Social structure and forms of consciousness. Vol. 2, The dialectic of structure and history

510 Pages·2011·1.68 MB·English

by  Mészáros

Social Structure and
Forms of Consciousness
VOLUME 2
THE DIALECTIC
OF STRUCTURE AND HISTORY
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Satire and Reality, 1955
La rivolta degli intellettuali in Ungheria, 1958
Attila József e l’arte moderna, 1964
Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 1970
The Necessity of Social Control, 1971
Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, ed., 1971
Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 1972
Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness, ed.,1978
The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom, 1979
Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science, 1986
The Power of Ideology, 1989
Beyond Capital, 1995
L’Alternativa alla Società del Capitale, 2000
Socialism or Barbarism, 2001
A educação para além do capital, 2005
O desafio e o fardo do tempo histórico, 2007
The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 2008
The Structural Crisis of Capital, 2010
Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume I, 2010
Social Structure and
Forms of Consciousness
VOLUME 2
THE DIALECTIC OF STRUCTURE AND HISTORY
by ISTVÁN MÉSZÁROS
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2011 by István Mészáros
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mészáros, István, 1930–
Social structure and forms of consciousness, volume 2 / by István Mészáros.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-58367-236-5 —ISBN 978-1-58367-235-8 (pbk.)
1. Social structure. 2. Consciousness. 3. Marxian school of sociology.
I. Title.
HM706.M47 201
301–dc22
2010002973
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
1. THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL DETERMINATION . . . . . . . . . . . .33
1.1 Material Imperatives and the “Active Side” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
1.2 Philosophical Foundations of Historical Materialism ........36
1.3 The Poverty of “Anti-Historicism” .......................46
1.4 Concepts and Metaphors: A Problem of Method............53
1.5 Technological Determinism and Dialectics.................56
1.6 The Dialectic of Structure and History....................60
2. DIALECTICAL TRANSFORMATIONS: TELEOLOGY,
HISTORY, AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS ...................67
2.1 Social Interaction and Uneven Development...............67
2.2 Problematical Character of Labor’s
Spontaneous Teleology ................................69
2.3 Interdependence and Global Control.....................78
2.4 The Structural Constraints of Social Consciousness.........80
3. KEY CONCEPTS IN THE DIALECTIC OF BASE
AND SUPERSTRUCTURE...................................85
3.1 Hasty Rejection of the Marxian Conceptual Framework......85
3.2 Reproduction of the Operating Conditions of Production...101
3.3 Customs, Tradition and Explicit Law: Historical
Boundaries of the Legal and Political Superstructure.......115
4. MATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
AND IDEOLOGICAL FORMS...............................143
4.1 Historical Conditions and Limits
of “Free Spiritual Production” .........................143
4.2 Key Aspects of Mediation in the Dialectic
of Base and Superstructure............................166
4.3 Ideology and “False Consciousness” ....................188
4.4 Radical Transformation of the Legal
and Political Superstructure ...........................199
5. KANT, HEGEL, MARX: HISTORICAL NECESSITY
AND THE STANDPOINT OF POLITICAL ECONOMY ..........241
5.1 Preliminaries........................................241
5.2 Theology, Teleology, and Philosophy of History...........244
5.3 The Kantian Conception of Historical Development .......247
5.4 The Radical Openness of History.......................253
5.5 Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of History............254
5.6 Naturalistic and Dialectical Conceptions of Necessity.......275
5.7 Need and Necessity in the Historical Dialectic.............280
5.8 The Conflation of Natural and Historical Necessity ........282
5.9 The Disappearing Necessity of Historical Necessity........285
6. STRUCTURE AND HISTORY: THE DIALECTICAL
INTELLIGIBILITY OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT........297
6.1 Preliminaries........................................297
6.2 The Dynamics of Need, Necessity,
and Epochally Sustained Structural Change .............305
6.3 Material and Formal Structures of History:
Critique of Sartre’s Conception of Dialectical
Reason and Historical Totalization......................355
6.4 Structural Imperatives and Historical Temporality:
Critique of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism..........398
6.5 The Law of Uneven Development
and the Role of Scarcity in Historical Conceptions.........431
6.6 The Dialectical Nature of Historical
Change and Advancement.............................454
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .507
For Donatella
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INTRODUCTION
The investigation of the dialectical relationship between structure and
historyis essential for a proper understanding of the nature and the defin-
ing characteristics of any social formation in which sustainable solutions
are being sought to the encountered problems. This is particularly impor-
tant in the case of capital’s social formation, with its inexorable tendency
toward an all-embracing, structurally embedded determination of all
aspects of societal reproduction and the—feasible for the first time ever—
global domination implicit in that form of development. It is therefore by
no means accidental that in the interest of the required structural change
Marx had to focus critical attention on the concept of social structure,in
the historical period of crises and revolutionary explosions of the 1840s
when he articulated his own—radically new—conception of history.
In his first great synthesizing work, the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, Marx put into relief that in the course of modern
historical development natural science, through its close integration with
the material practices of capitalist industrial production, had become in
an alienated form the basis of social life; a circumstance considered by
Marx “a priori a lie.”1In his view this had to be rectified by extricating
science itself from its alienating integument. At the same time science had
to be retained—in a qualitatively modified form, remade as “the science of
man”2 in its inseparability from “the science of history”—the enriching
and gratifying basis of actual human life. But to achieve this fundamental