changes: a merchant or moneylender acquires goods in order to sell them at a price exceeding the original cost, and the resulting unequal exchange contributes to the accumulation of capital.
Marx calls the increase in AD surplus value; it becomes capital, or self-increasing value, which gets the opportunity to increase precisely because the relations between members of capitalist society allow the private appropriation of a product belonging to society. According to Marx's theory, surplus value is unearned income, appropriated by both the “antediluvian” and modern capitalists.
Thus, the economic analysis carried out by Marx to prove the “format” of capitalist society, that the relations of exploitation of man by man cannot themselves disappear, became the “cornerstone” of Marxism. They were the ones that caused heated discussions. However, Marx still acted primarily as a social philosopher. Marx did not create a new political economy alternative to liberal classical political economy. On the contrary, only relying on it, he formulated the provisions that the capitalist appropriates part of the surplus value created by the labor of the worker.
In those countries where Marxism remained within the framework of abstract economic theory, it had much fewer students and propagandists than, for example, Keynesianism. Western European Marxist theorists did not even create a more or less noticeable scientific school. Marxism became the dominant movement in half the globe thanks to the Soviet Union, which created not only a new economy, but also a world socialist system. With their collapse, the role of Marx's economic teachings throughout the world has dropped significantly, although about half of the world's population still considers themselves more likely to be followers of Marx than to any other economist represented in the history of economic teachings.
- Marx K., Engels F. Op. T. 26. P. 169.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION is the central concept of the Marxist theory of society or historical materialism: “... a society at a certain stage of historical development, a society with a unique, distinctive character.” Through the concept of O.E.F. ideas about society as a specific system were recorded and at the same time the main periods of its historical development were identified. It was believed that any social phenomenon can be correctly understood only in connection with a certain O.E.F., an element or product of which it is. The term “formation” itself was borrowed by Marx from geology. Completed theory of O.E.F. not formulated by Marx, however, if we summarize his various statements, we can conclude that Marx distinguished three eras, or formations, of world history according to the criterion of dominant production relations (forms of property): 1) primary formation (archaic pre-class societies); 2) secondary, or “economic” social formation, based on private property and commodity exchange and including Asian, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production; 3) communist formation. Marx paid main attention to the “economic” formation, and within its framework, to the bourgeois system.
At the same time, social relations were reduced to economic ones (“base”), and world history was viewed as a movement through social revolutions to a predetermined phase - communism. The term O.E.F. introduced by Plekhanov and Lenin. Lenin, generally following the logic of Marx’s concept, significantly simplified and narrowed it, identifying O.E.F. with the mode of production and reducing it to a system of production relations. Canonization of the O.E.F. concept in the form of the so-called “five-member structure” was implemented by Stalin in the “Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)”. Representatives of historical materialism believed that the concept of O.E.F. allows us to notice repetition in history and thereby give it a strictly scientific analysis. The change of formations forms the main line of progress; formations die due to internal antagonisms, but with the advent of communism, the law of change of formations ceases to operate.
As a result of the transformation of Marx's hypothesis into an infallible dogma, formational reductionism was established in Soviet social science, i.e. reduction of the entire diversity of the human world only to formational characteristics, which was expressed in the absolutization of the role of the common in history, the analysis of all social connections along the basis - superstructure line, ignoring the human beginning of history and the free choice of people. In its established form, the concept of O.E.F. together with the idea of linear progress that gave birth to it, already belongs to the history of social thought.
However, overcoming formational dogma does not mean abandoning the formulation and solution of questions of social typology. Types of society and its nature, depending on the tasks being solved, can be distinguished according to various criteria, including socio-economic ones. It is important to remember the high degree of abstraction of such theoretical constructs, their schematic nature, the inadmissibility of their anthologization, direct identification with reality, and also their use for constructing social forecasts and developing specific political tactics. If this is not taken into account, then the result, as experience shows, is social deformation and disaster.
Definition 1
The formational approach is a socio-philosophical theory that considers the process of development of society from the position of analyzing the processes of its material production, as well as social relations built around it.
Basic concepts of formation theory
The theory of socio-economic formations was developed by K. Marx and F. Engels, using materialist dialectics as a method of analyzing socio-historical processes. Unlike other theories of social development (Hegel’s idealistic dialectics, civilizational approaches), formation theory is based on a completely materialistic understanding of both society itself and the historical process, as well as the criteria for its development, which become concretely measurable quantities.
Formational theory understands society as a set of social relations that arise between people in the process of their joint activities and are consolidated over time, forming social institutions. At the same time, two global structural units are distinguished in society, to which all existing social relations are reduced:
- basis,
- superstructure
The basis is a set of social relations and processes centered around material production. Marx and Engels rightly point out that without material production no society can exist, and stopping it would invariably lead to the death of society as such.
The superstructure is a set of political, religious and cultural institutions that consolidate a certain distribution of roles in society, corresponding to the level of development of the base. Marx and Engels distinguish two fundamental social strata in society, which are called classes - the class of exploiters and the class of the exploited. The differences between these classes lie in their relationship to the means of production. While the exploiting class has the right of ownership of the means of production and, thanks to the use of this right, receives surplus income, the exploited class is forced to exchange its labor for the opportunity to use the means of production, and produce material goods both for its own use and to provide for the exploiters.
Note 1
Through dialectics and class struggle, the development of society occurs, its transition from more primitive socio-economic formations to more developed ones, and ultimately to communism.
Dialectics of production forces and relations
The driving force of society, according to formation theory, is the dialectical nature of material production, which dictates the dialectical relationship between the classes of society. The most important elements of material production are productive forces and relationships.
Productive forces represent the totality of all those labor efforts, skills and methods of production, technologies, as well as means of production, i.e. tools through which the process of material production is carried out directly. Productive forces are in constant development, thanks to the improvement of labor skills, the development of new techniques that are passed on from generation to generation, the introduction of technological innovations and scientific inventions.
Production relations include all those social relations that develop around material production, from labor relations themselves, management and administration processes, exchange and distribution of goods produced and, of course, property relations in relation to both the means of production and the products produced. Unlike productive forces, relationships tend to be conserved, i.e. Having formed at a certain moment, they support the resulting social system without taking into account and even contrary to the development of productive forces.
This contradiction serves as a source of social transformations in society. When the development of productive forces reaches its limit within a certain socio-economic formation, social and class conflicts caused by the conservatism of production relations intensify in society. As a result, society undergoes revolutionary changes during which the existing superstructure, primarily the political system, is completely dismantled and in its place a new one emerges, consolidating a new distribution of production forces and relations. The new formation inherits certain features of the old one, and also lays down the features of future formations. Within its framework, the productive forces continue to grow within the margin of safety of the existing system.
Formations
Definition 2
A formation is a specific type of society that exists in a certain historical period and is characterized by a specific mode of production.
Within the framework of the theory, Marx identified five main formations:
- primitive communal
- slaveholding,
- feudal,
- capitalist,
- communist.
The primitive communal and communist formations are considered by Marx to be non-antagonistic - they do not have a class division of society into exploiters and exploited. At the primitive stage, each member of the tribe participates equally in the production process, is not alienated from the products of his labor, and their distribution is carried out according to a fair principle. However, as labor technology and tools improve, as well as the numerical growth of the tribe, the expansion of its geographical habitat and contacts with other tribes, the amount of goods produced begins to exceed the tribe’s own needs. As a result, processes of stratification begin within the tribe, transforming the tribal community into a neighboring one; in addition, the tribe can afford to feed additional workers, for example, slaves captured during the war.
In the slave-owning formation there are already classes - slave owners and slaves, however, over time, the ratio of the costs of maintaining slaves and the productivity of their labor leads to the fact that the work of personally free peasants becomes more profitable. Feudal societies are formed on the ruins of slave states. However, the development of science, the introduction of machine production methods, and the expansion of the geography of the existence of societies entail new changes. Land ceases to be the main and only means of production; capital comes in its place, which is concentrated in the hands of a new class. In the course of bourgeois revolutions, capitalist formations replace feudal ones.
K. Marx
K. Marx was one of the first in the history of social and humanitarian knowledge to develop a detailed idea of society as a system. This idea is embodied in his concept "socio-economic formation". A social formation is a social system consisting of interconnected elements and is in a state of unstable equilibrium. The basis of the socio-economic formation, according to K. Marx, lies production method material goods, that is, the economic subsystem.
A.B. Hoffman draws attention to what K. Marx understood by production the entire cycle of movement of the produced good, which includes production itself, distribution, exchange and consumption. According to K. Marx, consumption is of particular importance, since without it there is no production (just as without production there is no consumption).
The production method has two sides: productive forces And industrial relations. Productive forces include all resources and means available to society that ensure the production process: natural and human resources involved in production, means of production, the level of science and its technological application. K. Marx considered man to be the main productive force of society. Production relations are the relations between people regarding the production of material goods. They are expressed in various forms of ownership of the means of production.
The method of production constitutes a system-forming component of the social system, determining its other components. It creates qualitative certainty of a social formation and distinguishes one formation from another. The production method forms basis society. In addition to the basis, the social formation includes superstructure. In it, K. Marx included, first of all, legal and political relations and institutions, as well as all other spheres of social consciousness: morality, religion, art, science, etc.
Despite his rigid materialist position, K. Marx believed that the superstructure could be relatively independent of the base. The superstructure obeys its own laws, which do not coincide with the laws of development of the base. In addition, the superstructure can have the opposite effect on the base. Some elements of the superstructure do not depend on the base at all. For example, in Ancient Greece V-IV centuries. BC. The productive forces in particular and the economy in general were at a very low level of development while the greatest masterpieces were created in the field of art, which served as a source of inspiration for painters and sculptors for many centuries.
The structure of a socio-economic formation, in addition to the base and superstructure, includes a certain social structure. Social differentiation, according to K. Marx, is an expression of the mode of production characteristic of a given formation. In addition, social formation includes components such as family form, lifestyle and daily activities of people.
After analyzing a significant amount of historical and statistical material, K. Marx developed a classification of social formations. The German thinker divided all formations into antagonistic, which are based on private property, and non-antagonistic, characterized by collective ownership of the means of production, and, consequently, the absence of class contradictions. In total, K. Marx considered five social formations:
1) primitive;
2) slaveholding;
3) feudal;
4) bourgeois;
5) communist.
The primitive formation is based on collective communal property and blood relations. The next three formations are based on private ownership of the means of production, and therefore the relations in them are antagonistic in nature. K. Marx pays considerable attention to the features of the future communist formation in his work “Critique of the Gotha Program,” where the following characteristics of the communist formation are highlighted:
1) the disappearance of man’s subordination to the division of labor that enslaves him;
2) the disappearance of the opposition between mental and physical labor;
3) transformation of labor from a means of life into the first need of life;
4) comprehensive development of individuals;
5) an unprecedented growth in the productive forces of society and social wealth;
6) implementation of the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
For K. Marx, social formations are not just social systems of varying complexity. These are stages of social progress leading from “prehistory” to the “true” history of mankind.
K. Marx supplemented his classification with the concept "Asian way of production". The Asian mode of production is a special social formation that occupies an intermediate historical position between the primitive and slave formations and is based on a system of land communities united by the state, which is the owner of the means of production. Such societies were characteristic of the eastern despotisms that formed in the last five centuries BC. In addition, the concept of the Asian mode of production made it possible to go beyond the rigid boundaries of dividing history into five formations.
Theories of local civilizations
The emergence of the theory of social progress
Social progress: civilizations and formations
The emergence of the theory of social progress. Unlike primitive society, where extremely slow changes stretch over many generations, already in ancient civilizations social changes and development begin to be recognized by people and are recorded in the public consciousness; At the same time, attempts arise to theoretically explain their causes and the desire to anticipate their nature and direction. Since such changes most clearly and quickly occur in political life - the periodic rise and fall of great empires, the transformation of the internal structure of various states, the enslavement of some peoples by others - the first concepts of social development in antiquity strive to explain precisely political changes, which are given a cyclical character. Thus, Plato and Aristotle already created the first cyclical theories of the development of society, in which they tried to explain the change of government in the ancient Greek city-states from despotism to aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, anarchy, tyranny. As society developed, the cyclical nature of social changes extended to other areas of its life.
World history was perceived as the history of the heyday, greatness and death of great empires that succeeded each other over many centuries. A typical example of such an interpretation of history is the treatise of the French educator of the early 18th century, S. L. Montesquieu, “Reflections on the Causes of the Greatness and Fall of the Romans” (1734). It is instructive that it was at the beginning of the 18th century that the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) in his book “Foundations of a new science [of the general nature of nations]” (1725) outlined a universal theory of the historical cycle, which has not lost interest, consisting of three eras with corresponding cycles - divine, heroic and human, replacing each other in the process of a general crisis. And even the powerful rise and flowering of culture in Western Europe in the 15th-17th centuries was perceived by contemporaries as the Renaissance of the best achievements of the period of antiquity.
It took another two or three centuries for the most insightful minds of the Enlightenment by the end of the 18th century (Turgot and Condorcet in France, Priestley and Gibbon in England, Herder in Germany and others) to come to the conclusion that the new era in the social development of Europe had far surpassed antiquity and is a further stage of social development. This is how the first theories of social progress in world history appeared, undermining the idea of its cyclical nature and establishing the idea of the progressive development of humanity. This belief in the universal nature of social progress was most clearly stated in the book by J. A. Condorcet “Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind” (1795). In his book, which he wrote while hiding from a death sentence, Condor-se spoke optimistically about the future of humanity, and set out as his goal “to show through reasoning and facts that no limit has been outlined in the development of human abilities, that man’s ability to improve is truly limitless.” , that successes in this improvement are now independent of any force that wants to stop it... Without a doubt, progress may be more or less rapid, but development will never go backwards..." [Condorcet J. A. Sketch historical picture of the progress of the human mind. M., 1936. P. 5-6.].
During the 19th century, the theory of social progress, the continuous progressive development of mankind, despite some skeptical remarks, clearly prevailed over cyclical and decadent concepts. She became a leader both in academic writings and in public opinion.
At the same time, it took different forms and did not act as an abstract theoretical concept, but was closely connected with the ideological struggle in society, with socio-economic and political forecasts for the future of humanity.
Theories of local civilizations. Many historians and philosophers began to seek explanations for the peculiar development of not only individual countries and regions of the globe, but also the history of mankind as a whole. Thus, in the 19th century, the ideas of a civilizational path of development of society arose and became widespread, resulting in the concept of the diversity of civilizations. One of the first thinkers to develop the concept of world history as a set of independent and specific civilizations, which he called cultural-historical types of humanity, was the Russian naturalist and historian N. Ya. Danilevsky (1822-1885). In his book “Russia and Europe” (1871), trying to identify the differences between civilizations, which he considered as unique, divergent cultural and historical types of humanity, he chronologically identified the following types of organization of social formations that coexisted in time, as well as successive types: 1 ) Egyptian, 2) Chinese, 3) Assyro-Babylonian, 4) Chaldean, 5) Indian, 6) Iranian, 7) Jewish, 8) Greek, 9) Roman, 10) New Semitic, or Arabian, 11) Romano-Germanic, or European, to which was added two civilizations of pre-Columbian America, destroyed by the Spaniards. Now, he believed, a Russian-Slavic cultural type is coming to the world-historical arena, called upon, thanks to its universal mission, to reunite humanity. The book of N. Ya. Danilevsky became a manifesto of late Slavophilism and at the end of the 19th century caused wide and heated controversy among such prominent representatives of Russian social thought as V. S. Solovyov, N. N. Strakhov, F. I. Tyutchev, K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin and others.
Many of Danilevsky’s ideas were adopted at the beginning of the 20th century by the German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of the two-volume work “The Decline of Europe.”
"The Decline of Europe" (literally translated "The Decline of the Western Countries", in 2 volumes, 1918-1922) brought Spengler worldwide fame, because it was published immediately after the First World War, which plunged Europe into ruins and caused the growth of two new "overseas" powers - the USA and Japan. Over the course of several years, 32 editions of the book were published in the main world languages (including two in Russia; unfortunately, only a translation of the first volume was published at that time - in 1922 in Moscow and in 1923 in Petrograd). The book evoked numerous, mostly admiring, responses from prominent thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In his judgments about the history of mankind, in contrasting different civilizations to each other, Spengler was incomparably more categorical than Danilevsky. This is largely due to the fact that "The Decline of Europe" was written during a period of unprecedented political, economic and social upheaval that accompanied the World War, the collapse of three great empires and revolutionary changes in Russia. In his book, Spengler identified 8 higher cultures, the listing of which basically coincides with Danilevsky’s cultural and historical types (Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Byzantine-Arab, Western European, Maya), and also anticipated the flourishing of Russian culture. He made a distinction between culture and civilization, seeing in the latter only a decline, the last phase of the development of culture on the eve of its death, when creativity is replaced by the imitation of innovations, their grinding.
Spengler's interpretation of both world history and the history of its individual component cultures and civilizations is fatalistic. Even separate cultures coexisting in time or replacing each other are hermetically isolated from each other, because they are based on different, alien to each other ideas about the world, beauty, human vocation, etc. Their development is predetermined not by rational causality, but by fate. Each culture is given a certain time limit from its origin to its decline - approximately a thousand years. Even formal similarities in architectural style and other external embodiments of different cultures do not deny their substantive opposition, such as, for example, between ancient magic and modern science. Western culture rests on a “Faustian”, scientific-cognitive attitude towards the world and exhausts itself by becoming convinced of the powerlessness of science in relation to nature.
Spengler's concept, like Danilevsky's concept, attracts the attention of scientists because it highlights the diversity in the history of mankind, draws attention to the role of spiritual traditions in the formation of society, to the active role, often the primary one, of consciousness, customs and mores in historical events.
The theory of civilizations was further developed in the work of the English historian A. J. Toynbee (1889-1975). Since at least the mid-20th century, his work has had a significant influence not only on academic circles, but also on the social and political consciousness of Western and Third World countries.
In the process of developing the concept of civilizations, Toynbee's theoretical views underwent significant evolution and, in some positions, even a kind of metamorphosis. This is explained by two circumstances: on the one hand, this concept itself was outlined by him in the twelve-volume work “Study of History,” which was published over almost three decades - from 1934 to 1961, and then, until his death, the author constantly returned to this topic; Of course, throughout almost his entire creative life, Toynbee continuously enriched his theory with new provisions. On the other hand, the very time of Toynbee’s life coincided with grandiose political and social transformations in the history of mankind - the Second World War and the Cold War, the liberation of most peoples from colonial dependence, the emergence of global problems, that is, with events that required deep comprehension and rethinking of everything. previous history. And it is precisely this evolution of the views of the English historian that gives special value to his concept of civilizations.
In the first volumes of his study, Toynbee adhered to such ideas about civilizations, which were in many ways similar to Spengler’s concept: he emphasized the fragmentation of civilizations, their independence from each other, which does not allow them to unite their unique history into the general history of mankind. Thus, he denied social progress as the progressive development of humanity. Each civilization existed for the period allotted to it by history, although not as predetermined as Spengler allotted to his cultures. The driving force behind the development of civilizations was the dialectic of challenge and response. As long as the creative minority that controls the development of a civilization, its elite, was able to provide satisfactory responses to internal and external threats to its distinctive growth, the civilization strengthened and prospered. But as soon as the elite, for some reason, turned out to be powerless in the face of the next challenge, an irreparable breakdown occurred: the creative minority turned into the dominant minority, the bulk of the population led by them was transformed into the “internal proletariat,” which, on its own or in alliance with the “external proletariat,” (barbarians) plunged civilization into decline and death. At the same time, civilization did not disappear without a trace; resisting decline, it gave birth to a “universal state” and a “universal church.” The first disappeared with the death of civilization, while the second became a kind of “chrysalis” successor, contributing to the emergence of a new civilization. Initially, in the first ten volumes, Toynbee identified nineteen independent civilizations with two branches: Egyptian, Andean, Chinese, Minoan, Sumerian, Maya, Indus, Hittite, Syrian, Hellenistic, Western, Orthodox, Far Eastern, Iranian, Arab, Hindu, Babylonian, Yucatan, Mexican; its branch in Japan was adjacent to the Far Eastern, and its branch in Russia was adjacent to the Orthodox. In addition, several civilizations arrested in their development and several abortive ones were mentioned.
Among these civilizations, both “related” ones, connected to each other by a “pupa - the universal church”, and completely isolated ones stood out. But even “related” civilizations differed from each other in the systems of social and moral values that prevailed in them, and in their prevailing customs and mores. Although civilizations, according to Toynbee, are incompatible and historically do not perceive each other as predecessors and followers, nevertheless they are connected by the same development milestones and key events, thanks to which, on the basis of civilizations that have already completed their development cycle, it is possible to anticipate upcoming events in existing civilizations : say, the upcoming breakdown, the “time of troubles,” the formation of a “universal state” and even the outcome of the struggle between the original center and the periphery, etc.
Subsequently, Toynbee gradually moved away from the above scheme. First of all, many civilizations appeared as having increasingly adopted the legacy of their predecessors. In the XII volume of his study, symbolically entitled "Rethinking" (1961), he develops the idea of successive civilizations of the first, second and third generations, which adopted (mainly thanks to the "universal church") many of the social and spiritual values of their predecessors: for example, the West adopted the heritage Hellenism, and the latter - the spiritual values of the Minoan (Crito-Mycenaean) civilization. The history of China and India is getting rid of unnecessary fragmentation into two or three civilizations. Thus, of the original 21 civilizations, 15 remain, not counting the side ones. Toynbee considers his main mistake to be that initially in his historical and philosophical constructions he proceeded from only one Hellenistic model and extended its laws to the rest, and only then based his theory on three models: Hellenistic, Chinese and Israeli.
World history began to acquire a universal human character in Toynbee’s concept: the cycles of successive generations of civilizations appeared in the form of rotating wheels, advancing humanity to an ever deeper religious comprehension of its calling: from the first mythological ideas to pagan religions, and then to syncretic religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism). In the modern era, according to Toynbee, there has become a need for further ecumenical religious and moral unity of humanity in a pantheism that is solidary for all religions (including communism, which he also considered as one of the world religions) and salutary in the conditions of the ecological crisis.
Thus, the theory of civilizations in the later works of Toynbee and his many followers gradually gravitated towards a universal explanation of universal history, towards rapprochement, and in the long term (despite the discreteness introduced by the development of individual civilizations) - towards the spiritual and material unity of mankind.
Theory of socio-economic formations. Of the theories of social development of the mid-19th - late 20th centuries, the Marxist concept of social progress as a consistent change of formations was most thoroughly developed. Several generations of Marxists worked on the development and coordination of its individual fragments, striving, on the one hand, to eliminate its internal contradictions, and on the other, to supplement it, enriching it with the latest discoveries. In this regard, heated discussions took place among the Marxists themselves on a variety of topics - just to name the topic of the “Asian mode of production”, “developed socialist society”, etc.
Although Marx and Engels sought to substantiate their concept of socio-economic formations with numerous references to historical sources, chronological tables and factual material drawn from different eras, it nevertheless mainly rested on abstract, speculative ideas that they had learned from their predecessors and contemporaries - Saint-Simon, Hegel, L. G. Morgan and many others. In other words, the concept of formations is not an empirical generalization of human history, but a creative critical generalization of various theories and views on world history, a kind of logic of history. But, as we know, even “objective” logic does not coincide with concrete reality: there are always more or less significant discrepancies between the logical and the historical.
The views of Marx and Engels on the “objective” logic of history in connection with ideas about socio-economic formations underwent clarification and some changes. Thus, initially they were inclined to the logic of Saint-Simon, identifying slavery and the ancient world, serfdom and the Middle Ages, free (hired) labor and modern times. Then they adopted the logic of Hegel’s division of world history (with certain modifications): the Ancient East (no one is free), antiquity (some are free) and the Germanic world (all are free). The ancient East turned into an Asian mode of production, the ancient world into a slave society, and the Germanic world was divided into serfdom and capitalism.
Finally, by the time Engels wrote “Anti-Dühring” and “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” the “objective logic of history” had acquired its completed form, forming the division of world history into five socio-economic formations, separated from two social triads. The first, “big” triad includes the primitive communal (collectivist) system without private property, its antithesis - the class-antagonistic, private property system and their synthesis in a classless non-antagonistic system of general welfare, or communism. This large “triad” includes the small “triad” of the antagonistic system: slave society, feudalism, or serf society, and, finally, capitalism, or “wage slavery.” Thus, from “objective” dialectical logic the periodization of world history into five formations consistently follows: primitive communism (tribal society), slave society, feudalism, capitalism and communism, which includes socialism as the initial phase, and is sometimes identified with it. This periodization of social progress was mainly based on its Eurocentric interpretation, with some reservations extended to the rest of the world, as well as on its providential character, directed towards communism.
Marx and Engels considered the successive change of socio-economic formations as a “natural historical process”, independent of the consciousness and intentions of people, thereby indirectly likening it to the objective laws of nature. This is evidenced by the very term “formation,” introduced at the end of the 18th century by T. Füchsel and widely used by mineralogists, paleontologists and geologists (including Charles Lyell) to designate historical strata of sedimentary rocks in order to determine their age.
In the century that has passed since the lives of Marx and Engels, our knowledge of the world history of mankind has expanded and multiplied immeasurably: it deepened from the 3rd to the 8th-10th millennia BC, included the Neolithic revolution, and also spread to almost all continents. The history of mankind no longer fits into the idea of the development of society as a change of formations. As an example, we can refer to the history of medieval China, where they were well acquainted with the compass and gunpowder, they invented paper and primitive printing, where paper money was in circulation (long before Western Europe), where the Chinese admiral Chen Ho made six voyages at the beginning of the 15th century to Indonesia, to India, to Africa and even to the Red Sea, which were not inferior in scale to the future voyages of European sailors (which, however, did not lead to the emergence of capitalism).
Thus, the formational path of human development does not at all explain all the complex vicissitudes of the progressive development of society, which is largely due to an exaggerated idea of the role of economic relations in the life of society and the belittlement of the independent (not always relative) role of social customs and morals, culture as a whole in activities of people.
The concept of formations began to lose its former attractiveness as a means of periodizing world history. The very concept of “formation” gradually lost its objective content, in particular due to its arbitrary application to various eras in the history of the “Third World”. More and more historians perceived the concept of “formation” in the sense of M. Weber’s “ideal type”.
Finally, especially from the second half of the 20th century, the following claims began to be made against the concept of formations. It followed from it that socialism, replacing capitalism, should have higher labor productivity, an increase in the well-being of workers and their higher standard of living, the flourishing of democracy and self-government of workers, of course, while maintaining the planned development of the economy and centralized management of many spheres of public life. However, decades passed after the victory of socialism was proclaimed, and the level of economic development and well-being of the population both in the USSR and in other socialist countries still lagged significantly behind the level achieved in developed capitalist countries. Of course, quite convincing explanations were found for this: the socialist revolution was victorious, contrary to forecasts, initially not in advanced, but in economically more backward countries, socialist countries had to experience the dire consequences of World War II, and finally, the “Cold War” absorbs enormous economic and human resources of society . It was difficult to challenge these explanations, but nevertheless a paradoxical situation became increasingly obvious: how could it be possible to be a country with the most progressive social system without being among the most advanced economic countries?
In the 60s, the Marxist leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany raised the question of giving socialism the role of a relatively independent socio-economic formation, which cannot be considered as a simple transition to communism, for discussion among Marxist parties, primarily the CPSU. It can exist for as long as it takes to eliminate its lag behind the parameters of a communist society. Despite initial controversy, this view was largely accepted. Socialism, instead of rapidly “growing into communism,” gradually became a “developed socialist society,” then entered its very initial “stage,” simultaneously approaching theoretically and moving away practically from communism. And finally, in the mid-80s, both the economic and political crisis of socialism became obvious, and at the same time the crisis of Marxism as a whole.
All of the above does not detract from the deep theoretical content of the concept of socio-economic formations. It would be wrong to categorically contrast the civilizational path of human development with the formational one, for both of these approaches to world history do not so much deny as complement each other. The concept of civilizations allows us to comprehend the history of large regions of the globe and large periods in their specific diversity, which eludes formational analysis, as well as to avoid economic determinism, to identify the largely determining role of cultural traditions, the continuity of morals and customs, and the peculiarities of the consciousness of people in different eras. In turn, the formational approach, when applied correctly and carefully, can shed light on the socio-economic periodization in the development of individual peoples and humanity as a whole. Modern historical science and philosophy are now in search of the most fruitful combination of both of these approaches in order to determine the specifics of modern civilization, its historical place in world history and the most promising introduction to the achievements of the planetary, universal civilization that is emerging in our era.