” CIVILIZATIONS " _
i
Why go back to this notion of civilization whose flagrant theoretical insufficiencies have been shown by Antoine Pelletier? It is that we must distinguish between the chaff of words and the grain of things: burdened with idealism, powerless to go beyond an empirical appropriation of historical material, congealing it on the contrary into a static and incoherent typology, the notion of civilization nonetheless designates, somehow, a rich set of real singularities - what Pelletier called the “ facts of civilization ’’ - whose irreducible character it sets up as absolute. It is these facts that now interest us. As far as the notion is concerned, let us at least temporarily grant it a signaling and indicative valuel
1. This is, moreover, what corresponds to the practice of many Marxist historians: they in no way proscribe the word, but they avoid theorizing its use (see for example Charles Parain: “Proto histoire Mediterraneenne et mode of Asian production", in and let us beware of pronouncing from the outset on its definitive status: that would be to want to start with the end! But we shall not really begin if we confuse questions of terminology with questions of substance.
In essence, the question is as follows: Marxist historians, long too insensitive to the "prodigious" diversity
(Lenin) of historical matter, learn today to discover it better; the "facts of civilization" then appear to them as the index of the resistance that history opposes to any attempt to reabsorb it into the abstract universality - devouring, destitute - of a tyrannical schematism. If we are interested in the notion of civilization and in the use that is made of it today, it is therefore not to find in it an opportunity for an easy polemical victory: we have too often contented ourselves with such triumphs!
We certainly had a critical task to perform. But it was only the prelude to a more positive task, much more arduous and vast, more substantial too; to develop the theoretical instruments allowing us to approach scientifically the study of the “ facts of civilization”, and, more generally, to grasp better than in an empirical way all that human history actually contains of singular and complex.
We are Marxists: we therefore believe that this work can only be accomplished on the terrain of historical materialism.
For us, this cannot be a theoretical accommodation. Nor can there be any question of manufacturing or importing one or more complementary concepts that we would hastily integrate into historical materialism in order to open it up to understanding the “facts of civilization”. More generally, we must give up the hope of finding all at once the key to all the phenomena that concern us.
On the other hand, we cannot dispense with examining our past insufficiencies, rethinking our own conception of history in this light, rediscovering its fruitfulness in order to be able to apply it boldly to new objects - new at least in the to the extent that Marxists have sometimes neglected the study of it: all this will first of all oblige me to take some distance from the immediate question which forms
On the “Asian mode of production", collection of works published by the CERM [Centre for Marxist Studies and Research], Social Editions, Paris, 1969).
the subject of the debate, and perhaps to seem in no hurry to tackle it directly. But nothing is more harmful here than impatience.
It is that the requirements that I have just defined are really formidable. The worst thing would be, however, in my opinion, to elude them indefinitely, by postponing indefinitely the moment when we would feel sufficiently armed to face them: we have to start one day, and sometimes it is better to have a bad start than no start. at all.
Such is in any case the thought that encourages me to publish the study here. Let us also excuse the somewhat disordered form: it was difficult to present otherwise the quite provisional assessment of a research which must be continued, and which has not yet reached the point that we can give a systematic form to the presentation of its results.
The problem of schematism
But I would give the wrong idea of the problem if I didn't correct the above immediately. In fact, this debate on ” civilizations" is a natural extension of the considerable effort undertaken in recent years - notably by the French Marxists - to liquidate the effects of the "theoretical sclerosis ” which had masked the fertility of the historical materialism2 ; However, the work has already largely begun!
For example with the research undertaken on the ” Asian mode of production ”: beyond the problem of rediscovering and studying a social formation whose specificity had been denied or misunderstood, it was a question of defining the place of this formation in universal historical development,
2. Sclerosis “all the more regrettable,” writes Eric Hobsbawm very rightly, “because the last thirty years have been, in many respects, a period of great success for the Marxist conception of history. In fact, one of the most striking illustrations of the superiority of the Marxist method is that, at the very time when creative Marxism was too often doomed to sclerosis, historical materialism nevertheless inspired a good number of valuable historical works and exerted an unprecedented influence on non-Marxist historians. This is what makes the effort to clarify the Marxist analysis of historical evolution all the more necessary today. (Introduction to the English edition of Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, Karl Marx, Precapitalist Economics Formations, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1964, p. 65).
in the "logic" of this development. The idea that we commonly had, among Marxists, of this logic itself found itself somewhat compromised: was it possible to summarize it, as we had got into the habit of doing, in a succession? stages punctuating a perfectly unilinear evolution? Was there not a risk, in doing so, of seriously mutilating the reality of historical development, of misunderstanding its unequal pace, the multiplicity of its forms, the diversity of its paths and its results? This is how we have been led to take seriously, however excessive and onesided it may seem to us, the insistence of many non-Marxist historians on the specific heterogeneity manifested by the " facts of civilization ", and to ask ourselves this problem from our own perspective. Maurice Godelier already indicated this in the study he devoted, in 1964, to the "Asian mode of production ": " It is not only the concept of the Asian mode of production, he wrote, that must be reconsidered. working order, but the very notion of historical necessity, of law in history. »3
"Restore " the notion of historical necessity, universally conceive of a necessity which, far from showing the same face everywhere and always manifesting itself sic et simpliciter, effectively accounts for the complexity of the historical movement and the relative disparity of its results, is this not also what is involved, in substance, in the present debate?
To pose the problem in this way necessarily led us to reject the schematism of the statements in which Stalin had confined historical materialism; to cast doubt in particular on the idea, consecrated and canonized by Stalin in Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, of a universally valid " pattern of evolution " implying the obligatory succession of a determined series of stages of social development.
But this problem of Stalinist schematism requires patient and scrupulous examination. Let us be careful not to speak of it allusively and as if by hearsay, brandishing a few epithets: sweeping judgments will hardly get us any further!
Rather consider, to begin with, that
3. Maurice Godelier: “The notion of the 'Asian mode of production' and Marxist patterns of the evolution of societies”, in On the “Asian mode of production”, op. cit., p. 99.
things are not so simple: isn't what we denounce as a defect, on the contrary, a quality? The gift of briefly and clearly extracting the essential, the ” pedagogical" simplicity were precisely what was praised, not so long ago, in Stalin's work...
Everyone agrees - and Stalin himself repeated it willingly - that reality is richer than any schema.
Are there not, however, useful and legitimate diagrams, pedagogically and theoretically? It will be noted in this connection that Stalin, when he defined the ” five stages" of historical development (the primitive commune, slavery, the feudal regime, the capitalist regime and the socialist regime), specified that it was not a question of only “ fundamental types of production relations ”4 ; he himself notes, moreover, in this passage, the ” schematic" character of the "table" thus drawn, which is intended above all to illustrate "the dependence of the development of the relations of production on the development of the productive forces »5 . If therefore the diagram of
five stages ” excludes the famous “ Asian mode of production”, is it not because this type of society must in fact be considered as an accessory and marginal type with regard to the main axis of historical development ? 6 The problem then would no longer be that of a simple omission, liable to be immediately denounced as a gross error: the problem would be to know whether this way of deciding between the fundamental and the non-fundamental is legitimate. The error, if there
is an error, would be less localizable and ultimately much more serious... But let's not decide too quickly.
Especially since Stalin's work is not, far from it, the only one in question: the Stalinist schema of the ” five stages" only crowns a whole tradition in Marxist literature - a tradition that one could trace it back to The German Ideology7 and
4. Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (1938), in Stalin, Texts, Social Editions, Paris, 1983, volume 2, p. 103 (emphasis added).
5. Ibid, p. 107.
6. We know that in fact the Soviet Marxists had, as early as 1931, officially rejected the very notion of an “ Asiatic” mode of production as a specific form of social relations.
7. See on this point Roger Garaudy, Karl Marx, Seghers, Paris, 1964, p. 92 sq.
which, closer to us, has been illustrated by Engels as well as by Lenin.8
A “ guideline for the study ”
These remarks, all provisional, have no other purpose than to underline the need for serious criticism, getting to the bottom of things and knowing how to avoid that too little prudence, that hasty presumption that one sometimes feels when it is a question of correcting defects whose existence and seriousness are recognized by everyone today. Let us also remember that it would be too convenient to see in Stalinist dogmatism the only reason explaining the need we find ourselves in today to "re-evaluate " historical materialism: there are errors that go back earlier (we often mention those of Plekhanov); and then there is above all, and in a sense there is first, the incompleteness of Marxism itself. We must resolutely recognize this incompleteness and the
necessity, not circumstantial but permanent, of a deepening and a creative development of historical materialism.
Let me explain, and first of all to prevent a misunderstanding: in a sense, the theoretical heritage of Marx and Engels does indeed form a completed whole, an organic set of fundamental concepts to which it would be pointless to claim to add, here from there, some new parts.
This would be to conceive of “creative development” in a dangerously mechanical way! Look at Lenin and his work: to develop Marxism, for him, is to reject any "literal fidelity" to the thought of Marx, but it is at the same time to return unceasingly to the thought of Marx, to this theory "cast in a single block of steel” where the instruments necessary for a scientific study of human history have been forged together and in a sense definitively.
8. Cf. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Social Editions, Paris, 1972 (see in particular p. 161), and Lenin's lecture on the State II would be false however, to conclude that Engels and Lenin rejected the notion of an Asian mode of production. On the case of Lenin, see Eugene Varga's study, "On the Asian mode of production" (reproduced in International Research in the Light of Marxism, no. 57-58: First Class Societies and Asian Mode of Production, 1967, pp. 98-117).
There remains, however, this, which at first will seem trivial: Marx and Engels did not have time to do everything! More precisely: they did not have time to completely clear the immense field of research that they had had so much trouble opening up... To tell the truth, it could not be otherwise. As soon as they abandoned speculation for science, Marx and Engels definitively renounced confining historical development to any Proudhon-style “ progress formula”: they discovered the vast horizon of a domain that they gave us to work on. . From The German Ideology, that is to say from the first consistent formulation of the principles of historical materialism, Marx and Engels are very clear on this point: if they define in broad strokes the main "stages of development" of division of labor and the successive "forms of property" which correspond to them, this diagram is for them the provisional balance sheet of an investigation which is not yet complete, and an instrument capable of facilitating its continuation. The beginning of the book gives us a clear warning on this: the most general results that can be drawn by abstraction from the study of historical development have no value " in themselves", apart from this study. itself, and can in no way provide us with a “recipe” for “ accommodating historical periods ”9
Later, when Marxism had begun to spread, laziness and ease compelled Marx and Engels to energetically renew this warning: we know, for example, Engels' protests against "Marxists" who use the Marxist conception of history to ” label" historical materials without taking the trouble to study them: ” Our conception of history, he adds, is a guideline for study and not a lever serving to constructions in the manner of the Hegelians.
10 Thus the speculative mania, with which Marxism had broken from the start, was now transported within Marxism itself! Marx's disciples treated historical materialism as Proudhon had treated Ricardo: they reduced science ” to
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Social Editions, Paris, 1976, p. 21.
10. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Conrad Schmidt, August 5, 1890, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Philosophical Studies, Social Editions, Paris, 1968, p. 153.
thin proportions of a scientific formula”, which they then pretended to forcefully apply to reality, by “ torturing” the factsll.
Here the narrow adversaries joined, as often happens, the superficial disciples: one easily finds reason to be indignant at Marx's theory when one takes the first word for the last!
So with the Russian populist Mikhailovsky: he constantly denounces Marx's Hegelianism; but it is precisely because he wants to see in the Marxist conception of history a "Hegelian construction", a complete explanation of the totality of the historical process - and not a "directive for study". This does not fail to lead to serious misinterpretations, for example on the part of Capital devoted to the study of the constitutive process of the capitalist mode of production (" primitive accumulation"): it is Marx this time who protests, in a letter too little known which is nevertheless of considerable interest12. May I be excused for quoting again: " It is absolutely necessary for him," wrote Marx, "to transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general march, fatally imposed on all peoples. , whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed [...]. But I beg his pardon. It is doing me, at the same time, too much honor and too much shame. »13
Too much honor, because once again the scientific investigation of historical material is far from complete, far from it. Too much shame, because a "one-size-fits-all" theory, as Marx still says, would be totally powerless to account for the disparity of concrete historical evolutions: science, to be science, must give up "beginning at the end" . If Marx was able to found the scientific method in history, it is precisely because he was able to discard from the outset historico-philosophical reasoning on "society in general" and "progress in general", and that he East
11. See Karl Marx, Misery of Philosophy, Social Editions, Paris, 1972, p. 134 and 61.
12. Letter (in French) to the editors of the Annales de la patrie, November 1877. Known as the "Letter to Mikhailovsky", this letter played a major role in the controversies between Marxists and Russian populists.
13. On precapitalist societies, selected texts from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Social Editions, Paris, 1970, p. 351.
proposed to give only "a scientific analysis of a society and a progress "14.
Engels, and after him Lenin strongly emphasized this incompleteness of historical science. First of all as a datum of fact: “We must re-study all of history, writes Engels, we must submit to a detailed investigation the conditions of existence of the various social formations [...]. On this point, little has been done so far, because only a few people have seriously tackled it. On this point, we need a mass help, the field is infinitely vast. »15
And Engels does not hesitate to declare (we are in 1890) that "economic history" is still "in nappies": its scientific knowledge, he specified in Anti- Duhring, is limited until now "almost exclusively" to the genesis and development of capitalism. As for the scientific results acquired for the periods prior to the “bourgeois era ”, Engels underlined their incomplete and fragmentary character despite the enormous contribution of Marx16. It is true that here the task is in certain respects more arduous, and this not only because of the difficulties specific to the knowledge of a distant past, but also because precapitalist social relations, as Marx and Engels have repeatedly emphasized, are more complex and more "tangled" (Engels) than those of bourgeois society.
Regularity and singularity
We will come back to this last point. But more generally it is to the very nature of the object of historical knowledge that Engels imputes the "delay" of science in this domain. “In the history of society, the repetition of situations is the exception and not the rule, as soon as we go beyond the primitive age of humanity, what is called the stone age; and where such repetitions occur, they do not
14. Cf. Lenin, What are the “friends of the people”, /“Lenin, Selected Works, tome 1:1894-1902, Editions sociales-Editions du Progres, Paris-Moscou, 1990, p. 78 (emphasis added).
15. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Conrad Schmidt, August 5, 1890, letter quoted.
16. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, Social Editions, Paris, 1971, p.
180.
ever produce under exactly the same conditions. If one manages, continues Engels (he specifies that this is the exception), to recognize "the internal sequence of the forms of social and political existence of a period", it is still only a question of a partial
and limited knowledge, since we limit ourselves to “penetrating the sequence and the consequences of certain forms of society and State existing only in a given time and for given peoples. From all this, it should be noted, Engels in no way concludes that history cannot be an object of science: he simply concludes that science is not easy! But he rejects the metaphysical idea of a complete knowledge, which in truth is illusory in any field, and a fortiori in history.
Let us also remember this, which fully corroborates Marx's point of view in the letter quoted above: far from dismissing as theoretically negligible the circumstances
of time and place which give each historical fact its singular figure and its uniqueness, Engels affirms the irreducible character of this uniqueness. Better still, he strongly conceives of it as the mode of existence specific to the object of historical knowledge in general: the history of human society is a process within which the same phenomenon cannot be repeated without modification of the participating substrate. to this very process. Repetition is therefore necessarily non-repetition: “regularity” implies singularity. The evolution of each society is always specified by the specificity of the "conditions" within which it takes place; from one people to another and from one era to another, these conditions are never the same: if there is in history a "rule" which does not suffer from exception, it is this one. ! In this way, the historically analysable "internal sequences" are always singular: this singularity does not contradict their necessity but it is not foreign to it either, since it is implied in it as the condition of its manifestation, thus determining from a new way each time the form in which it is realized.
17. ifcwi, p. 121 and 122.
18. Cf. Lenin: “ The regularity of general development in universal history, far from excluding, implies on the contrary certain periods presenting
singularities either in the form or in the order of development” ( On our revolution, in Lenine, &uvres, Editions sociales-Editions du Progres, Paris-Moscou, 1966-1976, volume 33, p. 490).
Hence the "supra-historical" character of any theory that "goes everywhere" - of any theory aiming to deduce the whole of historical evolution from a " formula " which would then only remain to be applied directly. to each particular evolution: to think " in general" of historical necessity in its abstract universality, outside of any "historical milieu", is only I egitimate on a provisional basis, because, thus defined, necessity will always leave outside she an immense reserve of necessity! "The soul" of Marxism, repeated Lenin, is "the concrete analysis of a concrete situation": the essence of historical materialism, said Engels, runs the risk of escaping those who are content with a few statements, if excellent as it is, essential principles; and he sent the “disciples” back to 18 Brumaire.19
Not that it is not necessary to distinguish the universal from the particular.
But this distinction is one of those which risk, if we are not careful, petrifying into absurdity: it must be conceived as the moment of an essential connection, since the particular finds in the universal the basis of his existence as an individual. The "particularities" - the conditions, the circumstances, the "historical environment" - cannot therefore be reduced to the "universal logic" of social development, nor can they be deduced from it; but neither can they be separated from it, nor be opposed to it, nor simply added to it as its complement, as its empirical accessory: science here must get rid of this coarse "common sense" that Marx characterized by the I ncapacity to grasp, in the same object, the unity with the difference.20
Stalinist dogmatism
And now we can return to Stalin's work: the flaws that compromise its theoretical value are already clear from all that has gone before. Yet let us pose the question again: is it enough in itself to note the schematism of his presentation, the fact that he is content to enumerate, isolating them from any concrete analysis, the "fundamental features"
19. Cf. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Philosophical Studies, op. cit., p. 156.
20. Cf. Karl Marx, Moralizing criticism or critical morality, Philosophical Works, Alfred Costes Publisher, Paris, 1947, volume III, p. 131. A historical materialism? But it would be easy to quote from the classics of Marxism texts that are apparently just as schematic: not only "popular" works with educational purposes (such as Lenin's lecture on The State), but also great theoretical texts - starting with the famous "Preface" to the Contribution to your Critique of Political Economy. Stalin's presentation, precisely, is based on this text, quotes it and comments on it, reproduces its main ideas: where do we see that it is unfaithful to it? Will Stalin be blamed for a few simplifying “shortcuts”? We will find it, of course. Thus, when Marx wrote: "It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, it is conversely their social being which determines their consciousness", Stalin briefly "translates" this principle into a more direct and less abstract language. “Such kind of life, such kind of thinking. But Lenin himself, on occasion, did not hesitate to use quite analogous formulas.21
The difference is rather due to the fact that, in the thought of Marx, Engels or Lenin, such " shortcuts" in no way dispensed with analysis and never claimed to close it: Marx and Engels, as we have seen, were aware of the misunderstandings that a partly inevitable schematism could lead to, especially at a time when it was a question of laying the foundations of historical materialism. And later, with admirable conscience, Engels attributed the errors of the "disciples" in part to the sometimes one-sided insistence that Marx and himself had placed, in the heat of polemics, on emphasizing "essential principles." 22
It is hard to see that Stalin had such scruples!
Quite the contrary: nothing in his apodictic enumeration of "fundamental features" is capable of suggesting that there can be anything essential outside of this essential. If he quotes at length the most important passages of the "Preface " to the Contribution, he nevertheless omits to quote a capital sentence, the one precisely where Marx defines the value and the
21. Lenin writes for example: " The course of ideas depends on the course of things" (What are the "friends of the people", op. cit., p. 72).
22. Cf. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890, letter quoted. On the unilateral abstractions that the necessities of polemics can “naturally” entail, see also Lenin, The Economic Content of Populism, Works, op. cit, volume 1, p. 539 and 540.
role of the principles that he will state: "The general result at which I arrived and which, once achieved, served as a guideline for my studies can briefly be summed up as follows..."
Far be it from me to exhibit this omission as the corpus delicti. It is nevertheless significant: it helps us to understand to what discreet inflection, under the exterior of a literal fidelity, dogmatism was able to subject a lapidary text which wanted to release not only the acquisition of knowledge, but a "conductive thread » for new acquisitions; not only the result of a search but a “ guideline for the study not only a synthesis but the instrument - and the requirement - of new analyses.
In its Stalinist version, historical materialism tends, on the contrary, to present itself as a " finished " system, as a definitive "synthesis " which nevertheless persists in crowning itself with the epithet of scientist. Curious science indeed: science of principles, of " fundamental laws", a kind of "science of sciences" which no longer has much to learn from science and above all expects from it a suitable illustration of the truths it already holds, science who has already completed the sum of his knowledge and whose ambitions are closed! Only a few wording problems are left for him to solve.23
From there, all kinds of confusion are possible, and of the most serious: this is what the famous "theory of the five stages" illustrates with brilliance. I do say theory, even though it is presented in a descriptive form, like a simple " table " ("History knows five fundamental types..."). But one of the major misunderstandings of Stalin's text consists precisely in the fact that it encourages us to confuse the empirical observation of reality with its scientific appropriation24; what is it
23. When, in 1952, the Stalinist formulation of the “fundamental economic law of present-day capitalism” and that of the “fundamental economic law of socialism” (cf. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR), there was much discussion about the "formulations" that should be adopted for the "fundamental laws" specific to feudalism, slavery, etc. To get an idea of the formal character of these discussions, one can refer to the article by Guenther and Schrott, " Theoretical problems of the slave society" (1956), reproduced in International Research in the Light of Marxism, No. 2 : Slavery Antiquity, 1957.
24. “Why is such a social regime succeeded by precisely such a new social regime, and not another? Why to the primitive commune need to distinguish one from the other when one has settled into absolute knowledge? Thus the description is surreptitiously transformed into an apodictic proposition; conversely, the "law" is stated in a descriptive mode, in a serenely abstract "formulation" which nevertheless seems to be nothing more than a direct observation of the phenomena observed. In Marx, the analytical distinction of a series of “progressive epochs” (“Preface ” to the Contribution) always appears as the result of a necessarily incomplete historical investigation: as such, it constitutes a provisional and always revisable schema25. Theoretically, however, it allows Marx to highlight the contradictory unity of the relations of production and the productive forces, and to illustrate the general form of the movement in which this contradiction develops and is resolved: this is what we call the "law of necessary correspondence" between the relations of production and the productive forces. But can this law confer in return on the diagram which made it possible to discover it the value of a unique law of succession of social formations? This would be to suppose that the "form of the movement" of the contradiction includes in the necessity proper to it all the particular determinations of the processes in which it manifests itself, thus rendering superfluous the historical analysis of the "internal links" between the various social formations:
it would therefore be, once again, to interpret Marx's discoveries as if they exempted us from studying history, instead of introducing us to this study!
Let us take the question from another angle. The chronological succession of a series of “progressive epochs” undoubtedly implies in Marx's eyes a necessary order: necessary in what sense? Not at all in the sense of a teleological conception of historical becoming, but only in that the replacement of a given social formation by a precisely succeeds slavery? To the feudal regime, the bourgeois regime, and not some other regime? This is indeed the question that Stalin, from the beginning of his exposition on the "fundamental features" of historical materialism, poses and claims to resolve (Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, op. cit., p. 97): the apparent " descriptive modesty' of the five-stage schema allies itself in a very significant way with this claim.
25. Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction to the English edition of Former Forms of Capitalist Production, art. quoted, p. 19.
of “new and superior” social relations (“Preface”) sanctions and makes possible a progress of the productive forces. Now, thus defined, the necessity which manifests itself in the process of this substitution in no way determines the specific nature of its result: the succession does not make it possible to define a relation of filiation between the modes of production corresponding to each stage. For example: if European feudalism was born on the ruins of the Roman Empire and i f the feudal regime can be considered, from the fundamental point of view of the development of the productive forces, as an improvement compared to ancient slavery, Marx and Engels have nowhere affirmed that the slave system had necessarily, by the sole logic of its internal development, to engender feudal society, as if the latter had been inscribed in advance in the structure of the formation
which preceded it.26 It is no different for the study of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe, as it i s done by Marx in Capital and in his manuscript devoted to “ Pre-capitalist forms ”27: far from appearing as the "fatal" result of the internal dynamics specific to the feudal mode of production, this genesis is the subject of a series of historical analyzes aimed at defining all the conditions that formed its starting point. and to grasp retrospectively, within the pre-capitalist formations (or rather in their interstices), the various processes that created these conditions.
I will come back to this problem. But it seems to me that one conclusion is already clear: a rigorous critique of Stalin's work must clearly denounce the implicit inference thanks to which the " law of necessary correspondence " presents itself as a "law of necessary succession", as a kind of impeccable machinery that would control the unfolding of the whole story by predetermining the sequence and the nature of each of its stages.
Such a mechanistic conception of historical necessity naturally i eads to interpreting history as if it were oriented in advance towards the realization of its end. And this is how we arrive at this astonishing situation: formally maintained in the rigor of its principles, historical materialism in fact becomes a dogma so little materialist and so “supra-historical”
26. Md, p. 28.
27. See Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1858, Social Editions, Paris, 1980, volume 1, p. 410-442.
that it renews, in a "Marxist" form, the finalist illusions proper to the old philosophies of history.
Dogmatism and anti-dogmatism
But it would be difficult to understand Stalin's dogmatism - and the way in which it should be corrected - if we neglected to note another paradox: this dogmatism was never presented as such! It is true that, as a general rule, this kind of defect is rarely admitted... But it is not only a question of that: in words, Stalin never ceased to fight against dogmatism and to repeat that Marxism does not is not a dogma, that the truth is always concrete, that a concrete situation must be analyzed concretely, etc. Dogmatism here consists precisely in reducing to the dimensions of a simple phrase everything that separates Marxism from dogmatism; to recognize in a purely formal and declarative way the great principle of the materialist dialectic, which says that truth is always concrete; not therefore to ignore it, but rather to debase it.
In the domain of historical materialism, this formal anti-dogmatism is reflected quite well in Stalin's insistence on the role of the concrete
historical milieu: does he not declare that " everything depends on the conditions, the place and the time "28? Doesn't he underline the need to consider every phenomenon in its "indissoluble" connection with the "surrounding conditions"29? This principle constitutes precisely, according to him, one of the "fundamental traits" (the first!) which define the "Marxist dialectical method" in opposition to metaphysics...
Decidedly, all this is unassailable.
But is it really enough, to guard against dogmatism, to multiply the references to the specificity of the “ conditions”? Or is it ultimately a way of consolidating dogma - of maintaining dogmatic error - by offering it the convenient complement of empiricism? Very significant in this regard is the practice of Marxist historians who ten or twelve years ago followed Stalin's statements so annoyingly. They too willingly insisted on the " particularities", but in such a way that these, far from calling into question
28. Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, op. cit., p. 85.
29. Ibid., pM
the abstract universality of dogmatic diagrams, appeared in fact as an addition to these diagrams: their role was in short to bridge the gap existing between the diagram and real history, to make the application of the diagram to reality more plausible. history, to mask, while justifying it, the tyranny he subjected her to.
I will take just one example here: by virtue of the schema of the "five stages", the ancient societies of the Near East and the Far East had to be placed in the "first class society"; they therefore had to be defined as slave formations. Yet it was difficult not to recognize that slavery, if it actually existed in the East (in a form very different from classical Greco-Roman slavery), never played a dominant role there. But doesn't dialectic teach us to detect "the seeds of the new", to apply our attention to what is developing ?30 Arguing from this principle, we allowed ourselves to define as slave formations societies where slavery occupied only a marginal place! After which all that remained was to invoke the "particularities": royal property and its coexistence with communal possession of the land, the specific forms of exploitation of the agrarian communities, the forms of despotic state which correspond to them, in short, everything that constitutes the real economic basis of these societies was considered as a simple survival of the primitive community, as an obstacle to social development, the persistence of which was attributed to particular historical or geographical "conditions" rejected in fact, if not in law. , apart from the strictly theoretical analysis.31
It is here that comes into play, to support the dogma itself, the anti Stalinist dogmatism: challenging the above argument
30. Ibid., p. 81. Cf. also, in Anarchisme ou socialisme (1907), Stalin's presentation on the " dialectical method " (on the use made of this text to support the theory of " slavery at its initial", see the article by GA Melekechvili in La Pensee, n° 132, April 1967, p. 33.)
31. See, for example, the report by A L. Sidorov to the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Florence (Relazioni, vol. VT, Florence, 1955, pp. 409 and 410). For a Marxist critique of this point of view, cf. EG Welskopf, Die Prodaktionsverhaltnisse im Alten Orient undin der griechisch-romischen Antike, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1957, p, 450 sq.
summarized, it was risking his wrath! In particular, this meant exposing oneself to the reproach of interpreting the laws of social development in a metaphysical way, without taking into account the “accidents” which can thwart their effects.32 The law, it was pointed out, only defines the tendency of development, its “fundamental content”, which is realized in various forms, according to the “ surrounding conditions”: let us not neglect the diversity of forms and the specificity of conditions! Of course, this warning was not long in being supplemented by a warning in the opposite direction: that the secondary particularities do not make us forget the ” fundamental content" - that the tree does not hide the forest from us! Then returning, by a kind of pendular movement, to the first antiphon: "It would however be wrong, it was said, to conceive of this content in a unilateral way, by isolating it from concrete historical circumstances," etc.
This, unfortunately, is hardly a caricature: it would be easy to cite examples of this skilful seesaw, which seems to reduce all the problems to that of a formulation ensuring a fair balance between the abstract universality of a preconceived schema and ” particularities" grasped in a wholly empirical manner. The wording is intended to be definitive, but the dosage whose measure it seeks to establish inevitably turns out to be precarious: hence this hesitant approach, hence these inconsistencies that one perceives through so many sharp declarations, and which are like the sign of their theoretical impotence.
To characterize this impotence, I will again use what Marx wrote about Proudhon: Marx evoked those metaphysicians who, by making abstractions, ” imagine themselves doing analysis and who, as they detach more and more objects, imagine approaching them to the point of penetrating them”; these intrepid thinkers, he added, are perfectly right - from their point of view - ” to say that things here below are embroideries whose logical categories form the canvas ".33 Similarly, Stalinist dogmatism believed to define the essence of the historical process at the very moment when, in reality, it imposes on history a "supra-historical" norm. This “canvas” once drawn, remains to be embroidered on it: embroider as much as you want! As soon as "the essential" has been exiled
3
32. Cf. R. Guenther and G. Schrott, “Theoretical problems of the slave society”, art. quoted, p. 23.
33. Karl Marx, Misery of Philosophy, op. cit., p, 85.
far from the ' accidental ', beyond the reach of ' conditions',
'particularities', circumstances, Stalin is quite at ease in declaring that ' everything depends on the conditions All ? It is too much and it is too little, since this whole is the whole of history, thus handed over to empiricism, but the whole of history minus the essence of the historical process, defined once and for all by the Dogme. Hence these hesitations (or this skilful double game) between two disjointed perspectives: practically held to be decisive, the “conditions " are judged in the end to be theoretically indifferent. The relationship of complementarity which is established between these two points of view assures the system as a whole of its formally unassailable character, but at the same time designates its major weakness.
I will summarize this point by saying that the Stalinist error is defined by a double and contradictory approach: it transports the universal into the particular, but only to immediately expel the particular from the universal: powerless to grasp in the particular “ the very universal which makes it this particular”34, it confuses when it is necessary to distinguish and it separates when it is necessary to link.
A “dialectized” scheme
I insist on these two aspects because, in my opinion, failing to grasp them both in their reciprocal dependence, we run the risk of not actually going beyond Stalin's dogmatism. And the intention here is so far from sufficient that I ask the following question: is there not a way of correcting dogmatism which amounts in fact to perpetuating it, insofar as it consists in sum of doing to assert in a more subtle or more insistent form the correctives with which he had provided himself? And for example, isn't this what risks happening when, after having denounced the “insufficiency” of the schema of evolution consecrated by Stalin, one proclaims the necessity of “dialectizing” it? At the very least, it seems to me that the role thus assigned to dialectics is equivocal: is it a question of rethinking our conception of historical development in such a way as to eliminate all trace of mechanism? Can we not fear that it is simply a matter of making a series of “ dialectical” amendments to a plan that has remained fundamentally mechanistic?
34. I borrow this formula from Louis Althusser (cf. Pour Marx,
Maspero, Paris, 1965, p. 224).
Let us say that this second hypothesis is sometimes verified: to "dialectize" the diagram, it is then hardly anything other than to embellish it with some general references to the "lags" between the base and the superstructures, to the role of tradition, " vis inertiae of history", to the "survivals", to the inequalities of development, to natural conditions, to historical circumstances, etc. What must be criticized in such references is first of all that they present themselves as the solution of the problem when they should indicate the paths of a research that remains to be carried out, both to define the theoretical status of all these notions only to implement them in historical analysis. It is then that they appear too often, indeed, as a series of amendments intervening, if I may say so, in second order: the complexity of the real historical movement thus seems to be attributed to a series of disturbing influences. conceived as external and contingent factors with regard to this movement itself, and capable at most of modifying the rhythm of the process or the modalities of its effects, without affecting its results or its “fundamental” content. Now it seems to me, once again, that this way of seeing is in formal contradiction with the conceptions of Marx and Engels: far from immediately dismissing these particular
a
E
"factors" as purely phenomenal forms or as data inorganic elements external to the necessity of historical evolution, they included them in the concept of this necessity35 ; that is to say that they conceived their own effectiveness not as statutorily "secondary," but rather as subordinated to a totality of determinations and relations whose relative heterogeneity does not contradict their unity.
The meaning of this "inclusion" is not easy to grasp: let us try to bring it out more clearly by taking the example of "geographical conditions". Stalin contented himself, with regard to them, with refuting the old theories which made the cause
35. Cf. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Starkenburg, January 25, 1894: “The concept of economic relations also includes the geographical basis on which these take place and the vestiges, actually transmitted, of the stages of previous economic development which has been maintained, often by tradition alone or by vis iner tiae, naturally also the external environment which surrounds this social form. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on “Le Capital”, Social Editions, Paris, 1972, p. 410; it is the author who underlines.)
principle of historical evolution, and underlined the "non-determining" character of their influence : 36 was said Marx and Engels, as for them, do not stop at these negative conclusions: they consider concretely the role of the geographical conditions in the evolution of a given company, and they show that this role can be important, especially in the most primitive phases of social development.
But in doing so they also do not fall into the "geographism " that a Plekhanov, for example, was not always able to avoid. What is this defect?
Not so much to exaggerate the influence of the natural environment (the problem, once again, is not to obtain the right balance), but to make it the "ultimate cause" of the development of the productive forces and thereby of step by step, through all the mediations one wishes, the final cause of the particular evolution of such and such a society, 37 thus to go beyond the mechanistic point of view of a "reciprocal action" between the geographical and the historical. It is important to note that Marx, for his part, makes little use of the Plekhanovian notion of “ geographical environment”: he prefers that of “ historical environment”, which includes its content and goes beyond it. It is because for him the geographical environment "posited as such" imposes nothing on history; not that its influence is theoretically negligible or even “ secondary”: it is rather relative to the historical movement itself, which integrates it as one of its own components. Insofar as they influence history, geographical conditions can no longer be defined as data external or prior to historical evolution: "natural premises" of history, they
36. Cf. Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, op. cit., p. 803 and 804.
37. See for example this text in the Essay on the development of the monist conception of history: “In the final analysis this structure [the “structure of the collectivity”] is thus determined by the properties of the geographical environment which provides to man more or less margin for the development of his forces of production. » (Georges Plekhanov, Philosophical Works, Editions du Progres, Moscow, 1954, volume I, p. 711.) are modified, informed and in a sense produced by them; they therefore appear as properly historical conditions.
Plekhanov
If I speak of Plekhanov, it is because once again "Stalinism" is not the only cause here. But I would like, even at the cost of a detour in my presentation, to talk about it better than simply "in passing": do not the theoretical errors of the man who was one of the most intelligent "disciples" of his generation risk not to be meaningful? Especially since Plekhanov - unlike Stalin in 1938 - had a very keen awareness of the need to develop historical materialism. See for example this passage, in the Essays on the History of Materialism36: “ The work began in the hands of incomparable masters, we have only to continue it. And we
have to do this if we don't want to turn Marx's brilliant thought into something "grayish", "Cimmerian", "cadaverous" in our heads. »
Lucid and prophetic thinking! But declarations of intent are not enough. The very intention, the awareness of the task, is not enough: the task must actually be carried out... Plekhanov keenly felt and proclaimed the necessity of concrete historical analyses; he felt what was sterile in the simple repetition of "fundamental propositions "39.
Yet it was not he who wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and his work remains above all a "defense and illustration ” of Marxism: as regards the concrete analyses, which condition the development of the theory, a sort of latent positivism pushes him too often to rely on bourgeois historians, to wait and register the confirmations that their work would bring of themselves to the Marxist conception of history.40
But let us return to Plekhanov's “ geography” and the theoretical errors associated with it. Excuse me for repro
38. Georges Plekhanov, Essays on the History of Materialism, Social Editions, Paris, 1957, p. 183.
39. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, Essay on the development of the monistic conception of history, op. cit., p. 694.
40. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, The Fundamental Questions of Marxism, Social Editions, Paris, 1950, p. 77.
here, in extenso, to illustrate this point, an entire page by this author can be found: it is found in Fundamental Questions of Marxism (1908), and the context is provided by the commentary on the "law of necessary correspondence" between the relations of production and the productive forces, as stated by Marx in the famous text of the " Preface" to the Contribution. “ We have here
before our eyes,” writes Plekhanov after quoting this text, “a veritable ' algebra', a purely materialist ' algebra' of social evolution. Then he goes on to comment more specifically on the sentence, which caused so much ink to flow, in which Marx characterized " the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production" as so many " progressive epochs of economic social formation". . And Plekhanov then writes this: "It
must be believed that after having subsequently read Morgan's book on primitive society, Marx modified his conception of the relationship existing between the ancient mode of production and the oriental mode of production . . Indeed, the logic of the economic development of the feudal/production mode brought about the social revolution which marked the triumph of capitalism. But the logic of economic development, for example in China or in ancient Egypt, in no way led to the appearance of the ancient mode of production. In the first case, it is a question of two phases of development, one of which follows the other and is engendered by it, while the second case rather presents us with two coexisting types of economic development. Ancient society succeeded the social organization by clans, and this also preceded the advent of the Eastern social system . Each of these two types of economic organization arose as a result of the growth of the productive forces which had taken place within the clan-based social organization and which was ultimately to bring about the decomposition of that organization. And if these two types differ significantly from each other, their main distinctive signs were formed under the influence of the geographical environment. In one case, the latter prescribed to a society having reached a determined degree of development of the productive forces such a set of relations of production, in another case, such another set, quite distinct from the first.
41. Georges Plekhanov, Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op. cit., p. 53 and 54 (emphasis added).
This text seems significant to me in many respects, and I will about three kinds of remarks:
1. We can note first of all that Plekhanov, who attaches capital importance to the works of Morgan and to the book by Engels on The Origin of the Family, does not for all that abandon the notion of an Asian mode of production ("oriental "), which he conceives on the contrary as a social formation "quite distinct" from the society
slavery.42 What seems to him called into question by Morgan's discoveries is the place of this formation in the "logic" of historical development, as defined in his eyes by the "progression" indicated by Marx in the "Preface" of 1859. Plekhanov is then led to put forward the idea of a plurality of paths of evolution starting from primitive society, thus rejecting the hypothesis of a unilinear evolution. We see that Plekhanov (unlike, here again, Stalin thirty years later) is sensitive to the disparity of the results of the historical movement: history is not for him this unique scale on which all human societies should, early or later, successively climb each degree!
2. But how to account for the “considerable” divergence between these two evolutions whose starting point is assumed to be identical? Plekhanov's answer is simple and categorical: it consists in invoking “the influence of the geographical environment”, which “prescribes”, depending on the case, two different types of relations of production. There is no need to insist further on the inadequacy
- on the falsity in the end - of this explanation: in the fine work that he devoted to the Asian mode of production43, Ferenc Tokei criticized it in a convincing and detailed manner, in contrasting Plekhanov's "geographism" with the numerous texts that Marx devoted to this problem. If we refer to this analysis, we will see that Marx, certainly, is far from neglecting the role of the geographical conditions specific to the ancient East (territorial extension, vast desert areas, need for irrigation), but that refuses to consider them alone, to separate them from
42. It is therefore completely inaccurate to speak about this text, as Maurice Godelier does (Sur le mode de production asia tique, op. cit., p. 80, note 2) of “the interpretation of Plekhanov of an abandonment by Marx of the notion of an Asian mode of production”.
43. Ferenc TOkei, “The Asian mode of production in the work of Marx and Engels”, La Pensee, no. 114, April 1964.
strictly historical conditions. The “geographical factor”, concludes Ferenc Tokei, is thus reduced “to its fair value” ; more precisely: it cannot " prescribe" anything for social development, since its effects are always a function of the " historical environment" within which they are exercised.
3. But the important thing is to understand that this geographical determinism, whose non-Marxist character is obvious, constitutes the complement and in a sense the expression of another theoretical error of which I have already spoken and on which I must now return: it generally consists in making Marx say more than he says, and in interpreting the text of the "Preface" in such a way that one comes to reduce the "logic" of social development to a formula, to an “algebra”44. It consists more especially in interpreting in an abusive way the succession of "progressive epochs" indicated by Marx in this same text: if Marx characterizes ("qualifies" ) the "Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois " modes of production as so many of historical moments whose succession marks progress, he in no way tells us that each of these economic systems "generates", by the sole logic of its internal development, the one which succeeds it. In fact, one would look in vain for a text in which Marx, whether before or after Morgan's book, defined between the Asian mode of production and "ancient" societies the relationship of logical filiation that Plekhanov believed implied in the simple temporal succession. .45
Moreover, Plekhanov's interpretation supposes that Marx would have claimed to resolve, at least essentially, all the problems of " economic history", of the "internal link" between the different social formations, of the passage from one mode of production to another: which Marx and Engels, as we have seen, expressly defended themselves against. On the other hand, if it is true that Marx's work offers us instruments
44. Plekhanov, it is true, uses this expression only in quotation marks and to paraphrase a saying of Herzen, who saw in the Hegelian dialectic “a veritable algebra of the revolution” (see The Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op. cit . ., pp. 38 and 39), but, related to this source, the expression is no less significant.
45. On this point, see Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction to the English edition of Former Forms of Capitalist Production, art. quoted, p. 36.
of decisive value in thinking about these problems, the way of approaching them that it illustrates invalidates any superficial evolutionism: the Stalinist problematic of the "fundamental laws" specific to each mode of production - by which it was claimed to account for the necessity of its dissolution and the genesis of the following formation - is foreign to Marx's thought.46
But i sn't it already virtually present in this text by Plekhanov? Hence his failure to think about the problem of divergent evolutions: if the "logic" of strictly historical evolution can be reduced to an " algebra " , how can the disparity of concrete evolutions be explained, if not by bringing in history, directly as such, a cause external to history?
After that, Plekhanov can well emphasize that the degree of social development in turn determines the influence of the geographical environment: he has read too much Hegel not to recognize the theoretical insufficiency of the relation of reciprocal action thus defined. “The point of view of reciprocal action”, he declares then, is “legitimate " and “inevitable ”47; however, we must “ go further ”48. In what
does this excess consist of? In fact, it hardly takes place except from one abstract and declarative way, by (often brilliant) criticism of the eclecticism specific to the " theory of factors" and by the assertion reiterated the monist character of the Marxist conception of history.
But one recognizes too easily here this "verbal monism" that
criticized Lenin49; Plekhanov, ultimately, merely superimposes
what he calls "the monistic formula "50 from the " inevitable " point of view
of reciprocal action. So much so that at the very moment when he strives to
hold both ends of the chain by simultaneously denouncing the
"empty formalism" of a pseudo-Marxist dogma and the empiricism of
factors", Plekhanov manages to cumulate these two
46. On the failure of this problematic, cf. Eric Hobsbawm, ibid., p. 60 and 61.
47. Georges Plekhanov, Essays on the History of Materialism, op. quoted,
p. 182.
48. See Georges Plekhanov, The Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op.cit.pH
49. Cf. Lenin, Works, op. cit., volume 23, p. 58.
50. Georges Plekhanov, The Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op.cit., p.71.
kinds of faults! So true it is, once again, that polemical declarations are not enough for everything.
Provisional conclusions
This is what warns me myself that it is time to close the critical part of this presentation to finally approach the “ positive task”. From all that precedes I will retain at least this: it is wrong to oppose to the "internal logic" of social evolution purely "external" factors which would disturb from the outside or secondarily complicate the effects of its mechanism. That is to say that the " internal necessity" of the historical process manifests itself as an "internal-external" necessity, in a way. But understanding this point imposes on us, it seems to me, two theoretical requirements that I would now like to define, both as an initial assessment and as a “guideline” for what follows.
In the first place, we must get rid of the terribly abstract and poor conception of historical development that the "evolutionist" ideology of the last century,51 powerfully relayed in this by Stalin's popularization, imposed on Marxist research in history. In short, this conception amounts to affirming that all of history is progress, that is to say, development: an "irresistible" development, the content and antagonistic character of which are uniformly defined by the struggle between the new, to which the future belongs”, and the old, “which stubbornly persists even though it must inevitably succumb ”.52 Thus
51. Marx and Engels repeatedly criticized the different manifestations of this ideology: Marx, for example, criticized “ the usual abstract form " given to the idea of progress (cf.
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Social Editions, Paris,
1972, p. 173); Engels, in the same way, notes in the historical work of Maurer “the prejudice of the philosophy of the Enlightenment according to which it is necessary that from the dark Middle Ages there has taken place a constant progress towards the better; it prevents him not only from seeing the adversarial character of real progress, but also the isolated sel (Letter to Marx, December 15, 1882, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, op. cit., p. 299).
52. Cf. A. L. Sidorov, report to the International Congress of Historical Sciences, art. quoted, p. 397 and 398. On the “struggle between the old and the new”, see also Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, op. cit., p. 101.
history becomes a triumphal march, punctuated by battles won in advance! It is conceivable that a historian armed with such a conception is hardly in a position to think theoretically about the ” setbacks", the stagnations and the setbacks without which the history of humanity would be another history: he will then be tempted either to either to deny their existence, or to attribute them to obstacles "encountered" by social development but foreign by nature to its own dynamic, since the latter can only produce by itself the triumph of the new... He will therefore use, in the latter case, the “residual concepts” whose role is to justify the persistence, here and there, of the old, and to explain the insignificant “sooner or later” of its defeat53; for example the “law of unequal development” (we will discuss this later); for example survivals, or even the ” force of inertia ” of tradition, which is conveniently hypostatized into a particular force - as if inertia were not included in the law of movement itself.
The second conclusion - the second task to be defined - is closely
linked to the first: this task consists in applying in a consistent way the idea, constantly present in Marx, that there is no History prescribing by advances its paths and stages to human history, that history is a necessary but in no way "fatal" process, that the concrete historical evolution of a given society depends on a given "historical milieu". For it is not enough to repeat and paraphrase these general statements: it is essential, in particular, to specify the content of the concept of historical environment and to define the theoretical foundations of its validity in order to be able to handle it, in concrete historical analysis, in a way that is not empirical. It is here, precisely, that one can touch with one's finger the theoretical difficulties which a Plekhanov could not overcome: one finds in him a number of excellent commentaries on the fatalistic error, on the need to take into account the conditions specific to each era and each society. But when it comes to applying these principles to historical analysis - or at least to giving "examples ” - we see that Plekhanov reduces the ” historical environment" to a "set of external conditions ” which are summarize, in the end, in the addition of two elements: on the one hand the "influence of the geographical environment", on the other hand
53. See for example Guenther and Schrott, “ Theoretical Problems of Slave Society ”, art. quoted, p.. 23-25.
“ international relations”, that is to say the further influence, on such a society, of the societies that surround it54 I hope I have said enough about the inadequacy of this point of view...
And finally I would like to express what the English call a "second thought", which will perhaps correct or at least which will reflect my "first movement". Until now, I have placed myself in the field of criticism, even of a polemic not devoid of "passion"; and the reader may have noted that even when I apply myself to defining the "positive task", I resolve so badly to leave this field that the definition, in fact, remains essentially negative: well, that's enough! But I cannot close this chapter without striving to dissipate, at least by a provisional declaration, an ambiguity that one will perhaps have perceived there and which is precisely the effect of the almost constantly negative character of my exposition. I criticized a vulgar, abstract and poor conception of historical evolution; I rejected a mechanistic and teleological conception of the necessity of this evolution: to clear the way for what?
To reject any "theory of evolution"? To denounce in the very idea of a necessary historical development a dogmatic illusion? Failing to have warned her, I must foresee such a question. Especially since if we examine the currents of thought which currently dominate research in the human sciences, we can hardly avoid noticing that the critique of evolutionism and historicism, such as these currents l express, indeed leads to this rejection or seems to lead to it. I must therefore, at least "provisionally", answer this question now and specify that in my opinion Marxism cannot, without denying itself, throw overboard neither the notion of a historical development necessary, nor more generally the "theory of evolution," that is to say dialectics.
I cannot hide from myself what is so unsatisfactory in an affirmation of principle so summarily formulated. Because on the one hand it is so classic that some will consider it superfluous; but, on the other hand, precisely because it 54. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, Essays on the History of Materialism, op. cit., p. 182 and 183.
is "classical", it is so far from self-evident, and today less than ever, that it would require a long development on its own. For the moment, I will content myself with clarifying my thoughts by invoking the example of Lenin: noting that the idea of development and evolution had, at the beginning of this century, "almost entirely penetrated the social consciousness", Lenin constantly protested against the debasement of this idea; but this from the point of view of dialectics, that is to say in the name of a theory of evolution infinitely more "vast", more "subtle", richer in content than vulgar evolutionism.65 C It is from this "point of view" that my own critical examination has sought to be inspired, but not always sufficiently visibly, it seems to me, that I need not say so now.
Obviously, this clarification is far from sufficient since I said what the necessity of historical evolution is not without showing what it is, without showing in what sense it is not a dogmatic illusion. To elucidate this meaning - to "restore" the notion of historical necessity - such is precisely the "positive task". Which supposes, in my opinion, that initially we treat this notion less as an acquired fact (which it already is) than as a "guideline for the study", as a working hypothesis whose fruitfulness by implementing it in the concrete historical study of the problems posed by the history of "civilizations ": is it possible or not to go further, in the analysis of the "facts of civilization", than a static and descriptive typology? This is what to check.
The important thing therefore is for the moment this: one cannot highlight and define the necessity of a historical process without studying the real content of this process. Is it not Lenin again who warns us of this? Let us remember what he said about Mikhaiyovski, petty-bourgeois interpreter of Marx and destroyer of Marxism.
"The distortion brought into the question by Mr. Mikhaiyavsky is obvious: he left aside all the real content of the theory, all its
essence, and presented things as if the whole theory were reduced to the single word "necessity" [. ..]. In other words, having said nothing of the doctrine, he stuck only to his label. »56
55. Cf Lenin, “Karl Marx”, Works, op. cit., volume 21, p. 48 and 49.
56. Lenin, What are the “friends of the people”, op. cit., p. 90.
Lenin said the same thing about the "objectivist" Struve, "bourgeois defender" of Marxism: to speak of "invincible historical tendencies" and "discuss" on the necessity of a historical process without studying the content of the process, it is to reduce the notion of necessity to a "word", it is to abandon materialism . .
II
And now, to approach the "positive task", I will start from an idea put forward by Jean Boulier-Fraissinet during the debate organized by the Center for Marxist Studies and Research68 on the problems that concern us: notion of
civilization, noted Boulier-Fraissinet, was not elaborated in the classic works of Marxist thought, in the sense in which it is currently understood. Where one would expect to find it is the concept of "nation" which holds er. »
This last assertion cannot fail to attract our attention: it certainly deserves to be clarified, and the kind of equivalence that it seems to establish between the two notions is doubtless difficult to accept. But this point would require a special discussion which I cannot open here. Suffice it to remember the interest there is, for our purposes, in examining the concept of "nation" and the use made of it by Marx and Engels, notably in The German Ideology, where the word appears with particular frequency.
A “natural prerequisite ”
Let us specify right away that it is not a question here of nations in the modern sense of the word, which designates a "category of ascending capitalism": it is a question of nations in a much more general sense, which is the Latin sense of the term, that is, of the distribution of the human species into a series of distinct ethnic communities . It is in this sense, most often, that the
57. Cf. Lenin, The Economic Content of Populism, op. cit., p. 433.
58. Colloquium on “ The notion of civilization”, November 1965.
59. It is moreover to The German Ideology that Jean Boulier Fraissinet referred.
term appears in The German Ideology,60 and this in constant connection with the idea, on which Marx and Engels particularly insist in this work, that the primitive stages of historical evolution are dominated by the " scattering", by the isolation and by partitioning: the "primitive isolation of the various nations "61 and the very existence of these as "exclusive" communities62 thus appear as -
"natural premises" of human history. Subsequently, Marx would develop and complete these views: in his manuscript devoted to "pre-capitalist forms", he shows in particular that the transition from animals to humans and all that it causes to emerge that is qualitatively new (the appropriation activity of nature by man, human language, the progressive accumulation of a technical heritage transmitted from generation to generation) would be inconceivable if we took the isolated individual as our starting point. Man as an isolated individual is only the result of the historical process: originally, he appears as a generic being, as a " tribal" being.
(Stammwesen), as part of a “ herd ”63; the individual adheres from the outset ("as strongly as a bee to its swarm", Marx would say in Capital) to a "natural " community (natarwuchsige Stammgemeinschaft) which represents a preliminary condition, anterior to his activity as well as his own body, of his existence as a producer, that is, of his existence as a man.
60. But also in many subsequent works by Marx or Engels: in Le Capital, book III, tome 1, Editions sociales, Paris, 1957, p. 341, Marx speaks of “ national pre-capitalist modes of production”; in his Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels opposes Christianity, as a “universal religion”, to the old “ national” pagan cults {cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Philosophical Studies, op. cit., p. 56).
61. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 35,
62. Ibid., p.S8.
63. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms prior to capitalist production, in Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1858, op. cit, volume 1, p. 433. See also the Introduction of 1857, where Marx shows that the individual, in historical epochs prior to bourgeois society, always appears as "an element of a determined and limited human conglomerate" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 17).
64. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., especially p. 426 and 429, and Le Capital, book I, Social Editions, Paris, 1983, or
The ethnic specifications of the human race therefore present themselves, in the eyes of the historian, as a datum that nature offers "ready-made" for historical development, which finds in it one of the first conditions of its existence. But let us beware of this notion of "precondition" (Voraussetzung) and how it should be used. In his Introduction of 1857, Marx provides us with crucial details on this subject:
“Production, he says, does indeed have its own conditions and premises, which constitute its factors. These may appear at the very beginning as natural data. The very process of production transforms these natural givens into historical givens and, if they appear for one period as natural premises of production, for another period they have been the historical result. As part of production, they are constantly being changed.”65
What does this mean except that there are no purely natural conditions , no more than an absolute starting point ? If it is true that men, as is already said in The German Ideology (p. 25), always find themselves "facing a nature which is historical and a history which is natural", what may appear as a starting point must at the same time be conceived as a result.
Basically, the analyzes that Engels later devoted to the problem of anthropogenesis (where, for example, he shows that the hand is not only the " organ of work", but also "the product of work") are in the straight line of the conception that I have just recalled and represent a consequent application of its principle.
Let us try in our turn to apply the same principle to the object considered here: we will be led to correct what I was saying earlier, or at least to clarify it by conceiving the "original" ethnic diversity of the non-human race. not as the inert survival in history of a pre-historic datum, but as the result of an ethnic (or rather “ethnic-cultural”) diversification involved in the general process of hominization. So that then this "natural given" will appear as the product ("constantly modified") of historical development itself, this at least insofar as this 65. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 161 and 162.
development can be defined as a process of natural history.
Hominization and diversification of ethnic groups
Now, this point of view seems to me to be confirmed in a striking way by the conclusions authorized by the recent acquisitions of prehistory: I refer here to the last work of Leroi Gourhan, who studies the testimony - certainly very limited, but significant - what can the evolution of the lithic industry from its origins to the Upper Palaeolithic bring to us on the “diversification of ethnic groups”66. However incomplete and crude it may still be, the "cartography" of the types of stone tools and that of their technical variants, epoch by epoch, makes it possible to identify some decisive results: at the most primitive stage, the documents available (pebble-culture), already relatively abundant and distributed over the entire expanse of the African continent, do not reveal any differences other than "those which are linked to the nature of the rock used". This situation does not fundamentally change at the next stage (early Palaeolithic), although the types of tools begin to multiply and the variable proportions according to which they are distributed reveal the existence of "several large industrial layers" - which Leroi-Gourhan also proposes to call (improperly, he specifies) “layers of civilization”; but these "very large cultural areas" remain weakly differentiated and seem perfectly homogeneous, nothing yet attesting to the existence of "regional variants" for the same type of tool: "A Saharan handaxe and a Somme handaxe are not in nothing distinguishable by their technique. The “regional” diversification of techniques, still extremely limited to the Middle Paleolithic, only really manifested itself with magnitude in the Upper Paleolithic (thirty to thirty-five thousand years before our era), which here marks a qualitatively new stage:
“ If, over several hundreds of thousands of years, from Great Brittany in South Africa, the handaxe remains unchanged, Upper Paleolithic in the space of twenty thousand years and for
66. Cf. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, The Gesture and the Word, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1964, volume 1, p. 200-204.
Western Europe alone, the twenty basic types of tools offer more than two hundred variants. »67
Now Leroi-Gourhan remarks that this "cultural diversification" coincides on the one hand with a considerable acceleration (or better said a "transformation") of the "rhythm of technical evolution", on the other hand with the appearance of 'homo sapiens, which marks the completion of biological hominization. A remarkably attentive and coherent interpretation of all these facts, and of the significant concomitances which they bring to light, then leads the author to formulate the following conclusion: in the most remote phases of prehistory, the "material culture" remained so slight and so rudimentary that technical evolution remains subordinate to biological evolution and does not go beyond the "frame" of the latter; as long as this is so, humanity is essentially defined as a single phylum: the splitting of the human zoological species into a multiplicity of culturally heterogeneous ethnic groups only appears when the properly historical-technical evolution and cultural, economic, social - affirms its specificity in relation to biological evolution and takes precedence over it in a way that is decisive enough to relay it .
How to understand this correspondence and define its necessity? It lies essentially in the fact that the genetic heritage evolving by " biological drift " belongs to the species, whereas the technical-cultural heritage, evolving by cumulative progression through generations of men, belongs not to the species in as such, but to the "natural" community of producers, to the human zoological "herd" slowly becoming a human group and functioning as a " subsistence unit", as an economic unit. The historical modalities of the transmission and modification of the acquired cannot therefore present the uniform character of biological evolution: they imply a “diversification”, which gives each community an original “group personality”.
On the other hand, and precisely because the characteristic of the historical acquisitions of humanity is to be transmitted by way of precept or example, and not by sexual reproduction, the acquisition of a given group can be suitable no
67. Ibid., p.204.
only by later generations of this group, but also by other groups with which it has come into contact: this possibility of diffusion, which constitutes a specific modality of technical and cultural evolution, actually plays such a role important that history knows no human group whose cultural treasure does not include borrowings from other groups. It would therefore be wrong to imagine that the diversity of cultures expresses an absolute isolation of each group: all recent research tends, on the contrary, to confirm the extent and complexity, from the most distant periods, of networks of acculturation. , and show what is illusory in the idea of a community living without any link
with the exterior68. However, the extension of these exchange networks is necessarily limited', hence a non-homogeneous human space, where little by little " groups of cultural affinities" (Leroi-Gourhan) more or less vast and more or less fluid form, re-form, superimpose themselves on each other, intertwine and modify... The study of prehistory has something precious about it - nothing for history itself - that it imposes on mind with particular force of evidence the idea that man is a natural being who historically produces his own humanity. That is to say that human history is not a process constituted from the outset in its specificity, but that on the contrary the specificity of the historical is a result of the historical process itself, which must be defined as a natural history process . Thus, when humanity "leaves" nature, it gains access to a new quality which remains " dominated " by the old for a long time: this is why history is first of all prehistory. And similarly when prehistory begins to become history (when social evolution "takes over" from nature), the history of society remains, and for a long time, "prehistory of humanity." 68. See ibid., p. 218. From this point of view, it seems to me that a reservation is necessary with regard to certain formulas of The Ideology of the Mande Wing on "primitive isolation." Moreover, the research of prehistorians today shows that the human species only spread relatively recently in certain parts of the globe (for example on the American continent), and that isolation very often appears as the result of this geographical extension of human settlement (see on this subject Grahame Clark, La Prehistoire de l'Humanite, Payot, Paris, 1962, p. 37).
This makes it possible to understand, it seems to me, how the existence of "nations" - of ethnic-cultural disparities - can be analyzed on the one hand by the prehistorian (from a genetic perspective) as the sign of outcrop of the historical and on the other hand by the historian (in a retrospective form) as a " natural datum ". It is not a question of completing these two perspectives one by the other: on the contrary, it is a question of breaking down the partitioning of perspectives - and of the disciplines which correspond to them - in order to recapture what founds the unity of their object. It is therefore a question, once again, of conceiving of human historical development as a process of “natural history ", of clarifying all that this conception implies, and finally of applying it to concrete analysis. And for that, the work of Marx has some chance of being useful to us.
“Local” developments and “global” history
So back to Marx. I will first quote a text from The German Ideology which, while summarizing some of the conclusions we have already reached, will allow us to see new extensions of them: this text is taken from a passage in which Marx and Engels endeavor to show that the history of societies is founded on the development of the productive forces, which determines in each period the "form" of social relations and the changes in this form; then they go on to write: "This development occurring naturally, that is to say, not being subordinated to a general plan drawn up by freely associated individuals, it starts from different
localities, tribes, nations , of different branches of work, etc., each of which develops at first independently of the others and enters only little by little into connection with the others. Moreover, it progresses only very slowly;
the different stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the interest which triumphs and they still drag themselves along for centuries by its side. »
9
We find here, but clarified in its content and in its extension, the notion of natural development: it is defined negatively by its opposite, that is to say by the 69, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 67.
notion of "planned" development , of development subject to the conscious control of "freely associated" individuals. Thus the history of humanity, up to
the triumph of communism, is a “natural” process, and its path opens blindly like that of a mole! Which means that it is not fully “history of humanity”: it becomes so, and this as the productive forces and social relations “grow ”70. The entire first part of The German Ideology illustrates this i dea and clarifies it: one can only speak of a history of humanity, show Marx and Engels, from the moment when social development has created "men empirically universal, historical" (emphasis added by the authors) - that i s, from the moment when individuals are forced to live "on the level of world history" and no longer "on that of life local ”7 \ But world history has not always existed72: it was truly “created” by modern big i ndustry (L'Ideologieallemand, op. cit., p. 58), that is, say by "the productive forces developed up to the stage of totality" (ibid,, p. 71), and simultaneously by the world market, that is to say by the "universal relations" whose emergence, on the basis of big industry, resulted in the dissolution of all the old "natural" relationships (ibid, p. 58). And the worldwide triumph of communism will mark the completion of this process of universalizing history (cf. ibid., p. 36).
Thus, to treat past history as a history which would be "universal" from the outset - as the history of a humanity which would be i ntegrally "historical" from the outset - is to transport i nto the past "an abstraction of previous history” (ibid., p. 35); it is to put at the origin of the process what is only its result, and thereby to fall back into the old finalist illusions; it is to come to conceive historical necessity as the providential design of a History which would hover above history and would guide from the outside
70. Cf. Karl Marx, Letter to Annenkov, December 28, 1846, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, Social Editions, Paris, 1971, volume l, p. 446.
71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p.33.
72. Cf. Karl Marx, Introduction of 1857: “Universal history has not always existed; history considered as universal history is a result. ( Manuscripts of 1857-1858, op. cit., tome 1, p. 44.)
real historical evolution, thus prophetically mimicking that “conscious planning” whose practical conditions (the “free association” of individuals, their emancipation from all “natural” ties) are produced by the real movement! At this point, I would offer the following
remark: Marxists have sharply and rightly reproached historians of "civilizations" for considering history as "a sum of isolated civilizations, each of which develops by itself", and, in so doing, to break the “unity of
the world historical process”73. But do they always
correctly defined the error thus denounced? If one examines it in the light of what precedes, it seems to me that one realizes that it is a question much less of an "absurdity" than of a "superfluity": to see there only an "absurdity", do we not ourselves run the risk of conceiving in a speculative way the unity of the historical process, and of losing sight of the "natural " character of this process?
It must be recognized that Marxist historians have more than once fallen into this sort of error: how could this have happened? Basically, the answer is always the same: it is that they had badly assimilated Marxism, and that they did not know how to respond to the necessities of its development. Because they were Marxists, they were among the first to feel and to formulate the requirement" today almost shared by everyone, to go beyond the "Eurocentrism" of traditional history to found a concretely universal historical science. in its extension.
Because they were too little Marxists, they only went beyond Eurocentrism by universalizing it, extending at the same time to the scale of “universal history " what Marx had said “ nar vom europaischen point of view years" [only from the exclusively European point of view]74 : hence the “theory of the five stages”, the rejection of “Asian exceptionalism”, etc.
73. See the intervention by E. Joukov at the Royaumont International Meeting, May 1961 {What future awaits /7iomme?, PUF, Paris, 1961, p. 21).
74. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 433:
Marx uses this formula in connection with Greco-Roman slavery, which he clearly distinguishes from the " generalized slavery of the East."
Survivals
That said for the moment, and I'm sorry, by simple parenthesis. Because I haven't yet finished with the text quoted earlier: in the last sentence, Marx and Engels address the question, which I believe to be essential in this debate, of what are called survivals; and they shed light on it in my opinion in a decisive way by showing that the weight of survivals is intimately linked to the reality of compartmentalization, these two traits both belonging to the history of human societies as long as it remains a “natural” story. I will explain myself on this point. First, however, allow me another parenthesis to say, or rather to say again that we have often shown ourselves (we: I mean the Marxists) far too undemanding in the use we have made of this concept of survivals; do we want to designate in this way, universally and in all cases, the “residual vestiges” of the old quality which subsist after the transition to the new quality? But the historical movement is not so uniform that the modalities of this passage and the depth of the transformations it implies are always and everywhere identical... To tell the truth, I think that a certain abstract and unilateral conception of evolution by successive "leaps " has caused a lot of damage here: it has caused us to forget that the degree of completion of the destruction, of the liquidation of the old is not fixed once and for all and that, from a " jump" to another, it is in fact very variable. There are cases, as we have seen, where the old quality survives so well that it continues, by means of a change of form, to dominate the new quality: one can see what a mistake it would be to treat such a "survival" as an insignificant " residue".
In reality, for Marx and for Engels, survivals do not designate the "by-products" of historical evolution, the impurities which escape its law, its dross: on the contrary, they designate the natural limits of this evolution, such as they fit into his lot
Reading The German Ideology sheds further light on this crucial question. I will start here from the idea, taken up later in the Manifesto and in many other texts, that bourgeois society simplified and deepened class antagonisms. In The German Ideology, this idea appears in a particularly interesting form: classes properly speaking, say Marx and Engels, could only have been created by
the “ universal relations” which develop on the basis of modern big industry; in older times, when society remained a prisoner of "natural" relations, classes were only orders or states , even more primitively castes75, and class relations were much more "entangled" than in society. modern bourgeois. Hence the unprecedented advent, with modern society, of a "universal class", that is to say first of all a class whose fundamental interests are identical in all countries and whose struggle necessarily goes beyond the framework local and national, secondly of a class whose conditions of existence are such that it no longer has any particular interest to uphold, and that it can only fight to suppress itself as a class by suppressing class antagonisms; this "universal class" - this class which already represents the "expression of the dissolution of all classes" - is the modern proletariat. Thus the notion of class is realized in all its purity only when it reverses itself!
But this contradiction is not a "logical" contradiction: it belongs to reality, and only expresses the transitory (historical, or rather prehistoric) character of class societies.
What interests us for the moment in this analysis is the unprecedented universality of the proletarian revolution itself, both as regards its extension and as regards the depth of the transformations it implies: the first revolution carried out indeed in the interest of the majority, it is infinitely more radical than all previous social upheavals.76 “All previous revolutionary appropriations were limited”
(The German Ideology, p. 103): they had no other result than to substitute one dominant class for another and to widen the base of class domination (cf. ibid, p. 77), this precisely in order to perpetuate the fact of domination, which corresponded to an insurmountable historical necessity as long as
75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 73 and 74. Subsequently, Marx will define the caste system as the product of a “negative evolution” (cf. Karl Marx, Former Forms of Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 438).
76. See also on this point Le 18 Brumaire by Louis Bonaparte, by Marx, and Engels' Introduction to Class Struggles in France (Editions sociales, Paris, 1972, p. 17).
the productive forces remained limited. In this way, the social transformations prior to the proletarian revolution represented more “reshufflings” than “revolutions”: they “subordinated” the particular interests of the new ruling class to the particular interests of the old one, and ended up absorbing them. within those; but they never completely liquidated the earlier stages, so that what had resisted their destructive effects encumbered ("burdened") all subsequent development78 insofar as the new social regime "absorbed" the old regime instead of eliminating it, it itself represented only the permanence (in a "converted" form) of the old.
Hence precisely the "survivals", hence the slowness of development as a whole and its inequality. To treat survivals as accidental impurities is to stick to empiricism. Nor will it suffice to invoke, in order to explain the fact, what is in sum only a double of the fact, and to argue, for example, that no social formation is absolutely "pure." What must be conceived is first of all that a social formation will be all the less pure as it
77. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit. "Until now, all emancipations had as their foundation limited productive forces, the production of which was insufficient for the whole of society, making development possible only if some satisfied their needs at the expense of others and thus received - they, the minority - the monopoly of development” (p. 437). Engels took up the same idea in the Anti-Duhring, op.
cit., p. 317, 78. Marx and Engels specify that this survival of prior
interests makes itself felt particularly in the domain of the state and
of law (cf. The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 67). But it would, it
seems to me, be misunderstanding their thinking to relate the
whole analysis of survivals to the "discrepancy" between the
economic base and the political or ideological superstructures, and
to the "relative autonomy" of which these these are provided as superstructure:
To take up an example frequently analyzed by Marx: will the
survival of Roman law well beyond ancient society be sufficiently
explained by the “ relative autonomy ” of legal superstructures? It
is clear, in this case, that the permanence of the superstructure is
linked to the maintenance and development of certain fundamental
elements of the base itself (private property), that is to say to the
limited character of the transformations that the base has undergone
in depth.
will have been more powerless to make, as our International says, " a clean slate of the past” in order to create an adequate basis for its own development; it is then that this very impotence expresses, in the final analysis, the "local" character of the productive forces, the limits of their development, the "limited" character of the forms of relations which correspond to them. Whence the preponderant role of tradition in the most primitive phases of historical evolution :79 social transformations, and even the most decisive ones as regards their subsequent consequences, take place there " silently", in a manner natural” and almost imperceptible, by slow metamorphoses, so much so that they appear as a perpetuation of the old order at the very moment when they deny it. To characterize this type of evolution, Marx meaningfully used
the expression: “becoming traditional”81; that is to say, once again, what a mistake it would be to represent the “force of inertia” of tradition as a “personal adversary of progress ”82; tradition appears on the contrary as a mode
79. Cf. Karl Marx, Le Capital, book 11, tome 3, Editions sociales, Paris, 1972, p. 173 and 174.
80. On this subject, see Marx quoted by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, op. cit., p. 57. On the “gradual” transformation of functions of common interest into state power, cf. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op, cit., p. 211 and 212. On the “natural” development of Asian societies and on the way in which the customs of primitive society are both perpetuated there and converted into their opposite, cf. Ferenc Tokei, “ The Asian mode of production in the work of Marx and Engels”, art. quoted. Even such a " historic" upheaval as the Athenian democratic revolution of the end of the sixth century BC took the form of a " restoration" (see on this subject George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society, volume H: The First Philosophers, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1955, pp. 226 and 227).
81. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 423: the different forms of primitive agrarian communities, writes Marx, are “more or less natural” (naturwucfisig) although one part already produced by a historical becoming, but by a “traditional” becoming (historisch gewordner, aber traditionell gewordner) .
82. Engels' expression on "necessity manifested and completed by chance" is often quoted. But we sometimes tend to forget the context, which clearly situates and limits the field of its application: “Men make their own history, writes
development itself, as the expression of its own internal limitation.
The inequality of development
But I did say: slowness and inequality of development How does inequality (or "disproportion", as Lenin also called it) fit into the law of a "natural " and uncontrolled historical development, of a " narrow" development , whose starting point is "local"? This is another crucial aspect of our problem - perhaps the most difficult. One could approach the question in a purely theoretical way by endeavoring to demonstrate that a limited, "natural" and uncontrolled development necessarily includes in its concept the role played by chance83 . But I prefer to choose a starting point less distant from concrete historical analysis, even if it means contenting myself first with studying a series of examples and cases. The first case will be that of " regressions " or " disappearances" caused by the fortuitous destruction of the productive forces acquired in a given " national" sphere. I cannot do better here than to quote another passage from The German Ideology:
“ It depends solely on the extension of exchanges whether the productive forces acquired in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for further development or not. As long as commercial relations
Engels, but so far they are not conforming to a collective will, according to an overall plan [...]. Their efforts thwart each other, and this is precisely the reason why necessity reigns in all societies of this kind, supplemented and manifested by chance” (my emphasis) (Friedrich Engels, Letter to Starkenburg, 25 January 1894, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on "Capital", op. cit., p. 411).
83. I borrow this expression from a passage in The Holy Family, where Marx criticizes in a very significant way an abstract and absolute conception of progress : around in circles. Far from assuming that the category "of progress" is totally empty and abstract, the Absolute Critique is on the contrary judicious enough to recognize that "progress" is absolute, and to explain regression by supposing a "personal adversary" of the progress "
(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Za Sainte Famille, Social Editions, Paris, 1969, p. 106).
beyond the immediate vicinity do not yet exist, one must make the same invention i n particular in each locality, and it is enough for pure chance, such as the irruption of barbarian peoples and even ordinary wars, to oblige a country which has productive forces and needs developed from scratch. At the beginning of history, each invention had to be recreated every day and made independently in each locality [...]. The duration of the acquired productive forces is not assured until the day when commerce has become a world commerce based on large-scale industry and when all nations are drawn into the struggle of competition.
84
ence. »
Here, it seems to me, is a fairly clear definition of the necessity on which the existence of these "accidents" is based: their real possibility i s objectively inscribed in the " limited " character of the productive forces and of social relations, in the " I ocal" character of their starting point and of their development. Hence the vast cemetery of “disappeared civilizations”: the “ beginnings ” are often exposed to being started again.85
I will dwell more on the second case, although I have already spoken about it previously: it is that of inequality determined by the influence of the "geographical environment " on the development of the productive forces, and thus on the overall social development.
Defined i n these terms - in terms "plekhano-venus" - this inequality appears at first purely "external",
84. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. quote, p. 52 and 53.
85. One can also wonder if our era has really emerged from these “beginnings”. "History," said Paul Langevin, "has only j ust begun," and perhaps this word is secretly beginning to age: it is not yet outdated. Also, it does not betray, it seems to me, the spirit of Marx and Engels to attribute to their analysis a greater extension than they do here themselves: the duration of " acquired productive forces" will not be definitively assured, as we well know today, until the freely associated individuals exercise a sufficient degree of control over social development; and from the constitution of the world market to the realization of this condition, the path is much longer than Marx imagined in 1846. However, the possibility of a regression, of an " accidental destruction"
is not not yet ruled out: this possibility therefore appears, ultimately, as a fact specific to the whole of our "prehistory".
in the sense that Louis Althusser could use the expression86, that is to say foreign to the law of development itself. But we already know that in order to analyze this question in a satisfactory way we must go beyond the point of view of a ” reciprocal action" between the natural environment and history, that is to say, grasp ourselves from the outset of the “third term” which encompasses and contains these two terms87. The “third term”, basically, we have already defined: it is historical development itself, but conceived as a natural process extending and relaying the history of nature.
To clarify this point, I will start from a remark proposed by Helene Antoniadis-Bibicou in an article dedicated to society
of the Middle Ages88 : the importance of the geographical factor in the formation of a mode of production must, she wrote, be evaluated in a different way according to the degree of development considered; it is "strong" if it is a pre-capitalist mode, ” weak" if it is a mode of production corresponding to modern production techniques. It seems to me that this remark is entirely in line with Marx's analyses: the modern productive forces assume such a high degree of domination over nature that the contingencies linked to the diversity of natural conditions become relatively indifferent to their development; the same is not true for the less evolved stages, where the limits of
production (of the appropriation of nature by man) necessarily leave a determining role to the particularities of the natural environment89 : the more the ” productive forces"
86. Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, op. cit., p. 218.
87. Cf. Hegel, quoted by Lenin, Cahiers Philosophiques, Social Editions, Paris, 1955, p. 135. This is indeed how Pekhanov himself defined the problem (cf. Essays on the History of Materialism, op. cit., p. 182); but, as I showed in the first part of this study, going beyond the "point of view of reciprocal action" often takes place, with Pekhanov, in a purely verbal manner.
88. Cf. Helene Antoniadis-Bibicou, -“Byzantium and the Asian mode of production”, On the “Asian mode of production”, op. quoted, p. 199. See also Pierre Boiteau, "Land rights in precolonial Malagasy society", ibid, p. 166 and 167.
89. On the role of climatic fluctuations (glacial and interglacial periods) during prehistory, see Grahame Clark, The Prehistory of Humanity, op. cit. “ The cumulative effects of these
ves acquired” are weak, the more their progress is closely subordinated to a “favorable environment” defined by relatively exceptional natural conditions .
The Neolithic Revolution
Here again, prehistory will offer us a striking illustration.
Let us take the example of what has been called the “Neolithic revolution”: capital revolution indeed since it is about the passage, some ten thousand years ago, of an “ economy of prey” still almost animal ( hunting, gathering) to agriculture and animal husbandry, i.e. to a stage where production finally really corresponds to its concept, to the concept of a conscious transformation of nature by human labor90. But it is again Andre Leroi-Gourhan who, in his last book, warns us of Terror that we would have to imagine this "revolution" as a sudden upheaval91 : on the contrary, it took place in a very progressive way. and almost "imperceptible", by "synchronic shift" from hunting to breeding and from gathering to agriculture. From the functional exploitation of a hunting territory to “proto-breeding”, from protobreeding to domestication and breeding proper, the transition took place slowly and quite spontaneously. But precisely because of this " spontaneous" character, it could only take place at first thanks to certain conditions.
great fluctuations in the characteristics of the physical environment, Clark writes, must have been all the stronger because the cultural capital available in prehistoric times was miserably thin " (p. 20).
90. We see how Lenin's saying is verified here again: "When the new has just been born, the old always remains, for a certain time, stronger than it" ("The Great Initiative", ^uvres, tome 29 , p.
429). Production, as a transforming activity of nature, begins to replace passive adaptation to nature from the most primitive tool; but it remains for a long time limited to the simple animal, “predatory” appropriation of the resources which nature offers to men “all ready”; and in a sense, as Engels has shown, it will remain "predatory" as long as men have not rationally organized their relations with nature and their own social relations (cf. Friedrich Engels, Dialectic of Nature, Social Editions, Paris, 1971, p. 180-183).
91. Cf. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, The Gesture and the Word, op. cit., volume 1, p. 122
sq.
(geographical and bio-zoological) “quite particular ”92; so particular that, with the sole exception of the American lama, " all breeding constitutes a coherent historical block" formed by extension and diffusion of the principle acquired in an "initial focus": unique - the ancient Near East - where found the relatively exceptional
"favorable environment" allowing the transition to take place "spontaneously ".
It is no different for what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the "invention" of agriculture, that is, for the transition from the seasonal harvesting of wild grasses ("proto-agriculture") to the organized production of cereals: the transition from gathering to agriculture initially took place where, to cultivate, men had almost nothing to do but gather93. And it is no coincidence that the new agricultural economy thus constituted experienced its first great flowering in the alluvial valleys (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley) where the fertility of the silt was such that the harvest was done, so to speak . all alone ”94.
92. See also on this question Grahame Clark, The Prehistory of Humanity, op. cit., who insists on the role of climatic changes following the last ice age: in Western Asia, drought and increasing aridity upset the balance of previous societies and compelled them to find new means of subsistence; thus, in this region, the most advanced hunting communities were led to "seek closer relations with certain species of animals and plants, in a way which ultimately led to their domestication" (p. 87).
93. However, there are several independent “foci of origin” here: domestication of maize in Mexico, domestication of barley and wheat in Asia Minor, domestication of rice in Southeast Asia, and so on. The best known and oldest focus is that of Asia Minor, where the development of agriculture took place parallel to that of stockbreeding.
94. But only once control of the water regime had been achieved (cf. Karl Marx, Capital, book I, op. cit., p. 574 and 575). Archeology today confirms that the "preparatory stages" of the great agricultural civilizations of the Near East took place outside the alluvial valleys, in the mountainous regions of Palestine, Syria and northern Iraq. (it is precisely there that the prototypes of barley and wheat were met in the wild state, as well as various species of wild sheep): "It was only when social development had comparatively progressed,
Thus this decisive progress towards the domination of nature is subordinated first of all to the possibilities which nature itself offers, and the transformation which it implies appears as the result of a progressive alteration of the old form: that is precisely which expresses the limits of the transformation, its unfinished character. Hence also the fact that the environment initially favorable to the new acquisition freezes it, so to speak, in its incompleteness and therefore becomes unfavorable to its subsequent elaboration, which can only take place if the acquired knowledge is transferred outside its environment . of origin.
The alphabet revolution
Another example will illustrate this consequence: I will choose that of the "invention" of the alphabet, or better said of the alphabetical "revolution", as Marcel Cohen puts it of a sudden upheaval, but of a vast and complex process in which it is necessary to distinguish a whole series of stages and successive transitions. And this revolution still resembles the one we have just studied in that it occurred only once in history, although it eventually acquired an almost universal extension: all the alphabets existing ones derive from the Phoenician alphabet96.
Significant paradox: what became “the rule ” was born as an exception
I am considering here only the last act, or more precisely the penultimate and the last act of this revolution: to embrace its entire movement, one would have to go back to the first phonographic elements that appeared within the Egyptian and Sumerian ideographic systems; then it would be necessary to study by what set of transfers and displacements these "complementary ” and marginal phonograms were able to acquire a rather determining role for the appearance, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, of syllabic writings writes Grahame Clark, that the occupation of alluvial soils, involving irrigation and the massive importation of essential raw materials, became possible” (The Prehistory of Humanity, op. cit., p. 100).
95. Cf. Marcel Cohen, Writing, Social Editions, Paris, 1953, p.
55.
96. This filiation remains obscure in certain cases (writings of ancient India): it nevertheless seems very probable (cf. ibid., pp. 64 and 65).
(Cretan scripts, Cypriot script) governed entirely by the phonetic principle - although this was not applied 'to the end', nor consequently brought out in all its clarity97.
It was then that the Phoenician “invention” intervened, marking the transition from the syllabary to the alphabet. The important thing is to note that it was favored by a “natural fact” specific to the linguistic domain within which it took place; the Semitic languages indeed contain radicals generally constituted by three consonants, which form the apparent support of the meaning of each word - the vocali-cal stamps playing a reduced role; so much so that when it was applied to the transcription of a Semitic language, the already acquired principle of "syllable phonography" quite naturally provided the basis of a consonant alphabet. But in return this " favorable environment" limited the transformation that it made possible and left it unfinished, since this writing which imposed on the reader the task of guessing the vowels was nothing other, basically, than a particularly convenient syllabary. . Thus, insofar as it was conditioned by a particular "environment", the Phoenician acquisition represented only the penultimate act of a revolution whose completion was conditioned by the transfer of this acquisition outside the environment which allowed it: the last act of the alphabetical revolution took place when the Greeks, who could not dispense with noting vowels, found in the Phoenician heritage a "ready-made" basis for forming their own writing system.
We can now, if we look again at the whole of this evolution, draw some important conclusions. And this first, which confirms what I said earlier on the same subject: the " natural conditions " - in this case the " linguistic environment" - are by no means negligible and can play a determining role in the technical and cultural evolution, but only within a given "historical milieu" and to a determined degree of development.
97. To tell the truth, the conditions under which the Aegean syllables appeared remain unknown until now; but their formation is hardly conceivable independently of previous acquisitions.
The expansion and international use of Sumero-Accadian writing, which made extensive use of syllabo-phonograms, undoubtedly played an important role (see on this subject Georges Mounin, Histoire de la linguistics, PUF, Paris, 1967, p.56).
expansion. For example: the linguistic particularities which favored the constitution of the Phoenician consonantal alphabet also existed in the language of ancient Egypt, which also belonged to the Hamito-Semitic group; and yet Egyptian writing has never been able to eliminate the ideographic system: a wide use of "complementary" phonograms has led to the constitution, within the system, of a sort of alphabet formed of monocon-sonantic signs, but this "alphabet "98, instead of developing into an independent system, remained "drowned in the ideographic system". given stage and under particular conditions, which were not those of ancient Egypt. It i s therefore impossible to grant to "natural conditions" the status of a specific determinism "intervening" i n the course of historical evolution. to "prescribe" a particular development.
This is still a completely negative conclusion. Let us therefore continue our examination by studying another example: how to explain a "fact of civilization" as remarkable in itself - and by all its consequences in the field of art, thought, etc.100 - as the permanence until nowadays, in China, of a non-alphabetic writing system still in full vitality? All the authors recognize here a natural determination of the Chinese "linguistic environment": from the time when Chinese writing was born, the words of this language were formed of a single syllable, homophonies being avoided thanks to the differences marked by the elevation or by the modulations of the voice. This monosyllabic structure allowed the constitution of a very original writing system, “both entirely ideographic, since each character is a word sign, and entirely phonographic. Phonography is of the syllabic type, each character being a syllable-sign or syEabo phonogram .
98. On the inappropriateness of this appellation, cf. Georges Mounin, History of Linguistics, op. cit., p. 43 and 44.
99. Cf. Marcel Cohen, The Writing, op. quoted, p. 35.
100. Cf. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, The Gesture and the Word, op. cit., volume 1, p. 282-289.
Chinese are both complementary and alien to each other: hence the extreme discrepancy between reading and writing, between written and spoken language. Hence also the possibility of using, without knowing the spoken language, the written Chinese language as a scholarly language: which partly explains the influence of Chinese writing and the culture it conveyed in Korea, Japan , in Vietnam, as well as the cultural unity of the vast Chinese world itself. Hence, finally, the extraordinary coherence and stability of the
system: a kind of perfection of a certain kind was obtained from the outset, but by that very fact it could not be surpassed.
Here we are, then, in the presence of a particular case where the causality assignable to the natural characteristics of language manifests itself in such a striking manner that one may be tempted to see in it a perfectly sufficient explanation: is it in truth ? Supposing that it is, we would also have to suppose that the absence, in the Egyptian or Sumerian ideographic systems, of the “ natural advantages” from which the Chinese system benefited would have been sufficient to bring about the decomposition of these systems and their disappearance. But it is not so. Take the Egyptian system: all in all, it showed a capacity for duration which is not incomparable with that of the Chinese system, since it survived from the fourth millennium until the fifth century of our era, its tradition not having been definitively destroyed only by the " historic turmoil " following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The very early visible inconsistencies and limits of the system in no way constituted a decisive obstacle to its survival: it appears to do so, as we have seen, by " secreting " secondary phonographic systems which made up for the impotence of ideography without destroy the principle. Extreme and laborious complexity, in our eyes unviable! And yet this is how the system ensured its permanence.
We must therefore push the explanation further. Here again I find precious help in Marcel Cohen's little book on writing, which I have already used extensively for this chapter. When discussing the Chinese writing system, Marcel Cohen writes:
"Any writing system that develops spontaneously and is not imposed from outside is more or less modeled on the character of the language for which it is formed" (p. 25).
Thus the fact that Chinese writing matches the characters of the language it transcribes is itself conditioned by a datum
strictly historical: this writing was born and developed “ on site”, and no historical break could call into question (as happened for example for Sumerian writing) the autochthonous character of its development. And is it not also in this "autochthony" that the explanation for the longevity of the Egyptian system must be found ? "natural" that alphabetic writing is inconceivable within the framework of "on-site" development: the birth of the alphabet, as we have seen, presupposes "progress by transfer", or rather a series of transfers, displacements and ruptures103 which could only have occurred in a determined "historical milieu", characterized by an exceptionally complex, dense and shifting network of relations and interferences between various "linguistic milieus", between "ethnic" units -cultural" many and diverse.
Technical progress and “ cultural circulation”
n
I hope I have come far enough in this analysis to be able now to put forward two ideas partly new, partly already implied in all that precedes. First of all, this paradox, which upsets the very terms of the question we had posed: what requires a particular historical explanation is not so much what today takes the visible form of an " exception" (the permanence of Chinese writing), it is rather the unique process in history (the advent of alphabetic writing) that gave birth to the “rule” itself; what requires explanation is less the persistence of a "natural" writing system than the tearing away from this natural form, the break with it. In other words, we can only reject, once again, this kind of distribution which attributes to “ particularities” the role of explaining the obstacles to historical evolution, while the “fundamental laws” would define the necessity of this evolution: to draw this dividing line between the general and the particular is to reason as if progress were always going
102. Cf. Marcel Cohen, The Writing, op. cit., p. 29.
103. Cf. Holger Pedersen: "In general, it seems that the great simplifications in the methods of writing occur during their transfer from one people to another" (quoted by Georges Mounin, History of Linguistics, op cit., p. 80).
self ! Whereas in fact a progress such as alphabetic writing could only have taken place under “exceptional” historical conditions; and if it nevertheless takes on a universal character, this character belongs to it as a result of the historical process but in no way belongs to the process which engendered it.
Conversely, moreover, the singularity, the “ contingency” of this process in no way contradicts the universality of its result—that is, the necessity of its historical production.
Let us also remember this factor of diversity. On this point, it seems to me that my analysis could be clarified by a passage from Capital where Marx precisely comes to speak of the influence of natural conditions on social development: Marx observes first of all that "the productivity of labor depends on natural conditions in which it takes place” - for example, for agriculture, the fertility of the soil; but he immediately adds this:
“It does not follow in the least that the most fertile soil is also the cleanest and most favorable to the development of capitalist production, which presupposes the domination of man over nature. A nature that is too prodigal "holds man by the hand like a child on the edge"; it prevents it from developing by not making its development a natural necessity. The homeland of capital is not in the climate of the tropics, amidst lush vegetation, but in the temperate zone. It is not the absolute fertility of the soil, but rather the diversity of its chemical qualities, of its geological composition, of its physical configuration and the variety of its natural products which form the natural basis of the social division of labor and which excite man, because of the multiform conditions in the midst of which he finds himself placed, to multiply his needs, his faculties, his means and modes of work.
Plekhanov willingly cites this text when he speaks of the geographical environment and its role. However, I hardly see that he draws the necessary conclusions from it, in particular this: there is no "absolutely" favorable environment, no favorable environment in itself: a given natural environment is only favorable transitionally and under determined historical conditions ; beyond the limits of the particular "transition" it has favored, this same environment can become an obstacle. Whence, for example, this other paradox, which the ancient Greeks had already noted: if
the Greeks are more civilized than the " barbarian" peoples, it is, they said, because necessity demanded virtue, Greece having always had "poverty as a foster sister " (Herodotus, Histories, VII, 102). In fact, the Greek cities never had an agricultural surplus comparable to that of the pharaohs of Egypt, and the extraordinary hole they made in history is not independent of this natural condition, apparently nothing I ess than favorable...
The only characteristic of the natural environment which can generally be defined as favorable to development is the diversity of conditions, their " multiform" and changing character, the incentive to progress which this diversity offers. But precisely this character is not a quality "in itself": the geographical environment provides nothing more here than the "natural basis" of a mobility which in itself is less the fact of geography than of the history -of the "historic environment" - since it depends in particular on whether or not development is indigenous \n a given national sphere.
It is here that we can highlight the historical role of what I have called "progress by transfer": it is clear, in fact, in this case, that "diversity" is not offered by nature only insofar as it is produced by historical development, the latter taking the form of a " displacement." Now, is not this form of development a necessary consequence of the "narrow" and limited character of the most primitive phases of social evolution? More precisely: is it not a necessary manifestation of the movement which breaks this narrowness and goes beyond it, that is to say of the progressive passage from a "natural" evolution, limited to the framework of local I ife, to a truly “world” history ?
If this is indeed the case, it will not be enough, I n studying "progress by transference", to show how transference favors progress: it will be necessary to conceive of transference as a particular but necessary moment of progress itself. Which obviously presupposes that we renounce, as Marx demanded, " taking the idea of progress in the usual abstract form "105: if we conceive of progress
like an abstractly universal and uniform law in the production of its effects, there will be a tendency to neglect, even to deny the role and even the reality of the phenomena of acculturation, borrowing, diffusion; and this is precisely what we observe among the representatives
nineteenth-century historical evolutionism , including vulgar Marxism.
An error often feeds the opposite error, by providing it with the appearance of justification: the anti-evolutionist currents of the beginning of this century (Austrian "historical-cultural" school, Anglo-Saxon cultural anthropology) granted these same phenomena a methodological priority absolute and used them to rule out any " theory of evolution" in history. Yet such is also, it seems to me, the perspective that prevails among our modern historians of " civilizations": very attentive to what they call "encounters of civilizations", they tend to highlight purely external between these static entities, true subjects of history, which are for them civilizations. So much so that these relations seem to affect only in an accidental way the immutable being of each civilization, the solipsistic universe of each "culture": the constituted forms are thus endowed with an absolute independence in relation to the movement which constitutes them, or who abolishes them; while this movement itself, insofar as its reality is still recognized, appears either as the result of a radically contingent interplay of "historical occurrences" (Levi-Strauss), or as the product of a purely subjective, of a "choice of civilization" (Braudel).
A Marxist approach to these problems will obviously be quite different. Not that it is a question of denying the role of “external” relations: it is a question of defining what, in the nature of the internal movement, founds the necessity of this role. It is therefore a matter of placing these phenomena of diffusion, borrowing, transfer, " recovery" in the general perspective of historical evolution: more precisely, we said, to conceive of them as specific modalities of this evolution.
This presupposes that we take care not to “harden”, as we too often do today, the difference between external relations and internal relations108.
106. For example in the works, moreover so remarkable, of Lewis Henry Morgan (see on this subject Irmgard Sellnow, Grund prinzipien einer Periodisierung der Urgeschichte, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1961, pp.
41-52).
107. For a Marxist critique of these currents, see ibid., p. 57-67.
108. On this subject, see Lucien Seve, “ Structural method and dialectical method”, La Pensee, no. 135, October 1967, p. 92 (reprinted in Structuralisme et dialectique, Editions sociales, Paris, 1984, pp. 37 and 38).
This will undoubtedly appear a little too abstract and programmatic, so I will give a positive illustration of it: I find it in the remarkable study that the Marxist historian Emilio Sereni recently devoted to the historical process of the domestication of the horse, the elaboration of harnessing techniques and riding development109. On the basis of considerable archaeological, literary and linguistic documentation, Sereni demonstrates that this process did not take place, as has often been believed, within a single civilization (for example what is called the "civilization of the steppes") or of a single ethnic group (for example the Indo-European peoples): the techniques of the military and productive use of the horse were not elaborated "in a vacuum" by the nomadic peoples of Eurasia.
In reality, it is rather the opposite that should be said: this very advanced (and relatively late) form of economic specialization in nomadic herding which characterizes the "civilization of the steppes" could only have developed through a process of “external differentiation ”110 which had as a prior historical condition
109. Emilio Sereni, “La circolazione etnica e culturale nella steppa eurasiatica. Le tecniche e la nomenciatura del cavallo”, Studi storici, n°
3, 1967.
110. This is the term that Sereni used in his work on the Ligurian communities; he noted the following, which is worth reflecting on: in ancient historical periods, where internal social contradictions ( class antagonisms) were still weakly developed, the processes of external differentiation (from tribe to tribe, from people to people) “necessarily acquire a particular prominence and become a decisive moment in the historical dialectic” (Emilio Sereni, Comunita rurali nelltalia antica, Edizioni Rinascita, Rome, 1955, p, 147). Certain indications of Marx could corroborate and illustrate this point: for example when he shows that the division of labor and market exchanges, before penetrating inside the communities, first developed between the communities
( Capital, book I, op. cit., p. 396). Moreover, Marx had already noted the complementary relationships that were established, in the history of ancient Asia, between the development of sedentary communities of farmers and that of communities of nomadic herders ( cf. Letter to Engels, June 2, 1853, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on "Capital", op. cit., p. 61), he characterized in an analogous way the relations maintained, in ancient times, between the "superbly developed" trading peoples (Phoenicians, Carthaginians, etc.) and the barbarian peoples, living in a natural economy, an already relatively advanced elaboration of the techniques of the use of the horse. And Sereni highlights the role played, in the slow process of this development, by the constant relations and exchanges maintained, including in the form of warlike conflicts, by the old agricultural societies of the Near East (Mesopotamia, of the Indus) and the barbarian peoples who surrounded them. More generally, he shows that this process is historically inseparable from the phenomena of " ethnic and cultural circulation", extraordinarily complex and dense, which occurred in vast areas of central and south-western Asia during the last four millennia before our time.
Here, then, is an exemplary study: exemplary in that it helps us to understand how the facts of acculturation, of diffusion, of "cultural circulation", which so easily mask the internal necessity of a historical process, can be interpreted both as conditions and as necessary forms of manifestation of this process.
Provisional conclusions
And this brings us back to the fundamental question of the necessity of historical development. But this question is so difficult that before tackling it again I will take up the results of my analysis in another way. We have seen that the development of the "acquired productive forces" rests on the historical continuity created by the transmission, from one generation to the next, of the technical and cultural heritage previously acquired. But this continuity, precisely because it is historical (and at least insofar as history is not yet subject to conscious control), can be interrupted: hence the regressions that "fortuitous " destruction entails. techniques acquired in a given national sphere. On the other hand, the historical character of these acquisitions and the specific modalities of their transmission on whose barbarism the development of the first rested and which he in turn maintained in this barbarism (cf. Capital, book III, volume 1, op. cit., p. 338). All recent historical research confirms this interdependence between the development of ancient civilizations and that of "barbarian " peoples (see on this subject the interesting article by Owen Lattimore, "La civilization, mere de barbarie?", Annales ES C, January-February 1962).
tion include the possibility of their transfer outside their environment of origin, and thereby the possibility of a break with the particular I ocal conditions which fixed them in their autochthony: hence the fact that "the transplantation of a technology from its region of origin to another is itself a factor of progress and invention”.111 Thus the role played by historical discontinuities seems contradictory. Now, what is this contradiction if not the very one that makes “human prehistory” a process of natural history ? Everything happens as if humanity, in order to progress, had to both preserve the achievements of its past history and free itself from its weight: preserve, under pain of "starting from scratch", the achievements of its previous historical development . ; break with everything that, in this development, was nature and expressed its limits.
History is cunning, said Marx: it has to be, in fact, to constantly invent the “ solution” to this problem! Example of one of these tricks: a local regression may appear, in the long term, as a "historical chance" insofar as it makes possible a subsequent progression taking place on the basis of a new appropriation of the slowly accumulated heritage. and preserved in a nearby sphere. The "historical chance", in this case, is that of a restart infinitely freer and faster than the "beginning". To illustrate this, let us once again take the history of writing: if the ancient Greeks were the first people in the world to constitute, on the basis of the Phoenician system, a complete alphabetic writing, is it not thanks to the historical turmoil which definitively destroyed Creto Mycenaean writing at the beginning of the Iron Age? The regression following the Dorian I nvasions was such that it I ed to the disappearance of all use of writing in Greece, and that for several centuries; but this regression, by forcing the Greeks to rediscover writing (or rather to re-borrow it), “cleared the ground” for a later progress which did much more than nullify its effect. So true I s it that history, as Marx says again, progresses from the “wrong side ”112.
So what is necessary in this progress, in this pace paradox and this inequality of progress? We have to go, I
111. Andre Haudricourt, “The origin of techniques”, Le Courrierrationaliste, n° 2, 12th year, February 1965, p. 35.
112. Cf. Karl Marx, Misery of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 97.
it seems, of this classic idea; that the development of the productive forces is a process which contains in itself its necessity, since it expresses the movement of the contradiction which, in the productive activity, opposes men to nature. We must then ask ourselves why this movement, in its concrete historical manifestations, bears so I ittle resemblance to the incessant, "irresistible" and uniform progress of which a vulgarized Marxism has sometimes nourished the illusion.
We can propose at least one element of the answer, in my view decisive: the contradiction defined above, which its “ movement” resolves and reproduces constantly, is certainly present in germ from the first tool, from the first productive act; but it develops itself only insofar as production is distinguished from the simple "animal" appropriation of nature - in other words insofar as man, "natural being ", becomes a "natural human being". Now, this condition of development, as we have seen, is not given at the start: on the contrary, it is the product of development itself. Whence an apparent vicious circle which is in fact, after long trampling, perpetually broken in such a time, in such a place, to reform itself afterwards within less narrow limits: the necessity of development is precisely the necessity of this a "paradoxical" rupture, which causes human history to overflow and constantly cross its own natural limits. That is to say that it does not abolish them all at once as soon as it begins to be history: this rupture must be conceived not as a single act, but as a series of ruptures whose succession forms a movement. to say also that each rupture of the "limit" is itself limited, both in its depth and in its extension. Whence the narrowness of the advance front of progress: can we see that it has ever been made “across the whole line " ? This is why a "locally" progress made so often appears as a "historical chance", offered by a particular conjuncture. The conditions which define this conjuncture are what Marx calls "historical givens"113: they can I n no way be deduced from the necessity which governs the whole of the process, since they represent the conditions already given, although "constantly amended", of the existence of the trial itself. However, the “historical location” of each breaking point is contingent.
But this in no way means that we must renounce scientific analysis of the modus operandi of the rupture, that is to say the particular historical "solutions" which express its necessity, and whose particular character is universally based in the nature of the process, in its very content.
III
Until now, I have considered above all the development of the productive forces. And this not without some care to insist on the completely classic idea, today disputed by some114, that this development forms the "basis" of all social development115; Ignoring this point, isn't it ultimately forbidding oneself to understand the history of society in its "self-development", to conceive of its internal necessity? But I can go no further than breaking and once again retyping the thread of this presentation to return to the examination of the transformation of social relations :116 how is manifested, at this level, the "law of unequal development" proper to natural history process? Basically, I already broached this question when earlier, examining the notion of survivals, I observed that the degree of the "liquidation" of survivals is not always or everywhere the same. Let us therefore take up the problem at this point.
114. See in particular Etienne Balibar, “ On the fundamental concepts of historical materialism”, in Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere, Read Le Capital, Maspero, Paris, 1965, volume 2.
115. Cf. Karl Marx, Letter to Annenkov, December 28, 1846, letter quoted. i 16. In distinguishing these two stages in my presentation, I specify that it is in my opinion impossible to separate, as Balibar would have it ("On the fundamental concepts...", art. quoted, p. 275), the production of material objects and the production of social relations: that is to say that the analyzes that follow are closely linked, in my mind, to all that precedes. For the discussion of Balibar's point of view, which I cannot open here, I will content myself with referring to the interesting speech by Henri Jourdain at the Argenteuil session of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party (Cahiers du communisme , May-June 1966, see in particular pp. 74 and 75).
Social development and international relations
Here again, I will start from what will at first appear to be only a particular case; and it is once again from Marx, always so attentive to the particular in history, that I will borrow his analysis. In the last (unfinished) part of his Introduction of 1857, Marx had noted, without developing them117, a series of points " not to be forgotten": there are very valuable indications for the Marxist theory of history, and I have already cited several. Here is another:
“ Secondary and tertiary phenomena. In general, derived, transferred, non-original production reports. Here comes the issue of international relations. »118
After the “influence of the geographical environment”, here we come across the second of the factors that Plekhanov envisaged “from the point of view of reciprocal action”: international relations.119 But is Marx's "point of view" that of Plekhanov? I have already answered in the negative for the question of the geographical environment: It remains for me to show that this answer is also valid for the question of " international relations". This is where this passage from the Introduction interests me: Marx does not limit himself to noting the "entry into play" of international relations, to recognizing a role for this "factor", he allows us to see what establishes the necessity of this role in historical development. The notion of transference, which we find in this text, is significant precisely in this: instead of imposing as a starting point for the analysis an external relation between several factors "posed as such", Marx indicates the way of a an explanation capable of subordinating the appearances of exteriority to the internal logic of development: not to dissolve them in itself, but to reconstruct them from it.
All this calls for some clarification: what phenomena did Marx mean, and what is their law? It is he himself who proposes to us, in several places of his work, the analysis and the illustration. The most classic case is that of
117. With the exception of the famous page he devotes to Greek art in its relationship with mythology.
118. Karl Marx, Introduction of 1857, op. cit., p. 44 (emphasis Marx).
119. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, Essays on the History of Materialism, op. cit., p. 180-183.
North America, which Marx and Engels studied from The German Ideology; the capitalist development of North America, they observe, was singularly favored by the absence of the feudal past which, in Western Europe, “burdened ” this same development. The transfer to new, practically virgin ground of the "form of relations" which had developed in Europe snatched this form from the "natural preconditions" of its European history and prehistory, thus delivering it from the survivals of forms earlier: hence a much faster and freer later development.120 Doesn't this “exceptional” case contain something typical? All the settlements developed under similar conditions, which gave their social evolution a particular vigor: Marx and Engels refer in particular, for ancient history, to the case of Carthage and the Greek colonies121. For modern history, we can also cite the case, studied by Lenin in such a rich and profound way122, of the "colonization lands" located on the eastern and southern peripheries of old Russia: these regions had no or had hardly known feudal serfdom, so that agrarian capitalism was able, at the end of the nineteenth century, to develop there more quickly and more vigorously than in the center " overwhelmed by the survivals of serfdom"123. And it is in this connection that Lenin, relying on the classic example of North America, came to distinguish two different forms - two possibilities, two "paths" - of
120. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 67. This “absence of past” is particularly evident in the area of superstructures, in particular by the fact that the United States has been, throughout its history, ruled unchallenged by the bourgeoisie and in purely bourgeois forms of state (cf. Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the English edition of Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism, Social Editions, Paris, 1971, p. 44). For the consequences in the ideological domain (absence of “traditional” intellectuals), cf. Antonio Gramsci, Selected Works, Social Editions, Paris, 1959, p. 445.
121. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 67.
122. See in particular The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Foreign Language Editions, Moscow, undated) and The Agrarian Program of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution {in Lenin, Works, op. cit., volume 13).
123. Cf. Agrarian Program..., op. cit., p. 253.
bourgeois evolution in the countryside: "the American type of bourgeois evolution" (break with the feudal past) and "the Prussian type of bourgeois evolution" ( conservation of feudal forms, "adaptation " of the seigniorial economy to capitalist development)124. The immense “colonization fund " available to Russia appears precisely, Lenin concludes, as one of the economic foundations of the possibility of an “American” evolution of agrarian capitalism in this country125.
Still in the context of this analysis, Lenin proposes another distinction which seems to me extremely important and fruitful.
The historical process of the development of capitalism in a given country comprises, he writes, two "aspects ": development in depth ("formation and evolution of capitalist relations within the limits of a given territory, entirely populated and occupied ") and broad development , that is to say the extension of the sphere of domination of capitalist relations to new territories that have hitherto remained outside the world market126. Lenin insists on the connection of these two aspects; yet this connection is not such that it cannot envelop conflicts between the two aspects. And Lenin makes the following remark in this regard, which seems to me to go far: if it is true that Russia, for her economic development, is placed "in particularly favorable conditions" because of "the abundance of free and accessible to colonization in the frontier provinces ", this circumstance also has an unfavorable aspect; indeed “the development of capitalism in depth, in an ancient territory populated for a long time, is delayed by the colonization of the frontier provinces.
The solution of the contradictions proper to the capitalism which engenders them is temporarily postponed because capitalism can easily progress in breadth”: this possibility - this facility - thus prolongs and temporarily consolidates the “semimedieval” survivals in Russian agriculture, and their coexistence with “the most advanced forms of industry”; it "blunts the sharpness of this contradiction and delays its solution ." However "it goes without saying," adds Lenin, "that such a delay in the development of capitalism prepares for it an even stronger and more extensive growth in the near future.
124. Ibidtp. 253.
125. IbkL, p. 267 and 268.
126. Ibid., p. 267 and 268.
tuture . Thus the " broad " development of capitalism entails contradictory consequences which deepen while displacing them, if I may say so, the inequalities of previous development: on the one hand, by widening the "sphere" of capitalism, it creates i n the regions peripheral conditions for faster and freer “in-depth” development; but on the other hand, in the centre, it temporarily delays the liquidation of the survivals of earlier formations, so that the development in depth becomes more difficult and slower there.
We will come back to the example of Russia, where Lenin's analysis develops in very interesting directions. For the moment, let us note that here too the meaning of " transference" is linked to the phenomenon of survivals, which, as we said above, can only be understood as an expression of the natural limits of historical development. To better clarify this point let us see another example, which I take again from The German Ideology: besides the case of settlements, Marx and Engels also consider certain cases of conquest; here is what they write on this subject: “ An analogous case presents itself in conquest, when one brings ready-made to the
conquered country the mode of exchange which has developed on another soil; in its country of origin, this form was still burdened by the interests and living conditions of previous eras, but here, on the contrary, it can and must establish itself totally and without hindrance, if only to ensure a enduring power to the conqueror. »I2
And they give here as an example England after the Norman conquest, where the invaders established "the most accomplished form of feudal organization "129.
Later, in 1857, at the very time when he wrote the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx took up the same example and clarified its analysis130 : in England, he says, the feudal organization s is developed as a form
127. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, op. cit., p. 680 and 681 (emphasis added).
128. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 68. 129.Ibid _
130. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 427.
secondary131 "introduced" by the Norman conquerors, and that is why it reached a much more complete degree there than in northern France, where it had developed "naturally" (natarwuchsig entstandene ). Finally, to complete and illustrate all this in a more striking way, we can also recall this remark of old Engels, still about feudalism:
"Founded in the kingdom of the Western Franks, developed in Normandy
by the Norwegian conquerors , better developed (fort-gebildet) in England and southern Italy by the French Normans, it was in the ephemeral kingdom of Jerusalem, which bequeathed to us in its Assizes of Jerusalem the most classic expression of the feudal order, that came closest to its concept. »132
Thus the development of a form of social organization to its most " classical" and purest historical type seems historically linked to its expansion "in breadth", from the original "centre" where it first appeared. to its own periphery. And this development takes place through a series of relays, such a "nation " continuing what another had begun, such a "nation" allowing others to do without, if I may say so, its own beginnings. : so that through this bias social development oversteps and crosses, but taking the form imposed by their existence, the “ national” limits which express its own narrowness.
Specificity of the lower forms of evolution
Hence the historical role of migrations and conquests133 and, more generally, of "international relations ": here again, the need for this role appears as soon as we consider the limits
131. Sekundar: "second" would perhaps be a less ambiguous translation.
132. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Conrad Schmidt, March 12, 1895, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on “Capital”, op. cit., p. 418.
133. That Marx and Engels recognize this role is all the more remarkable since they were very concerned, at the time of The German Ideology, to refute the " conquest theory" (i.e. the explanation by the conquest, among the French historians of the Restoration, of the origin of social antagonisms), but this in a way perhaps less unilateral, more attentive to "empirically" establishing facts than will be of development itself, and this explains why it manifests itself more strongly at the lower stages of social evolution. In fact, if I lingered over the example of feudalism, it is because in a sense it is more significant than modern examples. Take the case of North America: the break with the European feudal past gave an increase in vigor and speed to capitalist development, which however was able, in Europe itself, to make its way without benefiting from the same conditions. But is it the same in earlier eras, when it is no longer a question of capitalist development, but of that of pre-capitalist "national" modes of production, whose internal solidity is much greater, whose possibilities of evolution are much more limited?
This is where history needs to deploy all its tricks: this is where the "in-depth" development of the social economic formation most constantly takes, and this time as a necessary bias, the path of a development “ in breadth”.
So let's go back even further in the past, to ancient history and prehistory. For example, we could take up, studying it in the light of recent historical research, the case of the Greek colonies cited by Marx and Engels: this vast movement of colonization and expansion, which prolonged for several centuries the great migrations of the end of the second millennium, does it not appear more and more clearly as an essential element in the historical analysis of what is called, by a very significant mystification, the “Greek miracle ”134?
Moreover, Marx had very well grasped the role of colonization in the process which leads to the dissolution of " natural " agrarian communities - those at least which belong to the " antique" form, that is to say Roman and Greek135. Like all precapitalist social formations in general, these communities tend to reproduce themselves constantly in the same form and within the same limits, the reproduction of social relations appearing as the goal of production itself. However, the process of production can lead to an increase in the population within the community,
134. On this subject, see the already classic study by Jean Berard, L'Expansion et la colonization grecs a la guerre mediques, Aubier, Paris, 1960.
135. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 415 and 416.
and this increase is enough to compromise the reproduction of social relations, their maintenance within the limits that their form supposes.
In this case, to ensure reproduction, it would be necessary to increase productivity, which could only be obtained by developing the productive forces; and this development would in turn require, contrary to the aim pursued, a reorganization of social organization. But this solution -that of "in-depth" local development - is made impossible by the "traditional" character of the agrarian economy at this level. Territorial expansion therefore remains the only possible way: hence the tendency, inherent in the system that defines this type of community, to develop “in breadth” through colonization and wars of conquest136. However, this solution, intended to ensure the sustainability of the system, here again only postpones the crisis while gradually accumulating the conditions for a broader and deeper crisis: the movement "in breadth" first appears as a “innocent extension” • of the base that it has the function of reproducing137; ultimately it oversteps the limits of the system and destroys it. Wars indeed lead to the development of slavery, to the deepening of social inequality within the community, to the appearance and progress of a monetary economy, etc. The structure of the system is such that all these phenomena secondary ”138 appear at first and are indeed, but “up to a certain point”, compatible with its preservation; and this is precisely, says Marx, the proper
136. Cf. Karl Marx, "Forced Emigration", New York Daily Tribune, March 22, 1853. "In the States of Antiquity, in Greece and Rome, forced emigration, taking the form of colonial periodicals, formed a constant link in the social organization. The whole system of these States was based on a fixed limitation of the population figure which must not be exceeded, if one did not wish to compromise the very existence of ancient civilization. And why that? Because the application of the natural sciences to material production was ignored. To remain civilized, it was necessary to be few in number. ( On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 166 and 167).
137. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p.
416.
138. In its European (Greco-Roman) form, slavery, writes Marx (ibid., p. 433) is always ” secondary" (immer sekundar, nie ursprunglich), that is to say not primitive, produced by historical development.
of these ' ancient ' communities:' considerable developments are possible within a given framework'139 . In the long run, however, the collapse of the system is inevitable, and the community dissolves.
The dissolution of the system therefore appears as the necessary result of the internal contradictions of the system. But this necessity manifests itself historically by astonishing detours: how can such a development, "limited" to the point of being barely perceptible at first, in the end break through such narrow limits ? By enlarging its own base, by altering it more and more profoundly by this very extension. But this movement necessarily leaves an essential role to international relations, both in the "conjunctures" that mark each stage of its progress and in that which sooner or later provokes the final collapse of the base. Here again it is a text by Engels (a note taken from Anti-Duhring's "Preliminary Works" ) which seems to me to best illustrate this aspect for the whole process: Engels begins by defining the internal contradiction which ” causes the ruin of all production based on slavery and of the communities based on it”; then he describes the movement of this contradiction thus:
“The solution, in most cases, is the enslavement by violence of communities that are wasting away by stronger ones.
(Greece by Macedonia, and later by Rome.)
As long as these are themselves based on slavery, there is only a displacement of the center and the process is repeated at a higher level until (Rome) we finally have as conqueror a people who replace slavery. by another form of production.
41
Enslavement of a community which is wasting away by a community which is growing, and thanks to this ” relay" displacement and repetition, displacement and restarting of the process on a larger scale: is this not a typical form, at this level, of the social development? It is clear that an evolution of this kind, far from appearing as a regular maturation, includes a host of ” accidental" moments.
139. Ibid, p. 424.
140. On the “double” and “contradictory” character of the “ antique” form of property, cf. ibid., p. 411 and 414.
141. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 385.
The evolution of primitive agrarian communities
Moreover, more generally, Marx always underlined the determining role of the “historical milieu” in the evolution of primitive agrarian communities. And this question is of such great consequence that it seems to me essential to examine it further: no longer so much to give new "examples", but because to the history of agrarian communities is linked the appearance of private ownership of land, and that this is more than just a particular case.
It is clear in fact that through its results the advent of private property takes on a universal historical significance, since it creates the basis without which the great class societies could not develop, nor consequently capitalism, an essential stage in the universalization of history. But here again the paradox is that this universality resides in the “point of arrival” without being found at the start: the universal character of the result cannot be retrospectively extended to the historical genesis of the result. In fact, the "inequality of development" finds here a striking illustration, and nothing less than anecdotal: private land ownership did not develop everywhere, far from it. The old "natural" communities, founded on common property, have existed for a long time in many parts of the world, and seemed to be able to last there indefinitely if capitalism, from outside, had not come in the end to destroy them. “It is only where they have dissolved, writes Engels, that peoples have progressed on themselves.”142
Marx, for his part, was led to clarify his thinking on this point during the debates which had opened, in the 1870s, on the possibilities of evolution of the Russian agricultural commune and on the "inevitability" of the development capitalist in Russia. Marx specifies in particular that the "historical movement" which led, with modern capitalism, to the "radical separation of the producer from the means of production" is a
142. Ibid, p. 209.
143. See the famous Letter to Mikhanovski (November 1877) already quoted in the first part of this study, and the successive redactions of the letter from Marx to Vera Zasoulitch of March 8, 1881 { On precapitalist societies, op. quoted, p. 318-342). The theoretical interest of these texts is considerable for the criticism of the “ misunderstandings” which could have led to a fatalistic interpretation of historical materialism.
a specifically European movement, a movement whose "historic fatality"144 is limited to Western Europe. And he thus explains “the reason for this restriction”: “ In this Western movement, it is a question of the
transformation of a form of private property into another form of private property. Among the Russian peasants, on the contrary, we would have to transform their common property into private property.
Now, this last transformation is by no means "fatal the "inherent dualism"
of the agricultural commune in its most evolved form, which is precisely the Russian form and which was also, at the time of Tacitus, the Germanic form ( combination of "common property" and "private appropriation" of the products of personal labor), can lead to its ruin, but only in certain circumstances; in reality, its "constitutive form" admits an "alternative ": "the element of private property" can take precedence over the " collective element", or the latter over the former. “Everything depends on the historical environment in which it is placed. »146
But the important thing is to understand that, in Marx's mind, this analysis in no way contradicts the historical necessity of the dissolution of the primitive commune and the triumph of private property. On the contrary, it enables us to better define this necessity: among such and such a people and in such a society, common property has very well been able to maintain itself, and this is even what has happened in the greater part of the world; if, however, the other possibility, that of the triumph of private property, were to prevail in the long run -but only in the long run and by a prodigious detour147 - it is because the rise of individuality,
144. The expression is from Marx, but so are the quotation marks.
145. Karl Marx, Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, final draft, On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 341; it is Marx who underlines.
146. Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, third draft, ibid., p. 338.
147. Prodigious, since it has spanned some three millennia and only ends in our time, when the "widespread development" of European capitalism forced hundreds of millions of people out of their “historic sleep”. We will perhaps grasp here what Lenin meant when he wrote that this “awakening to life” of entire peoples “confirms more and more Marxism” (“The scope of militant materialism”, ^uvres, op. cit . , vol. 33, p. 236).
of the division of social labor, of the productive force of social labor, was incompatible with the permanence of the bonds which, in the old agrarian communities, united the producers to the natural conditions of production.
Thus the unity, but at the same time the "disproportion" of the "world historical process" is clarified: although once capitalism was constituted, its development upset all the parts of the world, the historical movement that its existence presupposes is a specifically European movement.
Indeed, writes Marx, the agricultural commune, which presents itself everywhere “as the last term or the last period of the archaic formation”148, “ as the most recent type and, so to speak, as the last word of the formation archaic societies»149 appears at the same time - but this only "in the historical movement of ancient and modern Europe" - as "a period of transition from common property to private property, as a period of transition from primary education to secondary education" 150 ; in Asia, on the contrary, and more generally outside Western Europe, this transition has not taken place.
The problem would therefore be the following: what are the particular "historical data" - specific to a particular "historical movement" - which determined the transformation of the "point of arrival" of the archaic formation into a
148. Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, first draft, On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 322.
149. Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, third draft, ibid., p. 337.
150. Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, first draft, ibid., p. 323. The distinction proposed here between ' archaic' and ' secondary ' education has so far, it seems to me, received too little attention from Marxists. It is however extremely interesting.
The ' archaic' ('primitive', ' primary') formation (the 'type') includes all forms of 'natural' communities based on the common property
of the soil: it therefore most certainly includes, in the spirit of Marx, the “Asian mode of production”. “Secondary education” encompasses all the forms of relations in which private property has become “the general rule”: it embraces, Marx specifies, “the series of societies based on slavery and serfdom” (Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, third edition, ibid, p. 338) - and it is clear that the Asian mode of production does not belong to this "series".
new starting point? We thus come back to the crucial question, thorny, fertile in misunderstandings, of the divergence of evolution between European societies and non-European societies: is it not basically the major problem, very distant but in certain respects more than ever current, that so many historians and ethnologists pose today in their own way to resolve it too often in the confusion of a "pluralistic" ideology - precisely the one that crowns so well the positivist typology of "civilizations"?
Things are all the less clear in that, on the other hand, it was believed for a long time that the Marxist conception of history -which starts from "the unity of the world historical process" - led to denying even the existence of the problem. Yet don't the texts I have just quoted testify to the contrary, at least in the case of Marx? Plekhanov, as I reminded you, had also posed the question, but only to resolve it immediately by a supposed geographical determinism which has nothing Marxist about it. Hardly a Marxist either, I have already explained myself on this point, the "theory of the five stages" as it had been consecrated by Stalin: it led to the forceful application to Chinese, Indian, etc. societies of the European concepts of slavery and feudalism. The solution to the problem, in this theory, therefore effectively consisted in asserting that the problem did not exist! Any specificity to non-European forms of society was denied (condemnation of the " Asian exceptionality") and the "inequality of development" was interpreted in a restrictive way, as a simple inequality of the rhythm of a development considered as fundamentally identical in all human societies.
It must be recognized that these theses had involved, for Marxist reflection in this domain, a very serious delay: let us say that this delay is on the way to being quickly filled today. But we understand that in these circumstances we attach great value, here again, to Marx's indications concerning this problem.
Let us therefore return to the special study that Marx devoted to "precapitalist forms." We know that he defines three main types —three “forms ” —of “natural” agrarian communities based on the common property of the soil: the “Asian” form, the “antique” form, the “Germanic” form151. THE
151. The geographical character - "local" and "national" - of these denominations is significant: it shows that they are forms of
European forms (ancient and Germanic) are distinguished from the "Asian " form by the fact that the private appropriation of the land is already developing within the community, combining it in various ways with common property. Marx is thus led to logically order these three forms according to the more or less limited possibilities they offer to the development of private property, slavery or serfdom, commodity production, etc. : "Asian" form first, which is the lower form, the one whose "internal solidity" is the greatest; then ancient form and Germanic form. But this in no way means that, in Marx's mind, these three types mark the successive stages of a unilinear historical progression . On the contrary: " all these forms," he specifies on several occasions, "are primitive," "given by nature," although at the same time more or less "modified" and developed by history.
What are the differences between them? Marx approaches this problem with great caution and in no way claims, as Plekhanov does, to give a complete and definitive answer. Yet he notes this: these differences relations studied "empirically " in situ, and not deduced from a " pattern of evolution" fixed a priori. Marx, moreover, does not claim that these three types represent all possible types, or all forms of agrarian communities that have actually existed in history. Its analysis therefore does not exclude the subsequent study of other specific forms. Moreover, Marx specifies that each type includes multiple "local" and "historical" variants (on the "Slavic form", "modified" form of the community of the "Asian" type, cf. Karl Marx, Forms prior to the production capita list, op. cit., p. 435). Marx also speaks of the particular forms of relations of communities of nomadic herders with regard to the land, gEiettE, p.411 and p.428.
152. See on this point the important Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (pp. 36-38) to the English edition of Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit.
153. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. quoted, p. 422 (emphasis mine): “Das naturwiichsige, mehr oder minder historisch entwickelte und modifizierte Dasein des Indi
viduums als Mitglied einer Gemeinde”; ' Die Okkupation [...] von Grund und Boden durch den Stamm, die Gemeinde in irgendeiner mehr oder minder naturwuchsigen oder schon historisch entwik keltern Form...'; p. 434: “Aile Formen (mehr oder minder natur wuchsig, aile zugieich aber auch Resultate historischen Prozesses)”.
specific results come, on the one hand, from the different conditions offered by the natural environment, “climate, physical properties of the soil, physically conditioned mode of its exploitation”154; but, on the other hand, they also already appear as the result of historical movement : “relations with neighboring or hostile tribes, modifications brought about by migrations, by historical events, etc. »155.
What must be retained first of all from this analysis is that Marx refuses to dissociate these two kinds of conditions, or to consider only one of them: this is basically how he separates of any abstract historical evolutionism, as of any "geographism".
If the history of humanity - or more exactly its "prehistory " - is a process of natural history which " takes over" from nature and prolongs it, we must first of all witness, in the initial stages of the process, to the slow enucleation of history within and from nature . Hence the importance of the distinction between the "archaic" ("primary") formation of societies and the "secondary " formation156. It is clear that in Marx's mind the different forms of "natural" agrarian communities belong to the "primary" formation: that is to say that their specific diversity is not produced by historical evolution, but determined from the start. by a set of data that form the “natural basis” of the historical process, its substrate.
But the permanence of this substratum is quite relative: the process of historical development has this particularity in that it alters and ultimately upsets its own "natural" basis. This is why it is not possible to attribute to natural determinations the status of a kind of "first cause", as Plekhanov sometimes does: as soon as history has begun (and this beginning is not a absolute beginning, there is no
154. IbUL, p. 423. See also Capital, book I, op. cit., p. 396:
“Different communities find in their natural surroundings different means of production and means of subsistence. Hence a
difference in their mode of production, their way of life and their products
155. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p.
423.
156. This distinction, as I have reminded you, was not formulated by Marx until 1881. But one can think that it is already present -implicitly - in the text of Forms prior to capitalist production (cf. p.
433, the text already quoted on the “ secondary” character of European slavery).
never more than the continuation of a "prehistory"), the "natural preconditions" of the existence of the historical process are already more or less "modified" by history. More or less, because the historical movement first intervenes in a limited way, accidental if I may say so, and can alter the form of natural relations only insofar as this form lends itself "naturally" to it.
In short, and to put it another way: the inequality of social development, as it manifests itself in the “divergent ” evolution of primitive agrarian communities, is certainly grafted onto the diversity of conditions offered by nature; but it is not the pure and simple effect of this "cause ": it belongs to development itself and is in a sense its product, insofar as this development takes place "naturally." It is therefore impossible to conclude, with Plekhanov: the geographical environment “prescribed” the development of private property in Europe, while in Asia it “prescribed” the maintenance of common property157.
The exception and the rule
Moreover, Plekhanov's conclusion seems to establish between these two divergent evolutions a sort of symmetry which we cannot admit. For it is precisely here that the inequality of development appears, its extreme "disproportion": on the one hand, the natural basis of social relations is essentially preserved, in forms it is true that can be very elaborate, very refined; whereas, on the other hand, the historical movement has already been able, thanks to certain natural conditions, to break or at least "modify " the purely natural character of the community, thus creating the premises for its subsequent dissolution. In other words: on the one hand we have societies whose capacities for evolution do not exceed the “last word” of what the “archaic formation” may contain; these are the societies of which Marx went so far as to say that they had no history158, and which in fact only really "entered into history" in our time, in the time
157. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op. cit., p. 54.
158. Cf. Karl Marx: “The eventual results of British domination in India”, New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853 (On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 178).
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of modern imperialism, when the “widespread development” of capitalism had finally roused them from their long “ historic slumber” (Lenin); whereas, on the other hand, we find social formations endowed with a particular mobility and which, however far we go back into their past, already appear in part as the product of a "more eventful, more historical" existence ..
So what is the problem for historical explanation in the first place: the “historical slumber” of non-European societies or the precocious awakening to the history of European societies? The persistence of natural relationships or the rupture of the "umbilical cord" (Marx) which linked primitive humanity to nature? Asian "stagnation" or European progress - the "less" or the " more "159? The illusions that feed a fatalist interpretation of historical materialism have created a significant misunderstanding on this point: I recalled that not so long ago most Marxists condemned - in the name of the "unity of the world historical process - the so-called “Asian exceptionalism” thesis, that is to say the thesis affirming the existence of a “special path of evolution” for the countries of Asia160; I have said what was erroneous in the point of view which inspired this condemnation; but there remains precisely the question of knowing - as far as speaking of rule and exception - where is the rule and where is the exception! Basically, between the condemned thesis (at least as its censors presented it) and the censors themselves, there was this in common that European evolution was supposed to be the norm: was this not attributed to the process dissolution of communities
159. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 414 (about “antique” communities): “das Produkt mehr bewegten, historischen Lebens...”.
160. This notion of “ Asian stagnation” has given rise and still gives rise to much controversy. But I have no doubt said enough for you to understand that it is in no way a question, in my mind, of an absolute stagnation: thus conceived, the notion of stagnation would become as false, as metaphysical as its opposite, namely the idea of “ absolute progress ”so rightly denounced by Marx (cf. supra, note 83). Now, if the idea of an "Asian stagnation" - yet so constantly present
in Marx's work - has been disputed with such force, is it not -,
precisely because of a lack of conception of a relative stagnation? is to say a stagnation which was not the negation of all evolution but a limited, truncated, unfinished form of evolution? On the idea of a “ negative evolution” in Marx, cf. supra, footnote 75.
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land and the genesis of private land ownership, if not a "fatal" character, at least a "regularity" such that no people could have escaped it other than by exception?
Everything shows that this conception is contrary to Marx's thought: for him, it is rather the European historical movement which would constitute the exception!161 In addition to the texts cited above, I refer on this point to Ferenc Tokei's solid study of the Asian mode of production in the work of Marx and Engels: the formation and evolution of Asian societies, he says, although they can and must " be explained in detail by many factors and miscellaneous”, do not require in Marx's eyes a special historical explanation, since they essentially remain a “natural” evolution; and he adds: “it is precisely the typical Greek development (although it is unique in human history) that is determined by particular historical factors (in the philosophical sense of the word) ”162.
This is indeed the “Greek miracle”: as Maurice Godelier so excellently said, it can only be “de-idealized” on the condition of “taking it seriously”!163 We thus rediscover the “paradox” that I put forward hour about Chinese writing and the Greek alphabet: the main historical problem is not where it is believed to be...
And this paradox is basically nothing other than the denial of the tenacious illusion which consists in transporting the abstraction of its result to the origin of historical development, in such a way as to exempt us from "taking seriously" the peculiarities of this development.
By reading the Precapitalist Forms, one sees moreover very clearly where in Marx's eyes the main historical problem lies: what for him requires explanation is not the natural link which originally unites the "living and active " producers. under the natural conditions of production, it is
161. See for example V. Diakov and S. Kovalev, History of Antiquity, Editions in foreign languages, Moscow, undated, p. 88.
162. It should also be specified that the triumph of private property in the "European historical movement" is not an absolute historical exception, far from it: recent historical research shows that at different periods, in many non-European societies, tendencies towards the development of private property appeared (in China for example, at the time of the " Warring States").
163. LaPensee, no. 114, April 1964, p. 13.
on the contrary, the historical rupture of this link164. The main historical problem is therefore to define the particular conditions which, “in the historical movement of ancient Europe ", initially created the favorable environment and the premises for this rupture.
And this is why, from this perspective, Marx is above all interested in the conditions in which communities were able to form -“antiques”165: this brings us back to European protohistory and prehistory. Of course, a hundred years ago this area was almost completely unknown. Hence Marx's caution, which does not go beyond a few very general indications of the natural conditions favorable to a mode of production based on the personal trstvsiu, historical conditions in which the occupation of the soil by the community, role of “ migrations”, etc.166 Can we, on the basis of the materials brought to light since then, grasp the problem more closely? No doubt, and we will come back to this.
In the first part of this study, I tried to explain what a mistake it would be to consider historical science as a "completed" science (if that
164. Cf. Maurice Godelier, On the “Asian mode of production”, op. quoted, p. 100.
165. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p. 426: "The primitive conditions of production [...] cannot, initially, themselves be produced - be the results of production. What requires explanation is not the unity of living and acting human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their interaction with nature [...], it is the separation between these inorganic conditions of life. existence and the active existence of men” (Marx emphasis).
166. Later, Marx and Engels will also be interested in the development of private property in Germanic village communities.
But this development is explained, at least in part, by the prior existence of a system of private property in the provinces occupied by the Romans (cf. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, of Private Property et de l'Etat, op. cit, pp. 224 and 225 and p. 274). It is therefore, as Ferenc Tokei says, “ the formation of private Greek landed property which constitutes the main problem” (“The Asian mode of production...”, art. quoted, p. 31).
the expression has a meaning), or to dream it such: the merit of the founders of historical materialism is precisely, said Lenin, to have "begun at the beginning and not at the end"167, it is to say to have really started. And I insisted in this connection on what I called the incompleteness of historical materialism. Now it seems to me on reflection that this word, despite the precisions with which I had accompanied its use, offers so easily material for misunderstanding that I must explain myself further. Let us therefore take up the question from another angle.
The “field of action ” of historical materialism
With this mixture of "infinite naivety" (Lenin) and crude cunning which characterizes so many adversaries of Marxism, the Russian populist Mikhailovsky held approximately the following reasoning: historical materialism, which presents itself as a total explanation of the process world history, proved decidedly unable to keep, even approximately, all that it promised; moreover, Marx and Engels themselves were forced to recognize that political economy, as the universal science of the forms of production and exchange, "remains to be created", and that, to tell the truth, "what we possess of economics up to now has been confined almost exclusively to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production. So Mikhailovsky triumphed modestly and observed that “these formulas noticeably restrict the field of action of economic materialism ”169.
Double misunderstanding - or double subterfuge - reply Plekhanov and Lenin: “remodeling in their own image ” the theory of Marx170, the Populists begin by attributing to this theory the " absurd pretension" of explaining all of history at a stroke; then, when it appears that this claim is foreign to Marx, they come to draw an argument, against the
167. Lenin, What are the "friends of the people", op. cit., p. 160.
168. Cf. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 180.
169. Quoted by Lenin in What are the "friends of the people", op. cit.,
p. 160.
170. Cf. Georges Plekhanov, Essay on the development of the monist conception of history, op. cit., volume 1, p. 735.
historical materialism, of the “scientific probity” of its founders!171
In the same way the populists, paradoxically, seized on the famous Letter to Mikhailovsky, which Marx had written to protest against their interpretation of Marxism: in response to Mikhailovsky172, Marx had specified that his "historical sketch" of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe in no way deserved the excess of honor - nor the indignity - of being " metamorphosed" into a " one-size-fits-all theory", into a "historico-philosophical theory of the general march, fatally imposed on all peoples » ; Arguing from this " restriction", the Narodniks thought themselves authorized to declare that Marx, if doubtless he was right about "Western" evolution, had himself recognized that his doctrine, as far as the East was concerned, was not valid.173
There are stubborn “misunderstandings”: quite recently Kostas Papaioannou - quoting Marx, of course, and not without some feigned ingenuity - asserted that the "Marxist scheme" of social development loses all validity "as soon as one crosses the geographical and historical frontiers of society
171. Cf. Lenin, What are the "friends of the people", op. cit., p. 161 and 162.
172. Letter to the drafting of the 4rt "afesrfeAa&-ie (November 1877), On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 349-352. The text of this letter was first published in Russia in 1886.
173. On the populists who "admit" Marx for his Letter to Mikhailovsky, see Georges Plekhanov, Essay on the development of the monist conception of history, tome 1, op. cit., p. 696. As early as 1875 Tkatchov, in his Open Letter to Engels, “ abandoned bodies and goods” of “ Western” evolution to historical materialism in order to better contest its application to the analysis of social development in Russia {cf. Georges Plekhanov, “ Our Controversies”, Philosophical Works, op. cit., volume
1, p. 165). Engels and Marx have more than once mocked this claim of the " Slavophiles" to absolute originality; see in particular Engels' response to Tkatchov, " Soziales aus Russ land" (1875), in Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 18, Berlin, 1962. Let us also note in this connection that our modern historians of "civilizations" willingly cite as one of their precursors the Russian historian NI
Danilevski, author of a book on Russia and Europe (1871): also starting from the thesis according to which Russia constituted a world apart, absolutely original in relation to the "West", Danilevski came to distinguish , in universal history, twelve “ historical-cultural types”.
modern industry ”174. And we could thus cite among our contemporaries all sorts of attempts, subtle or gross, aimed in one way or another at removing, if I may say so, from the "jurisdiction" of Marxism such a "nation", such a region of the world or of history, such a civilisation175: that historical materialism does not go beyond the frontiers of its "field of action"!
Where does the hare lie here? In the meaning and scope of Marx's "restrictive" precisions, which gave so much satisfaction to Mikhailovsky and a few others. It is perfectly true, says Lenin on this subject, that Marx's theory, as expounded in Capital , "claims to explain only the capitalist organization of society, and that only "176 ; As for the other social formations, however rich and precious the heritage of Marx and Engels may be in this domain, historical materialism does not claim to furnish straight away a scientific explanation of their nature and the laws of their evolution (this which in each case presupposes " a special study of the facts" and a "detailed analysis" - and this i s obviously an enormous amount of work): it only claims to " found on scientific ground the methods used for their explanation"177. And Lenin concludes by resolutely rejecting any "restrictive" interpretation, which would grant historical materialism only "regional" validity.
Historical science or physiognomy of history?
From which we retain the following: the universal validity of historical materialism is not that of a general abstract model of any society and of any social evolution, of which each society and each evolution would be, embellished with this or that specific feature, simple reproductions. Quite the contrary: if Marx was able to found the science of history, it is precisely because he immediately renounced defining a model of this kind; it is because, instead of approaching society as a given object and in the form in which this object is given, it has
174. KostasPa.paioa.nnou, The Marxists, I read, Paris, 1965, p. 93.
175. For example, Senghor's theses on "African socialism" and " Negro-African civilization."
176. Lenin, What are the "friends of the people", op. cit., p. 160.
177. Ibid., o.\6l.
analyzed the processes of production and reproduction of social life, thus creating the " ground" necessary to scientifically approach "the special logic of the special object"178; that is, the concrete logic of the contradictions and of the development of a given social formation.
We will judge once again, starting from this, what distance separates Marxism from all dogmatism. But at the same time we will understand why Marxist historians refuse to “think by civilizations”. What is this way of thinking about history? It is, we are told, a method which consists in treating as "forms of a priori intuition", in other words as a universal organon of historical intelligibility, " phenomenological wholes" apprehended directly in the field of the historical given . .
It is clear that such an approach is totally foreign to historical materialism. Besides, don't we see that it leads to the abandonment of any scientific perspective in history? One of its epistemological presuppositions is the idea - which goes back to the neo-Kantian German philosophy of the beginning of this century (Windelband,
Rickert) - according to which history, as an "idiographic"180 science, would have its own type of universality, distinct from that of the natural sciences: not the universality of the concept or of the law, but a universality which would be graspable only in the form of a " Gesamtgestaltang", that is to say thanks to a typology systematizing, by reflection on the “ experienced”, the results of an intuitive apprehension of the coherent totalities in which the historical material is organized. Provided therefore with a
178. The expression comes from Marx, who wrote this in the Critique of Hegelian Political Right: “ This understanding [the understanding of the genesis and necessity of social and political contradictions] does not consist, as Hegel thinks, of to recognize everywhere the determinations of the logical notion, but to conceive the special logic of the special object” (Editions sociales, Paris, 1975, p. 149).
179. Cf. Othmar Anderle, “ The upheaval of history”, Diogenes, n° 9, January 1955.
180. That is, as a “science of the particular,” as opposed to the natural sciences (“nomothetic” sciences), which alone would be capable of grasping exact laws ( cf. ibid, p. 60 and 61).
On the gnoseological problem of a “science of the particular”, see the very illuminating presentation by Lucien Seve, Marxisme et Theory of Personality, Editions sociales, Paris, 1972, p. 317 sq.
quasi-mythical substantiality, the forms of this typology easily appear as subjects of history.
The result of such a method? Spengler defined it fairly well when he proposed founding a " physiognomy " of history; and for once the devil of analogy hardly kept him from the truth: the ramblings of Kulturmorphology (“morphology of civilizations”) are to historical science what the ramblings of Lavater are to scientific psychology!181
Allow me a parenthesis here. For the above assessments may appear unfair if they are applied to French university history, where the notion of civilization has often taken on almost reasonable appearances! In fact, as Antoine Pelletier noted, our historians hardly appreciate the dilettanteism of a Spengler, and show themselves in their mass very reticent with regard to the most aggressive forms of modern irrationalism. But maybe these influence them sometimes, and more than they think? Our country does not lack ideologues who have made a name for themselves by re-elaborating, in a neopositivist sense, the openly irrationalist and anti-scientific conceptions born in Germany or elsewhere182 : it is good, in this case, to go back to the source. The study of the works of Spengler or Toynbee is not my object here, and I do not want to yield to the pleasure of an easy polemic.
Do we at least want to measure how far the arbitrariness of these conceptions goes, and the credit they can have? Read the proceedings of the conference organized in Salzburg in 1961 by the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations183 : they discussed the "typological method", the "soul of civilizations " (Kulturseele), “metahistory” and various theological issues; we wondered about the future of
181. With this difference, however, that Lavater's ideas represented a pre-scientific fad, whereas Spengler fights against an already constituted science; it should be noted, moreover, that the proponents of modern irrationalism in history readily invoke, and not without some abuse, the patronage of certain great thinkers of the 16th century.
century, for example that of a Goethe, a Leibniz or a Vico: the latter is even presented as the ancestor of Kulturmorphology (cf. Othmar Anderle, " The Upheaval of History", art. cited ).
182. The most typical example is that of Raymond Aron. 183. 7heProblemsofcivilizations, Mouton, La.Ha.ye, 1964.
"Western civilization ", and on the important question of whether "Russia " is part of European civilization (of which it would constitute a "heretical" variant) or not (Bolshevism would have made prevailing Asian influences, more precisely the "Touranian spirit "!). Participated in this work MM.
Toynbee, Anderle, Sorokin, Hilckman, etc. ; General Hans Speidel, an eminent member of the organizing society, sent a message of encouragement to the conference, and expressed regret at not being able to attend. No French historian took part in these debates, and we can only rejoice at such a unanimous abstention.
But is it ever enough to abstain?
Do not erase “ historical differences”
To return to historical materialism, the important thing is to understand that by carrying out the analysis of one social formation, Marx created the “ground” for the analysis of all the others; but let this in no way dispense us from carrying out this analysis effectively, the results of which cannot be obtained by simple inference from the results already acquired, under penalty of distorting them.
It is against this " metamorphosis " of his own thought that Marx protested in his letter to Mikhailovsky; and in so doing he in no way "restricted," as his adversaries pretended to believe, the scope of his earlier work. Forgive me for quoting again, in order to shed more light on Marx's thought on this point and to illustrate his constancy, two texts from the end of the 1950s in which Marx explains himself on this subject, and which seem to me capital interest in appreciating the “incompleteness ” of historical materialism as far as the study of precapitalist formations is concerned. This first, in the Grundrisse:
“ It is not necessary to write the real history of the relations of production to analyze the laws of bourgeois economy. In fact, the correct conception and deduction of these laws as relations that have arisen in the course of history constantly lead us to establish comparisons evoking the past of this system, as with the data of the natural sciences. These evocations, together with the correct conception of the present, give us the key to the past: it represents a specific task [eine Arbeitjur sich] which we hope to be able to tackle one day.
184. Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1858, op. cit., volume 1, p. 400.
Was Marx able to realize this project? In his letter to Lassalle of February 22, 1858185, he still speaks of writing “a brief historical sketch of economic categories or relations [Verhaltnisse].
But it is remarkable that he postpones the execution of this work until after all his other economic projects, including after what will become Book IV of Capital (Theories on Surplus Value). We must therefore consider that Marx did not leave us even the sketch of a "real history of the relations of production" although his work contains many "historical surveys" (notably in the Grun-halyard, in Book III of Capital, etc.) which provide important material for this history.
The second text is this famous passage from the 1857 Introduction, where Marx
writes: “Bourgeois society is the most developed and varied historical organization of production there is. As a result, the categories which express the relations of this society and which make it possible to understand its structure allow at the same time to realize the structure and the relations of production of all the forms of society which have disappeared [.„] . Thus the bourgeois economy gives us the key to the ancient economy, etc. But not at all, adds Marx immediately, in the manner of economists who erase all historical differences and see in all forms of society those of bourgeois society. »187
This last clarification is of the utmost importance. Here Marx attacked the "philologists" (Mommsen) who spoke, for example, of "Roman capitalists"188. More generally, he denounced any “eternalization of historical relations ”189, and first of all the inability, specific to bourgeois economists, to grasp the historical and transitory character of
185. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on "Capital", op. cit., p. 86.
186. On this subject, see Etienne Balibar, “On the fundamental concepts of historical materialism”, art. quoted.
187. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 169.
188. Cf. Karl Marx, Forms Prior to Capitalist Production, op. cit., p.
451, etie Capital, book III, tome 3, op. cit., p. 168.
189. Cf. Karl Marx, Introduction of 1857, in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 150.
bourgeois society. But there i s more, for in doing so Marx strongly underlined the strictly historical requirement which is one of the constants of his thought: at the risk of not conceiving what precisely constitutes social the past of the present, the "lower " forms of production relations of the "most developed" form. If the “categories” which express the relationships of modern society provide us with “keys” for understanding social development as a whole,190 they cannot however be purely and simply projected onto earlier societies: in one way or another, " an abstraction from later history" in earlier times.
It is clear that we will not be quit with this requirement when we have learned to avoid the error of "philologists " and economists: it i s not enough to understand that bourgeois society has not always existed, that it has historically preceded by other social formations. Marx asks us much more: he asks us not to misunderstand the specificity of the "inferior " forms with regard to the "most developed" form; he invites us to study the specificity implied precisely by their "inferiority," that is, their "antediluvian," "limited" character, the degree of limited development to which they correspond. It is to this, basically, that I have devoted a large part of the preceding chapters, endeavoring to follow the numerous indications that Marx gives us in this domain. And it is to this research that I will devote most of what follows.
But it seems to me that from now on I can draw, from all that I have said on this subject, the following conclusion: the image, imposed by Stalin, of five modes of production perfectly homologous in their laws of evolution must be abandoned. Not only nor even mainly because it would omit to include in this series such other form
190. Marx therefore clearly rejects the idea that historical materialism would be valid only for modern society. See also on this point Le Capital, book I, op. cit., p. 93 and 94, note, and Friedrich Engels, Letter to Kautsky, June 26, 1884, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters on “Capital”, op. cit., p. 340 and 341.
191. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 35, footnote 1.
specific to production relationships. The most serious defect cannot be so easily located: it is precisely due to this seriality if I may say so, to this artificial homology, which amounts to disregarding the differences between the "stages" as regards the degree of universalization that they represent (“History considered as universal history is a result”); which therefore amounts to not grasping them effectively as the unequally developed stages of a true development; which amounts, in a word, to defining development by “eternalizing” the results of development, that is to say by suppressing the real content of development.
Hence the tendency to present the necessity of social evolution as perfectly uniform in its movement: uniform in time, through the whole of historical development from its earliest phases to the most highly developed phases, without to understand that each social transformation creates new conditions which will allow later , broader and deeper transformations ; uniform in space, since each “stage” is attributed a universal extension, whereas in fact the old pre-capitalist “national” modes of production “appear as purely local developments of humanity”192.
Forms and degrees of historical action
More generally, dogmatism comes to disguise any series of a "fundamental traits " of historical materialism by the mere fact that it confers on them a "supra-historical" validity. I am thinking, for example, of the capital thesis which affirms that "it is the masses who make history": have we not been wrong, sometimes, to apply it indiscriminately to all periods of history? ? As if the masses and their role represented
192. Cf. Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1858, op. cit., volume 1, p. 349 (emphasis Marx).
193. Hence, for example, the tendency, quite clearly linked to Stalinist dogma, which consists in overestimating the revolutionary role of slaves in the collapse of the ancient world. Soviet historians today criticize this error (see on this subject the report by EM Zhukov to the international conference of the Eirene Society, Leningrad, April 1964, report in Vestnik Akademii Naouk SSSR, Moscow, 1964, n° 9; see also SL Outchenko, “The Birth a fixed and constant magnitude! As if the historical activity of the masses were always equal to itself in its scope and in its forms! This is to forget that historical activity (and even more conscious historical activity ) is in no way a kind of “ natural gift ” of humanity; it is to forget that it can only be born by uprooting, so to speak, from this primary passivity, from this "stupidity" (Engels) that the crushing domination of nature over men first supposes and that maintains then, for the vast majority of them, the misery and the “dumbing down” (Lenin) engendered by class societies; it is to lose sight, in the end, of the limited and contradictory character of progress, such at least as it manifests itself as long as the "prehistory of humanity" lasts.
Lenin, who had an exemplary confidence in the " historical initiative of the masses", already protested in his time against the abuse of the notion of " mass": " The mass is
everywhere in our theses," he pointed out to the Third Congress of the Communist International.
But, comrades, you still have to understand what the mass is. [...] The concept of mass is variable, it varies according to the character of the fight. At the beginning of the struggle, a few thousand
revolutionary workers were enough for one to speak of a mass [...]. When the revolution is sufficiently prepared, the notion of "mass" becomes different: a few thousand workers no longer form the mass. This word begins to take on another meaning.
The notion of mass is modified, in the sense that by it we mean the majority, and moreover not the simple majority of the workers, but the majority of all the exploited.
This deserves to be meditated on for a long time. One could, for example, ask whether an "invariable", abstract and almost mythical notion of the masses195 did not, in the ideology of the "cult of personality", paradoxically play the role of a complement to the myth of the infallible leader. : paradoxically, since in reality the " exclusive" and " limited" character (Marx) of the Roman Empire and the Problem of Social Revolution”, Voprossy Istorii, Moscow, 1964, No. 7).
194. Lenin, Speech to the Third Congress of the Communist International, July 1 , 1921, Works, op. quoted, volume 32, p. 505 and 506.
195. Cf. Mao Tse-tung: "The popular masses are endowed with an unlimited creative power" (sentence of the "Little Red Book").
of the historically active mass alone allows us to conceive of the role of leaders as a necessary element of the historical process...
This point would, of course, require special study. Suffice it for our purpose to retain the idea, so constantly present in Lenin's work, that the notion of mass is historically relative and that its extension varies according to the degree of maturity of the class struggle: this not only within the framework of a given social formation (the difference between
the “periods of peaceful development”, when the backward mass undergoes exploitation, and the “ revolutionary periods”, when millions of men take part in the struggle), but also if we consider the development of class societies as a whole (difference between the proletarian revolution, the first revolution of the majority for the majority, and all the previous upheavals). In general, therefore, one can say that the breadth of the historically active mass increases in proportion to the depth of the social transformations that this activity achieves and leads "to the end": this is what Marx said in a phrase from The Holy Family that Lenin often quotes and in which he sees “one of the deepest theses of Marxism” :
" With the depth (Grundlichkeit) of the historical action will therefore increase the breadth (Urnfang) of the mass whose action it constitutes. »196
It should also be specified that Lenin did not conceive of the correspondence thus defined in a mechanical way: as is to be expected when it comes to a process of natural history, the " proportion" is not never establishes except through a multitude of "disproportions". Yet is it not precisely this "disproportion" that puts us on the path to understanding why the history of class struggles and their development is so rich and so "capricious"?
(Lenin), so little "academic" (Marx)? For example: if one conceives that the passage to socialism, that the construction of socialism is an unprecedented "historical task", which calls for an unprecedented extension of the historical action of the masses, one will also understand that
196. Marx-Engels, The Holy Family, op. cit., p. 104. Cf. Lenin, “What Inheritance Are We Denying? (1898), in Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 1: 1894-1902, op. cit., p. 321, and "Report to the Sixth Congress of Russian Soviets" (1920), in Lenine, &uvres, op. cit., volume 31, p. 518.
the “broad” development of the labor movement is both the sign and the condition of the maturation of this “ in-depth” progress; but at the same time one will conceive that this change of scale, far from taking place all at once, without jolts or ups and downs, can provoke "growth crises" which inflict on "progress" (on the abstract conception of progress) cruel denials. As it gains in breadth, the proletarian movement necessarily draws into its orbit "backward," petty-bourgeois masses, which emerge for the first time on the stage of history: the extension of the movement can thus draw, at its own periphery, so to speak, the repetition of the trial and error typical of the initial stages of the movement. It is true that these "restarts" are often much shorter, less painful, less groping than the "first beginning" - at least insofar as they operate "on the shoulders" of the starting point acquired during the first beginning. , that is to say insofar as the unity of the movement as a whole is effective, and remains so198. Thus we find at this level that historical dialectic of progress by "displacements" and "restarts" that I have already, under other aspects, analyzed in the preceding chapters: begun by some, the historical work is continued by d. others - by another "detachment" from the international labor movement whose growth, later, was faster and more certain... To grasp what binds, but at the same time what distinguishes "the beginning, the continuation and the "end" of such a process, is this not the condition for conceiving its unity in a way that is not speculative?
Here we are, apparently, far from the history of civilizations. However, if we manage to conceive that the " energy"
197. On this subject, see Lenin, "The Divergences in the European Labor Movement" (December 19)0), in Lenin, Works, op. cit., volume 16, p. 370 and 371.
198. Hence the value that Lenin attached to the "experience of the international labor movement." I am paraphrasing here a word from Marx and a word from Lenin; Marx on the Paris Commune: “A new point of departure is acquired, of world historical importance”
(Letter to Kugelmann of April 17, 1871, appended to The Civil War in France, Social Editions, Paris, 1972, p. 103); Lenin in 1905: “In the present movement, we are all on the shoulders of the Commune” (quoted in V. Lenin, life and work, Editions du Progres, Moscow, p. 117).
of the masses (Marx), that their capacity for " historical creation "
(Lenin) is by no means a kind of natural privilege, and that their possibilities of development are always circumscribed by the degree of previous development; if we conceive that the historically active mass, at first and for a long time limited to a narrow social minority and to a few "advanced" peoples, expands progressively, but in a way that is far from automatic and regular, by the “entry into history” of new classes and new peoples; if, moreover, we consider that, from one "nation" to another, the historical activity and the struggles of the popular masses always develop in an unequal manner in scope and intensity - here remaining prisoner of unfinished forms (with all the "preposterous" variety
proper to unfinished forms), elsewhere developing "to the end " and rising to the height of a veritable " historical creation" where other struggles will find ready-made the classic model of their own development ; and if finally we conceive that these rises - or these abortions - of the historical initiative of the masses leave on all social evolution a lasting "imprint" (Lenin): if we
conceive all that, are we not also on the way of understanding the prodigiously diversified character of the whole process and how, throughout history, the varied "physiognomies" of peoples and "nations", of "zones of civilization" have been able to be shaped and reshaped ( Engels ), multiple and shifting foci of human historical development?
To provide an example here, one could in particular use the study, published not long ago by La Pensee199, where Charles Parain sketched an interesting comparison between Greek civilization and Roman civilization based on the diversity of forms taken here and there by the historical process. of the genesis of a slave society, that is to say on the diversity of the forms, of the rhythm of development, of the scale and the acuteness of the social struggles which marked the various stages of this process and in were the engine. To give an idea of this analysis, I could not do better than to quote the conclusion of Charles Parain: "The whole physiognomy of
civilizations has been shaped both by the content of these antagonisms and by the form they
199. Charles Parain, “The specific characteristics of the class struggle in classical antiquity”, La Pensee, no. 108, April 1963.
have taken. In Athens the speed and vigor of economic and social development in the sixth century were translated into the brilliance and vigor of intellectual and artistic development, with more or less great delays, but which could not not to be? On the other hand, the fact that the battle was fought with decision, jointly by the layer of new men and by the mass of the people, enabled the latter to also enjoy the fruits of victory, enabled the establishment of a fairly high degree of democracy within the community of free men.
But at the same time the establishment of large slave-type farms was slowed down and the full development of the slave system was thwarted. In Rome, didn't the slow economic and social development that dragged on have its repercussions in the dullness of intellectual and artistic life? But if the transition to clearly slavelike structures was for a long time more hesitant, it was pushed further due to the existence of large landed estates where slavelike exploitation extended to agricultural production. »200
Do we not have here a sketch (certainly very incomplete, but in my opinion exemplary) of what could be a materialist analysis of the "physiognomy" - - of the "individuality", as Charles Parain still says - of a civilization ?201 Do we not have here the opportunity to verify that historical materialism provides us with all the instruments necessary for this analysis, provided, of course, that we know how to use them?202
200. Ibid, p. 24 and 25.
201. I say well: an analysis of civilizations, and not a theory of civilizations. As Antoine Pelletier rightly pointed out during the debates organized on this subject by the Center for Marxist Studies and Research (CERM), there is not and there cannot be a "Marxist theory of civilizations ": if the Marxist historian can perfectly use the term civilization, it is not to make it an operational concept, an instrument of his analysis, but only to designate (and not even to define) the concrete reality of " local " historical development. whose singular determinations constitute the object of his analysis.
202. It would be interesting to study here in detail the numerous indications that one finds, in the classics of Marxism, on the "psychology of peoples" (Lenin on the Russian obhmovtchina, Marx and Kngels on "German misery", etc.) and to show their
And now, let's take stock. The materialist conception of history, as we said, starts from the principle of the "unity of the world historical process", and it is in this way that it is fundamentally opposed to the "pluralistic" tendency illustrated by certain currents contemporary historiography; but at the same time Marxists affirm that one cannot grasp the real content of the historical process if one conceives of its unity on a speculative model, that is, if one conceives of unity outside of the difference. This second point, which a pseudo-Marxist dogmatism has too often caused to be overlooked, deserves to be underlined and this is why, emphasizing the difference, I have insisted on the scope of certain essential distinctions.
Allow me to recall them briefly.
It was noted first of all that the problems discussed here constantly bring us back, in one way or another, to the distinction between "inferior" social formations (characterized by the closeness of the relationships of men among themselves and with society ) . nature) and the " most developed " form of class societies - which creates on the one hand the conditions for an unlimited development of the productive forces, and on the other hand what Marx called "universal intercommunication". We have seen that in order to understand the unevenness of historical development we must start from
the fact that this development, up to the present, has taken place naturally, without being subject to the conscious control of freely associated individuals.
Whence the distinction, essential in my view, between the "prehistory of humanity" and that history which, in the words of Langevin, "has only just begun."
What must be grasped now is that these two distinctions, in short, are only one, or more exactly that the first is based on the second. Hence the dual and contradictory aspect of the Marxist definition of the place of capitalism in universal historical development: on the one hand, capitalist society marks a new degree of development in relation to all previous social formations, but , on the other hand, it still belongs to the " prehistory" of humanity: while creating the conditions for the liquidation of this
strictly materialistic character. See also Gramsci's remarkable analyzes of national cultures {cf. Selected Works, Op. cit., p. 441).
prehistory, it prolongs its reign. Now, what is this contradiction if not the very one that defines the capitalist system - the contradiction between its " Grenzenlosigkeit" (tendency to the unlimited development of the productive forces) and its "Borniert heit" (limited character of bourgeois appropriation )203?
Of course, bourgeois apologetics are unwilling to recognize this contradiction, and therefore the transitory nature of the capitalist regime. It also willingly opposes in an absolute manner the dynamism of "industrial society" to the immobility of "traditional societies" - while the " romantic " critique of capitalism, valuing
the same opposition in the opposite direction, nobly bears the mourning of the old "qualitative civilizations" destroyed by the "planetary" civilization of the modern era204...
Marxists can only denounce such a fixed, metaphysical opposition, even if it claims to be based on a few skilfully selected texts by Marx. However essential they may be, the " historical differences" which separate capitalist society from pre-capitalist formations should not cause us to forget that there is a fundamental trait common to all these societies: namely precisely the "natural" character, and consequently “disproportionate” to their development.
203. Cf. Karl Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1858, op. cit, tome 1: '' Capital is thus a living contradiction: it imposes a specific limit on the productive forces, while pushing them to exceed all limits” (p. 361).
204. Thus the notion of "industrial society" fulfills two interdependent functions in contemporary bourgeois ideology: to confuse (capitalist societies and socialist societies), but also to separate (capitalism and " traditional" societies, industrialized countries and " underdeveloped " countries). developed ”). We have not always noticed enough the second aspect, and how it "completes" the first.
205. On this subject, see the remarkable critical study by Pierre Vilar on the " Non-Communist Manifesto" of the American Rostow ( The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960): Vilar denounces what lies in the idea of 'self-sustained' growth (i.e. spontaneously balanced, regular, harmonious) of 'industrial society' (capitalist), and shows that capitalist development, precisely because it is 'spontaneous does not in fact take place and can only take place through a series of crises, inequalities and imbalances (Pierre Vilar, “ Historical Development and Social Progress”, La Pensee, n° 98, July- August 1961).
Certainly this character, when it i s a question of capitalist development, appears itself as the expression of a contradiction:206 the social nature of the productive forces and the universal extension of exchanges destroy local and national particularisms, break "the old barriers of isolation” (Engels) and thus tend, objectively, to equalize social development. But this tendency itself is by no means realized in an "ideal" way: that not by chance, but because it finds its most powerful obstacle in the system which gave birth to it. Within
the framework of this system, it can manifest itself only in a " blind " and chaotic way, so that far from suppressing the "anarchy of social production" it "pushes it to its i imit" (Engels): the inequality of development deepens and becomes universal, and its effects extend to the scale of nations and entire continents.
This is because, while creating the material premises of a "free association " of producers, capitalist society is still a society "whose production follows a natural development": if it destroys the old bonds of natural communities, it is to replace them with the "natural" link of the exchange of commodities - of the exchange between isolated producers. And this form of relations, as we have seen, is still so "limited" that it is incapable of completely liquidating the survivals of earlier forms: at the time when capitalism enters its "rotting" phase, it is becoming i ncreasingly clear that there will never be “pure” capitalism -any more than there was pure slavery or feudalism. Capitalist development is taking place at an unprecedented rate, it drags the whole world into its orbit, but it massively produces and "exports" its counterpart - " underdevelopment ", stagnation, ruin - thus aggravating the " ankylosis” of the precapitalist structures from the crushing weight of its own i mpotence.
206. On this subject, see Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 309-314.
207. Cf. Karl Mixrx, Manascrtsde 1857-1858, op. ait, volume 1: “Capital feels every limit as an obstacle, and overcomes it ideally, but it has not for all that overcome it in reality [...]. The universality towards which he tirelessly tends finds limits in his own nature which, at a certain level of his evolution, reveal that he himself is the greatest obstacle to this tendency, and therefore push him to his own abolition ” (p. 349).
Why remember all this? To emphasize that the problem of the inequality of development, which in a sense is our real problem here and which, until now, I have considered mainly with reference to ancient history , is not only for us the worthy object of “archaeological ” curiosity ! Far from it: the inequality of development has never been so flagrant as in our time, at the very time when the conditions ripen for it to be overcome, then gradually reabsorbed. But our historians of "civilizations" are only too i nclined to transport inequality outside of development itself, or more exactly before it: they are only too inclined to impute the diversity of cultures, peoples and civilizations to a i nature' foreign to history (to the nature, virgin of all historicity, of the old i immobile societies') and to the tenacious ' permanence' of this nature within history itself. This is why they willingly bring to the absolute the immobility of ancient civilizations, with all their "qualitative " diversity.
; conversely, in what in our time the historical movement produces, they only want to see the tendency towards the homogenization of cultures, the fusion of civilizations and nations, the "world" standardization of development. To separate so radically the present from the past is to risk truncating both; at the same time, it comes to render unintelligible the development which, from the past, has led to the present !209
208. Hence the abusive assertion - which has now become almost banal - that history remained stagnant "from the first millennium before the Christian era until about the eighteenth century"
(Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History, Gonthier, Paris, 1967, p. 63).
For the criticism of this point of view, cf. Pierre Vilar, “Historical development and social progress”, art. quoted. It is doubtless not useless to recall also, in this regard, the vigorous denial opposed by Marx to the apologetic theses according to which any "progressive" reproduction would be impossible in precapitalist societies, the only conceivable source of accumulation being the accumulation of
capital (cf. Karl Marx, Theories on surplus value, Social Editions, Paris, 1976, volume 3, p. 500 and 501.)
209. On the inconsistency of the Rostowian notion of "take ofT", cf.
Pierre Vilar, “Historical development and social progress”, art. quoted.
Proletarian revolution
and revolutions of the “archaic” type
Another aspect of the same analysis: however essential the historical differences between the proletarian revolution and the previous social upheavals may be, they cannot be appreciated correctly if we forget that the revolutionary movement which abolishes the domination of capital is necessarily marked by the inequality, by the limits of capitalist development. No doubt it is true that today, at the time of the general crisis of capitalism, the need for social progress takes on an "irresistible" and concretely universal character: communism "literally arises from all points of social life (Lenin) and the socialist revolution is "on the order of the day" on a world scale. But this in no way means that this progress imposes itself automatically and regularly: it can always, and we can clearly see this, stall at one point while it triumphs elsewhere...
It is because, if there is no "pure" capitalism, there is no " purely" proletarian revolution either: there is the setting in motion of the exploited masses, including the proletariat, as that "universal" class can and must take the lead. But this " hegemonic" relationship does not exist from the outset, and is not established in a spontaneous or fatal way.
Here again, I will recall a text by Lenin: analyzing, in 1907, the "duality of the situation and the role" of the Russian peasantry, Lenin defined an alternative between "two fundamental lines of development and achievement" of agrarian capitalism in Russia210: either the old seigniorial property will subsist by being transformed slowly, as if insensibly, into capitalist exploitation, and the agrarian regime will evolve towards a "bourgeois-seigneurial" variety of capitalism which will retain for a long time certain features of feudalism (path of development " Prussian” and “Stolypinian”): or else the seigniorial property will be liquidated “in the plebeian way” by the peasant bourgeois revolution of which the working class will have known how to take the lead (the “American” type of bourgeois evolution) 211 .
210. Cf. Lenin, Preface to the second edition of Development of Capitalism in Russia, op. cit., p. 10 sq. ; see also The Agrarian Program of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, op. quote
211. Lenin specifies that "infinitely varied combinations are possible " between the elements of these two types of evolution (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, op. cit, p. 13).
How will the matter be decided? By the class struggle, and "time will tell"! Lenin knows very well that there is no "absolutely hopeless " situation for the ruling classes. The revolutionary path - the path that only a revolution "from below" can pave - therefore represents only one possibility, and Lenin does not hesitate to say that, for this possibility to prevail, "a particularly favorable concurrence of circumstances, absolutely singular hypotheses . Yet the singularity of the "unity of rupture" necessary for the victory of the revolution213 in no way contradicts the necessity of this rupture itself: it is inscribed in the law of development in the law of "disproportionality" (Marx) of capitalist development . Moreover, the real possibility of a revolutionary solution is guaranteed because the existence of a "universal" class, and its chances, are already I argely determined by a "subjective" factor: the degree of consciousness and organization revolutionary forces.
But precisely at this point the essential "historical difference " reappears : in the epochs prior to the bourgeois era, there does not yet exist a class capable of making itself the historical agent of a radical social transformation, so much so that the the destruction of the old form and the birth of the new form is a much slower, more complex and more painful process, which I n
most cases fails to complete and remains unfinished. The path of "passive revolution", as Gramsci said, is then in a way the most normal path, and everything happens as if the ruling classes, by adapting social organization "from above" to the development of the productive forces , were able to resist almost indefinitely any profound transformation . If, however, certain societies manage, with more or less complete success, to tear themselves away from this "relative stagnation", it is thanks to a particular combination of circumstances which "fortuitously " caused a break in the continuity of their development, the " destructive chances” thus playing, somehow and naturally, the role that a conscious historical agent will later assume .
But I anticipate, and all this obviously will have to be clarified or clarified by more concrete historical analyses. However, let us already remember two inseparable requirements: 1. Do not
212. Lenin, Agrarian Program..., op. cit., p. 368.
213. On this subject, see Louis Althusser, Pour Marx, op. cit., p. 92 sq.
to make the proletarian revolution an absolute, not to separate it metaphysically from previous social upheavals; 2. To study, without superfluity of any kind, the specificity of forms "lower" of social revolution.
It is on this second point that we must now dwell. The concept of “social revolution”, as defined by Marx in his “Preface” of 1859, should not be treated as a “supra-historical” category either; the "most developed " historical form of the transition from one social regime to another - the socialist revolution - cannot be projected as such onto what have been called revolutions of the "archaic " type. Defining the particular traits of this " archaic " type is indeed a major task - if only to dispel the "misunderstanding" which allows some, under the pretext of respecting historical differences, to "restrict" the validity of the concept of social revolution and, more generally, to exempt "traditional" societies from the Marxist analysis of historical development.
Birth of European feudalism
Now let's take some examples. The first, which I will examine only briefly and very incompletely, is that of the transition from ancient slave society to Western European feudalism, as analyzed by Engels in The Origin of the Family : 216 this analysis, although it must today be completed, even rectified on certain points, remains in my opinion very valuable, if only because it constitutes the most thorough historical study that we find, among the classics of the Marxism, of an "archaic " form of passage from one social regime to another.
Engels first shows that the Roman Empire, because of the internal contradictions specific to the mode of production
214. On this subject, see the remarks of S. Kovalev in his study on “The social turn from the 3rd to the 5th century in the Western Roman Empire ”, Recherches internationales..., no. 2, op. cit., p. 177 and 178.
215. Cf. Kostas Papaioannou, The Marxists, op. cit., p. 92-95.
216. See also Friedrich Engels, " On the History of the Ancient Germans" (published as an appendix to The Origin of the Family), History of Primitive Christianity, and numerous passages from the Anti-Diikring. The German Ideology (first part) already offered relatively developed elements of analysis on this question.
slaveholder, was engaged in a "dead end without exit" (L'Origine de la famille, p. 139): "exsanguinated", deprived of all "capacity for development", of all "creative power", Roman society could not find within it the principle of a positive transformation {cf. ibid., p. 136 and 137). Hence the need for an "external" solution {cf Anti-Duhring, p. 385): it was the barbarian peoples who destroyed the slave state. Admittedly, the colonization of the Lower Empire foreshadowed feudal relations of production, but it only foreshadowed them: “ a form of hopeless decline of the ancient world ”, it could not constitute “ the starting point for a new development ”217. This starting point was acquired only thanks to an outside contribution,218 thanks to the new “ vital force” that the barbarian conquerors “inoculated” into the Roman world (The Origin of the Family, p.
144). However, it would be wrong to represent the "great invasions" as a purely external factor: the setting in motion of the barbarian tribes was linked to the social evolution of these tribes (passage to the "higher stage of barbarism"), and this evolution itself was up to a certain point provoked, in any case facilitated and accelerated by the proximity of the Roman world, and by the commercial contacts that he
217. Cf Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family..., op. cit., p. 143. Insofar as it had permitted a certain development of the productive forces, colonization had originally taken on a progressive meaning. But towards the end of the Empire, the status of the settler tended to approach that of the slave, and colonization in turn became an obstacle to the development of the productive forces (cf. Rigobert Giinther, “Evolution und Revolution im westromischen Reich zur Zeit der Spatantike”, Zeitschrijtjur Geschichtwissenschaft, no. 13: Evolution und Revolution in der Weltgeschichte, Berlin, 1965).
218. It is true that social movements within the Roman Empire played an important role. But Marxist historians recognize today that it is not possible to speak in this regard of a "revolution of slaves and settlers": far from being constituted by the exploited classes which were the specific product of the relations of slave production and their own evolution, the driving force of these movements was formed by the free peasantry, and more precisely by the peasantry of the least Romanized provinces (region of the Danube and the Rhine, Northern and Western Gaul, Brittany, Mauretania, Numidia) - that is to say the provinces which had been the least penetrated " in depth" by the slave mode of production {cf Rigobert Gunther, " Evolution und Revolution...", art. quoted).
maintained with them.219 “In fact, concludes Engels, only barbarians are capable of rejuvenating a world which suffers from dying civilization” {The Origin of the Family, p. 144). Here is a sentence which is likely to surprise from the pen of one of the founders of historical materialism: the idealist historian, who speculates on the rise and the "cyclical" decline of civilizations, will he not find there a kind of echo of his own speech? A very illusory encounter, even though the very possibility of the illusion is significant: Engels' thought is very far from these dead abstractions! What it first grasps is the profoundly contradictory character of the development of “civilization” - in the Fourierist sense of the term - that is to say of the evolution of class societies. And the contradiction manifests itself here in the following way: the ancient "civilization", whose blossoming rested on
slavery, exhausted its "vitality" so completely in this very blossoming that it found itself in the end incapable of self-renewal; but at the same time it "brought into the movement of history" a series of barbarian peoples whose social organization, much more primitive, was by this very fact much more apt to evolve: by a sort of backlash, Rome received the coup de grace from the hand of the barbarians and these, on the ground which Rome had prepared and which its collapse left free, found the starting point for a new development.
We see what is special about the path that the need for social progress is clearing here: it is thanks to the peripheral contacts maintained by Roman civilization with the barbarians - with societies not yet inhibited by the contradictions of a "civilized " development - that the possibilities of
219, Cf. Friedrich Engels, "Progress in the period preceding the great invasions", The Origin of the Family, op. cit., p. 197-208, and Grahame Clark, The Prehistory of Mankind, op. cit., p. 209-211, We must also take into account the progress and dynamism shown, within the Roman world itself, by the Romanized barbarian populations: on the " transfer ", from the High Empire, of the " technological vitality towards Northern Gaul, see Charles Parain, “The development of the productive forces in Northern Gaul and the beginnings of feudalism”, International Research in the Light of Marxism, No. 37: Le Feodalisme, 1963.
220. Cf. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, op. cit., p. 162; see also Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 167.
renewal appear; but they are realized only through a complex and painful process, in which the moment of destruction plays an essential role. Engels further notes that the transition from ancient slavery to feudal society was accompanied by a displacement of the "home" of civilization (after the Mediterranean, western and northern Europe) and a extension of the geographical area in which its development takes place222.
What can we conclude from such an analysis? Maurice Godelier, in the study he devoted to " Marxist diagrams of the evolution of societies", mainly retains the idea of a plurality of " forms of transition to class society "223 : the Germanic tribes are passed directly from a classless society to feudalism, bypassing the slave mode of production. In itself, this observation is absolutely
221. Insofar as they liberate social development from the inhibitions accumulated in earlier phases, the destructions which result from conquest appear in fact as a condition of later progress: where these destructions did not occur, or are produced incompletely (for example in Byzantine society or in Islamic civilization which preserved, in a more or less "petrified" form, part of the ancient heritage), later social evolution will ultimately be hindered.
It has often been remarked that for most of the Middle Ages Western Europe lagged technologically and culturally behind Byzantium and Islam - not to mention China.
But in a sense this delay was its "historic chance": because it had "started over from the beginning" (Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 441), Western Europe was, for so to speak, compelled to progress. In fact, until the 15th century at least, its technical, economic and cultural development was constantly nourished by the borrowings it made from the technical and scientific "treasures" accumulated by Islam and Byzantium (Greek science and culture ), as well as Chinese technology (arguably the most advanced in the world at that time). See on this question Samuel Lilley, Men, Machines and History, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1965, p. 42-45.
222. Cf. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, op. cit., p. 132: "The invasion of Western Europe by the Germans [...] drew Western and Central Europe into the movement of history, created for the first time a zone of compact civilization, with several national States reacting on each other. See also Dialectics of Nature, Social Editions, Paris, 1952, p. 191.
223. On the “Asian mode of production”, op. cit., p. 80 and 81
just. It seems to me, however, insufficient: is it possible to isolate abstractly, in order to include it in a "pluralistic" typology of "lines of evolution", the path of development followed by the peoples of barbarous Europe? Is this development intelligible outside the “historical environment” which conditioned it, that is to say, the contemporaneity and the proximity of declining ancient civilization? If we want to grasp the whole of the evolutionary process in the unity of all its components, we will be led to speak less of a plurality of lines of evolution than of a "multiline" evolution, according to the expression that Godelier himself employs in this regard224. But is this itself fully satisfactory? Does the support of a continuous “linearity” allow us to conceive in a fair way the process considered here? It seems to me, on the contrary, that the unity of the process cannot be conceived if one does not grasp the rupture of "linearity" - the "change of the starting point", say Marx and Engels225 -as an essential moment of the process. .
“The dawn of European civilisation”226
Another example will allow me to clarify the meaning of this criticism and better draw my own conclusions: it is the example of the particularly complex social evolution crowned by the appearance, in Greece, of the first slave cities.
I have already spoken on several occasions of the "Greek miracle", and of certain of the historical conditions which favored it: it is now a question, by taking up the question as a whole, of replacing these conditions in the unity of the process which involves them and which they determine.
The question? It is excellently posed by Maurice Godelier in these terms, which I have already quoted: how to both take the “Greek miracle” seriously and “de-idealize ” it227 ? However Godelier is content, for his part, with an allusion
224. Ibid, p. 68. In Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (Maspero, Paris, 1966, p. 292), Godelier takes up the idea of a “ multilinear evolutionism”.
225. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit.,
p. 18.
226. We use here the title of one of the first works of the English historian Gordon Childe.
227. Cf. On the “Asian mode of production", op. cit., p. 100.
very general to the " particular circumstances" which would have conditioned the history of Greek society, so much so that in fact these circumstances seem to be rejected outside the analysis, as if they were indifferent to the necessity of the process. It is only at the cost, it seems to me, of such an abstraction that Godelier can define a direct affiliation relationship between the "palatial" societies of the ancient Near East and the "ancient" Greco-Roman society, this path of evolution therefore appearing (despite its historically "exceptional" character) to correspond to a necessity which would be, in its essence, independent of the "environment " and the "moment
Godelier argues from the fact that the "antique" mode of production succeeded, in the very history of the Greek people, to the "palatial" societies of Crete and Mycenae. But in itself this succession in no way allows us to define the nature of the process in which it is part: successive "stages" ("Asian" mode of production, "ancient" mode of production, "slavery" mode of production) are they ordered along the continuous "line" of a single development? This is what Godelier tends to conclude, too quickly in our opinion.
However, when it comes to studying "Greek prehistory" in some detail (pp. 77-79), Godelier rightly emphasizes the profound "discontinuity" marked by the Dorian invasions and the collapse of Mycenae. . Speaking of the period following this collapse, he writes this, which seems to me quite correct: "There was really inaugurated the line of Western development of which Engels had grasped the essential characteristics" (p. 79; it's me which underlines). The problem therefore seems to have to be posed as follows: what are the particular historical conditions of the " inauguration" of this unprecedented line of development? How can we account for this crucial moment in evolution when Greek society renews itself and “starts from scratch ”228 - when the arrival point of its previous development is transformed into a new starting point ?
Insofar as it results from the upheavals provoked by an "external" factor (role of the Dorian invasions), this
228. Godelier rightly notes - but merely in passing - that early Iron Age Greek society was "somehow less complex, less developed than Creto Mycenaean society" (p. 78).
"moment" takes on the appearance of a pure historical accident. Now the problem is precisely to define its place and its necessity in the whole of evolution: it is possible today, thanks to the enormous progress made over the last few decades in the knowledge of Mediterranean protohistory229. In the light of these acquisitions, it appears more and more clearly that the "exceptional" evolution of Greek society is part of the process of a more vast development of which it is only the most "historic point". advanced230. It is therefore not possible, if we want " to take the Greek miracle seriously", to define in isolation the line of development followed by the Greek people: this is at least what I propose to demonstrate, and of course it I have to take a step back here.
After the "Neolithic revolution" - the main focus of which had been, as we have seen, the Near East, the newly constituted agricultural economy experienced its first great flowering in the great alluvial valleys of this region of the world (Nile valley , Mesopotamia, Indus basin) where the natural conditions were exceptionally favorable: the fertility of the silt ensured the cultivation of cereals such a productivity that it made possible, even with very primitive production techniques, the accumulation of an important surplus product, which allowed acquisitions as decisive as the metallurgy of bronze and writing. But such results could only have been achieved at the cost of an unprecedented development of the exploitation of the working masses (“generalized slavery”231) and a centralization
229. Moreover, we are fortunate to have a series of remarkable works in this field inspired by historical materialism: I am thinking in particular of the works of Vere Gordon Childe and George Thomson, as well as the little book by Jean-Pierre Vernant on The Origins of Greek Thought, PUF, Paris, 1962; see also the article by Charles Parain, “ Mediterranean protohistory and Asian mode of production”, On the “Asian mode of production", op. cit., p. 169-194.
230. Cf. George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society, volume I: The Prehistoric Aegean, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1954, p. 7.
231. On “generalized slavery” (Marx) as a specific form of exploitation of the Asian mode of production, see Charles Parain, “Mediterranean Protohistory and Asian Mode of Production”, art. quoted, p. 170-172.
extremely rigorous despotic tion. By the end of the Bronze Age, this oppressive and rigid social structure had become an obstacle to further progress: hence a " growth arrest"
(Gordon Childe), evidenced in particular by the marked slowdown in the pace of technical progress.
However, the need for raw materials (metal, wood, building stone, amber, etc.) had pushed the civilizations of the alluvial valleys to radiate far beyond the area in which they were formed. The quest for metal in particular, extorted from barbarian peoples in the form of tribute or obtained in exchange for handicrafts, drew neighboring populations into the orbit of civilization, and spread its influence to distant regions. New centers of civilization were thus born by swarming, which borrowed from the Eastern “model” its technical and cultural heritage, and which reproduced its economic, social and political organization.
But the system thus transferred was confronted with new geographical and historical conditions: absence of large irrigable plains, consequently less agricultural surplus; greater facilities for maritime trade and for access to raw materials; setting in motion of barbarian tribes which had hitherto remained in the Neolithic stage and suddenly making their "entry into history "... The transfer of the system therefore entailed, to a certain extent, an alteration of the system. In Crete and Mycenae, for example, one certainly recognizes the “ model” of the civilizations of the Near East, but with certain significant particularities: the more considerable role of navigation and trade; more dispersed rural economy; greater degree of autonomy of village communities232; less absolute and more precarious monarchical centralization; diversity of ethnic backgrounds and cultural heritages; particular flexibility and mobility of technical and artistic traditions233; in other words, and more generally, greater “flexibility”234 of the relationships
social.
232. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, op. cit., p. 15 and 23.
233. Cf. Vere Gordon Chade, Prehistoric Europe, Va.yot, Va.ris, 1962, chap. VII.
234. Cf. George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society, tome I: The Prehistoric Aegean, op. cit., p. 28.
From the end of the second millennium, it was there, in the most recent centers of civilization (and also among the barbarian peoples situated at the "fringe" of the civilized world) that new technical and intellectual progress could be made235, while the oldest centers of civilization seemed to have exhausted their capacity for development.
Thus social progress continued, but elsewhere: its area had shifted. Gordon Childe, who studies this whole process in all its variety of forms, defines its essential content: "The division into classes and the
exploitation of the masses were necessary from the historical point of view, to amass resources and bring together the personnel essential to the establishment of the bronze industry. Once this goal was achieved, other communities could benefit from the new organization without subjecting themselves to the same degree of exploitation. »237
Of course, this “historic chance” did not fall uniformly to all the surrounding peoples. Some of them ended up being absorbed by the large centralized states of the Near East, which deprived them of the possibilities of autonomous development238. Moreover, the civilizing impulse did not propagate in a homogeneous medium, nor in an automatic and uniform manner. Thanks to the great maritime and land trade routes239, its effects could be felt over long distances: this allowed certain barbarian peoples to appropriate part of the achievements of civilization without leaving their barbarism, that is, that is to say, without encumbering their possibilities of development with the weight of the impotence specific to "civilized" societies. This was particularly the case, from the end of the second millennium before our era, of societies
235. Cf. Vere Gordon Childe, The Birth of Civilization, Gonthier, Geneva, 1964, chap. IX.
236. This “relative stagnation ” would manifest itself later in the shift towards the type of military monarchy (Assyrian Empire, then Persian Empire); see Vere Gordon Childe, ibid, ch. IX.
237. Cf. Vere Gordon Childe, Prehistoric Europe, op. cit., p. 97.
238. This was the case with the Phoenicians, and very nearly so with the Greeks.
239. Gordon Childe notes the importance (already pointed out by Engels, cf The Origin of the Family, op. cit., p. 197 sq.) of the routes of penetration constituted by the great rivers of central Europe.
European barbarians: too distant to be drawn directly into the orbit of the great Asian empires, they nevertheless maintained regular exchanges with the eastern Mediterranean - above all through the intermediary of the Mycenaeans, who played the role of a "secondary" center of diffusion.
Thus the particular "physiognomy" of these societies was modeled: a
technically inventive spirit that welcomed innovations, the absence of cultural and political centralization, a particular mobility of social organization.
And Gordon Childe, who recognizes here the first historical basis of an original " European civilization", defines the essential particularity of its development as follows: "It is precisely thanks to
its backward state that Europe has benefited from the progress of Orient without itself paying the price for this change and that it drew on the accumulated capital, without having itself participated in its accumulation. »240
This allows us to grasp the common thread running through this entire analysis, and to judge its value: far from reducing the disparity of "national" and "local" evolutions to an empirical "plurality", Gordon Childe studies the concrete historical manifestations of the inequality of social development starting from the content of development itself, from its antagonistic and limited nature. It is also in this spirit and within this framework that he analyzes the historical conditions of the “Greek miracle”241. It is therefore conceivable that this study is not limited to Greek society: it embraces a series of extremely diverse "national" developments, and makes us conceive of the unity of this diversity.
In fact, if we compare these different developments, it appears that the particular set of circumstances which determined the evolution of Greek society undoubtedly took on a unique, exceptional character, without however constituting an absolute historical exception . From this point of view George Thomson, in his Studies on Ancient Greek Society242, sketches an interesting comparison between the circumstances
240. Vere Gordon Childe, Prehistoric Europe, op. cit., p. 82.
241. See in particular Vere Gordon Childe, Le Mouvement de l'histoire [What happened in history?], Arthaud, Paris, 1961, chap. IX and X
242. Studies in Ancient Greek Society, tome II: Ihe First Philosophers, op. cit., p. 98-100; see also p. 256.
social development among the Greeks and the Hebrews243 : beyond all sorts of disparities, these peoples have this in common that when they come into contact with the technical and intellectual heritage of the ancient East, they are still very close, historically, of their primitive traditions; moreover, this primitive fund is constantly maintained and revitalized by the relations they maintain with barbarian tribes (for the Hebrews, proximity to the nomadic tribes of the desert; for the Greeks, constant contacts and exchanges with backward peoples, in particular thanks to the colonization movement). Thus was able to achieve the historical encounter, the coalescence and the living unity of two opposing elements: on the one hand, the considerable heritage slowly accumulated in the formerly "civilized" centres; on the other hand, primitive mores that have remained alive and have not yet lost their plasticity, if I may say so - a barbarism "full of life", as Engels says, and rich in possibilities of development.244
If this "fusion" took place among the Greeks in a way exceptionally fruitful245 is that it was particularly favored by geographical conditions (the country's small size and agricultural poverty, facilities for maritime trade, relative distance from the Eastern empires), but also by specific historical circumstances . And this one first; the Greeks suffered more profoundly than other peoples from the destructive effects (Mycenaean collapse) of the vast Volkerwanderung [the great invasions] which upset the whole Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the Iron Age and which was probably, here again, a “repercussion in the opposite direction” of the process of acculturation of barbarian peoples246.
243. Note that Marx classed the Hebrews among communities of "antique" form; see Karl Marx, Forms prior to capitalist production, op. cit., p. 415.
244. Engels has well noted this historical contiguity of the primitive stages and the developed stages in the evolution of Greek society -and in my opinion it is very interesting to note that it is by this feature that he defines the character " classic” of this evolution {cf. The Origin of the Family, op. cit., p. 111).
245. On the role of this fusion in the rise of Greek culture, see my introduction to Prometheus enchained by Aeschylus, Social Editions, “Les Classiques du Peuple,” Paris, 1967, p. 53-55.
246. Cf. Andre Varagnac, Man before writing, Armand Colin, Paris, 1950, p. 413, Varagnac insists on the “demographic bubbling
It is time to conclude, insofar as I can and should do so here: this study, as I have said, is still under construction, and aims first of all to feed further discussions and research; moreover, I have raised so many questions, and such vast ones, that it is hardly possible for me to present an overall conclusion. I will therefore confine myself to briefly formulating a few propositions on the crucial and highly controversial problem of “Marxist schemes for the evolution of societies ”:
1. From the historical analysis outlined above, it seems to me that the following results can be drawn: Asian societies in no way "engendered", by the simple "logic" of their internal development, ancient societies ; must we then think, with Plekhanov, that they are foreign to the "line of evolution" of which they are the product, and that these two types of societies represent the culmination of two divergent paths of development starting from the "primitive communism" ?247 This answer cannot satisfy us either, for it is clear that the evolution of Greek society had as its historical precondition the development of the "palatial" societies of the ancient Near East - which does not not to say, once again, that it only prolonged the "line" of this development. To understand the connection thus defined and the role it played in historical evolution, it is necessary to start from the fact that the "Asian" formations of the Bronze Age "contributed to historical development over areas much larger than their own area"248 and that they have thus created, for other less developed societies, the possibility of undoing the economy of their own development: this possibility has been realized in a particularly brilliant way in the evolution of society. Greek, and that's what
metal” brought about, in the second millennium BC, by the expansion of bronze metallurgy in central and eastern Europe.
247. Cf. Plekhanov, Fundamental Questions of Marxism, op. quoted, p. 53 and 54 (for the criticism of this text, see above). A similar position was supported by the Soviet historian A. Tyumenev (cf. Jan Pecirka, “Soviet Discussions”, International Research..., no.
57-58, op. cit., p. 77).
248. Cf. Charles Parain, “ Mediterranean Protohistory and Asian Mode of Production”, On the “Asian Mode of Production”, op. cit., p. 183, footnote 1.
permitted the advent of a new and superior type of social relations, of a new " progressive epoch" of economic-social formation. It is therefore clear that social progress, in this case, cannot be described as a linear process since it implies a displacement and the constitution, on the margins, so to speak, of the area of previous development, of a point of new start.
2. As the example of Greek society is anything but anecdotal, one can hardly avoid asking what role should be attributed, in the whole of historical evolution, to the possibility which has just been defined. . We know that Marx, by studying the evolutionary capacities of the " agricultural commune" in Russia in the nineteenth
century, had envisaged a similar "historical opportunity" for this country: the possibility of "incorporating the positive achievements developed by the capitalist system without going through its Caudines forks" and thus finding "the direct starting point of the economic system to which tends modern society. More generally, Marxists have always accepted the possibility, for a given people, of “skipping a stage” in social development under the influence of a more developed neighboring society. It is true that this eventuality has too often been interpreted as a marginal and atypical possibility, ultimately indifferent with regard to the royal and “regular ” road of historical evolution, which was conceived as a purely linear progression. Theoretically, everything leads us to reject this flat evolutionary point of view. Historically, the analysis of the development of "ancient" societies would already suffice to show that the effective realization of the possibility defined above played an essential role in the history of society - not only to "accelerate" social progress, but to pave the way for him.
3. Now this conclusion, which certain indications of Marx already suggested, is confirmed more and more as we clear up the “real history of the relations of production”. In particular, it appears that the "Mediterranean-European" path of development - the "exceptional" path
249. Cf. Marx, Letter to Vera Zassoulitch, March 8, 1881, third draft (On precapitalist societies, op. cit., p. 339); it is Marx who underlines.
250. One of the classic examples is that of certain peoples of the USSR who, before the October Revolution, did not know capitalism, nor even sometimes division into antagonistic classes.
which goes from the ancient Near East to "ancient " societies, then to Western feudalism and which finally leads to modern capitalism - is precisely conditioned, in its most crucial moments, by "the recovery of the heritage of other societies, belonging to other geographical areas, some of which were in their time at the forefront of social development”251. Now, if this is so, we must recognize, with Hobsbawm, that this path of development (exceptional but typical: it is the one that best corresponds to the succession of " progressive epochs" indicated by Marx in his Preface of 1859) cannot be studied 'in purely European terms' - that is, in isolation - nor defined in a linear fashion: 'On the contrary, writes Hobsbawm, it is evident that at various crucial stages the
relations between Europe and the rest of the world were decisive. In a very general way, Europe constituted during most of its history a zone of barbarism, at the extreme western margin of the zone of civilization which extended from China, in the East, passing through southern Asia to the Near and Middle East [...]. From the very beginning of European history (as Gordon Childe has shown), economic relations with the Near East were important. This is also true in early European feudal history, when the new (though potentially much more progressive) barbarian economy was established on the ruins of the ancient Greco-Roman empires, and its most advanced centers were located along the terminal stages of East-West trade across the Mediterranean (Italy, the Rhine Valley), This is even more evident at the beginning of European capitalism, when the conquest or colonial exploitation of America, Asia, Africa - and parts of Eastern Europe - made it possible
251. Jean Suret-Canale, "Theoretical problems of the study of the first class societies", International Research..., no. 57-58, op. quoted, p. 13. We find the same idea in Ferenc Tokei's study on "The Asian mode of production in China" (ibid., p. 186): Tokei provides, so to speak, the counterproof by showing that the "isolation lies of Chinese society has been the main cause of its " stagnation"; this is, moreover, what Marx already asserted about India (cf. Karl Marx, "The eventual results of British domination in India" [1853], ira Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Texts on colonialism , Moscow, undated, p. 94).
the primitive accumulation of capital in the region where it was ultimately to win. »2S2
Thus the European historical movement, which creates the preconditions for the advent of a universal history, is indeed a specific movement. But in its very specificity it can only be understood as the epicenter of a much larger process which already constitutes, in a sense, a “global” process and which concretely becomes more and more so.
4. The fact is therefore the following: a locally effected social transformation creates a new "historical milieu" which modifies the conditions under which analogous transformations can take place in neighboring societies. There comes a time when the modifications thus acquired transform, if I may say so, the conditions for subsequent transformations: it is then that a new path of development arises which, precisely because it is based on the preceding developments, no longer repeats them. . This is why, since all societies do not progress at the same rate, there is not and there cannot be homotaxy between their respective developments. At the same time, it appears that the "plurality of paths" thus produced can only be understood as a function of the distinction and the connection between the different moments of the process in which these successive transformations are inscribed, that is,
ie according to the real unity of this process.
Thus the principle of the diversity of forms of historical dynamics must be sought in the nature of the movement itself, and this is what "pluralistic" methodologies seem not to notice: they register plurality, they hardly render it intelligible!
5. To conclude on this point: we cannot be satisfied with a "multilinear" approach to the problems of historical evolution, I mean with a method consisting in describing different lines of evolution separately, then listing them abstractly. as so many possibilities for social transformation. The plurality of "possibilities" cannot be thought of outside the "historical milieu", and the diversity of milieus is implied in historical evolution itself.
Of course, we can see how the problematic here in question could have been adopted by a certain number of Marxists following the rejection, fully justified, of this kind of "verbal monism" implied by the "scheme of the five stages",
252. Eric Hobsbawm, "From feudalism to capitalism", International Research..., no. 37, op. cit., p. 217.
as a unique and valid pattern of evolution for all peoples. But beyond its immediate critical content, does this “pluralism”, which moreover hardly asserts itself except in a programmatic way, represent an effective overcoming of Stalinist dogmatism253 ? Or is he just a byproduct of his collapse?
For our part, everything leads us to emphasize the insufficiency of this point of view and, ultimately, its theoretically erroneous character: the truly fruitful point of view in the analysis of the disparities of the historical dynamic is that of the dialectic, that is to say " the thesis of the total and contradictory character of the historical process "
(Lenin). The truly Marxist point of view is that of the unity and disproportion of the historical process, as a process of “natural history”. One of the main tasks here is to theoretically deepen and concretely apply the great Leninist idea of the inequality of development, in connection with the content of development itself254: no
253. This is notably the position illustrated and defended, on very diverse levels, by Roger Garaudy {cf. “ Dogmatism, pluralism, problems of religion”, intervention at the Argenteuil session of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, Cahiers du communisme, May June 1966; see in particular p. 14 sq.). On “pluralism” presented as the canon of an antidogmatic interpretation of historical materialism, cf. Ignacy Sachs, “A new phase in the discussion on training”, in Recherches internationales..., n° 57-58, op. cit. (see especially p. 304). For the criticism of this point of view, it is necessary to point out the interest, in this same issue, of the article by Ernst Hoffmann, “Socioeconomic formations and historical science” (see in particular p. 153).
254. I say well: apply this idea to the concrete analysis of a concrete situation, and not transform it into a sentence - because, as Engels said, we can transform everything into a sentence! For example: if the thesis of the " total and contradictory character of the historical process" effectively makes it possible to account for the fact that, among certain peoples and under certain conditions, a delay in economic and social development could (transitionally and for a determined period) constitute a "historical chance", it would obviously be absurd to conclude in general that the delay, " bad thing in appearance", is "good in reality".
On this caricature of the dialectic, see the very enlightening article by Claude Prevost, “Portrait-robot du Maoisme en France”, La Nouvelle Critique, new series, no. 5, June 1967, p. 13 and 14.
Hence, there is no " external " inequality which can be brought to light by a plurality of local and separate lines of evolution, but first and foremost the internal and necessary " disproportionality" of a complex process grasped in the unity of all its components.