James O'Connor - A Prolegomenon To Ecological Marxism

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A prolegomenon to an ecological marxism: Thoughts on

the materialist conception of history
James O‘Connor
Published online: 25 Feb 2009.
To cite this article: James O‘Connor (1999) A prolegomenon to an ecological marxism: Thoughts on the materialist conception
of history , Capitalism Nature Socialism, 10:2, 77-106, DOI: 10.1080/10455759909358859
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HISTORY AND NATURE
A Prolegomenon to an Ecological
Marxism: Thoughts on the Materialist
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 05:46 18 November 2014
Conception of History*
By James O 'Connor
1. Labor
The basic premise of the materialist conception of history is
empirical: real people engaged in real socially organized and
symbolically mediated material activities. "Real frogs in real gardens,"
a novelist once put it. Material activity is a two-sided, physical and
social, process. What Marx called "material existence" is, first, the
technical process of appropriating and manipulating nature, and,
second, the social relations within which this material appropriation and
manipulation is carried out. Material existence is a process (thus
implies space and time). It is constituted by a social relation (which
implies some kind of society); a relation between human beings and
nature (implying certain technologies, ideas of nature, sensibilities
toward nature, and so on); and a natural relation (implying that nature's
economy is itself a productive force). Material existence results not
only in the physical reproduction of the producers but also in the
reproduction of the social relationships which they have with one
another (and with other social classes) and the reproduction of natural
systems. Or not, if some kind of crisis breaks down these relationships.
(Those who paint Marx as an economic reductionist and functionalist
ignore the three-sidedness of "material existence.")
This essay is a "prolegomenon" to "Culture, Nature, and the Materialist

Conception of History," Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New
York: Guilford Press, 1998).
CNS 10 (2), June, 1999 77

In 1933, Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay proposing that the
material activity of human beings, or labor, has two consequences or
results. He called them the "objective and subjective moments" of
labor. But both "moments" or effects are also two-sided. The objective
result of labor is, first, the object produced, the material product; more
generally, the visible world of objects, in capitalism what Hegel called
a "heap of commodities;" and, second, the material basis of a particular
social order, or what Marx called the social relations of production. On
the one side, labor produces objects; on the other, these objects
physically reproduce not only the producers but also the social order or
class system. (There is a third result, the modification of nature inherent
in the process of the human appropriation of nature, which will not
concern us here.1)
The subjective result of labor is the consciousness produced
through labor, or the subjectivity of the producer. This means, first, the
visible and invisible world of the awareness of, and sensitivity to, the
material properties of the natural world and world of objects, and the
knowledge of how to manipulate these properties for purposeful ends;
and, second, the perception of and sensitivity to the social properties of
the social world, or intersubjectivity, a consciousness of the social order
or the relations of production. "Humans are not only conscious in their
productive activities," Richard Lichtman has said, "but also active in
the production of their consciousness." A child in a peasant household
may learn not only about the growing season and the properties of the
soil, but also the norms governing the social organization of village
production and life. When you make a garden, within limits you make
nature over to your own liking and at the same time acquire more
knowledge (if in fact you need more) of your own temperament. A
graduate student learns how to use a computer and how to take exams
and also the academic pecking order and rules of the game.
Marx wrote that labor not only creates the objects that satisfy needs
(the objective moment ) but also the needs that the objects satisfy (the
subjective moment).2 This is an ontological premise in Marxist thought,
but it is also an empirically verifiable (or refutable) claim. When auto
workers produce cars, they also produce the need to get to and from
work, hence the need for cars. Bank tellers open bank accounts and
many who operate word processors in hospitals need surgery for Carpal
Tunnel Syndrome and others who produce Prozac need an anti-
1
See "What is Environmental History?" ibid.
2
J. O'Connor, "The Need for Production and the Production of Needs," The
Corporations and the State (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
78
depressant. Labor transforms not only the outer world of objects but
also the inner world of knowledge, meaning and sensibility — the
knowledge of how to drive as well as to produce cars; how to balance a
checkbook as well as to service a checking account; how to find a
prescription drug as well as to manufacture the drug. Labor also
produces knowledge of the relations of production on the car assembly
line and in the bank and pharmaceutical factory. Labor thus produces
particular forms of knowledge, which are diffused through society in
various ways, as well as the need for these forms of knowledge. For
Marx, at the highest level of social abstraction, this knowledge is

science.
Marx thought that labor humanizes nature and naturalizes human
beings. As noted above, sensuous interaction with nature and the
material world, part of the objective moment of labor, necessarily
modifies the natural world. No species can use nature without changing
it; birds do it, bees do it, human beings do it. The use of nature
transforms it in ways that make nature more familiar. Nature looks
more like human beings want it to look like (unintended effects
obviously excepted). Landscapes and "environmental amenities" and
ecosystems become more recognizable and commonplace. This is
sometimes called "second nature" to distinguish it from nature
"untouched by human hands" or the unfamiliar. Those greens today
who speak of the "end of nature" mean precisely this: it is hard to find
anything in the natural world that hasn't been humanized to a tiny or
momentous degree. Human beings have transformed watersheds,
revolutionized the distribution of species life, polluted oceans, altered
climates, modified the atmosphere, and produced new forms of
inorganic matter and organic life.
Labor not only humanizes nature but also naturalizes human
beings. Physical interactions with nature and the material world have
the consequence of modifying not only nature and the world of objects
but also human knowledge and sensibility in ways that also make
nature more familiar. Nature comes under more human control, hence
is more predictable; ecological science, for example, reduces the
probability of unintended and unwanted side effects of production. At
the limit, human beings are able to make new forms of nature and
establish new relationships with nature, for example, horse breeding
and bio-engineering, for good or for bad.
People make themselves more familiar to nature via their material
existence, which also makes nature more familiar to them. Nature is
modified objectively to make it more accessible to technology-using
human beings who at the same time modify themselves subjectively in
79
ways that make them more accessible to nature. The objective world
becomes more human, more socially constructed, hence more
accessible to the natural and social sciences and also interpretive
methods of the humanities. The "death of nature" as defined above is
one reason why post-modern thought flourishes today. The subjective
world becomes more natural, hence more accessible to the natural and
social sciences. Today, post-modern accounts of the natural world and
socio-biological and human ecological accounts of the social world,
however ideological in their present form, appear as two sides of a
single historical process.

I think that Marx's claim might have been that labor, finally,
produces a universal scientific consciousness in so far as humans are
naturalized and a universal interpretive consciousness in so far as
nature is humanized. The relationship between the development of a
second nature and a scientific and interpretive consciousness is a two-
way street. The history of nature becomes the history of human material
activity,3 including the history of meaning and consciousness itself,
hence modern environmental historians have to take into account social
meanings, norms and values, as well as material needs and interests,
when they seek to explain this or that modification of nature or form of
environmental change or degradation. The history of labor becomes the
history of natural science, which itself is increasingly more "scientific."
On the one hand, since the discovery of the secrets of the commercial
production and uses of electricity (the first science-based commodity, I
believe), human material activity and the social relations within which
this activity is organized have been increasingly governed by science
and its technological applications. "Technology takes command,"
"technological society," and the "imperatives of technology" are
common expressions signifying the hegemony of scientific and
technological thinking and practice as access to nature. "If a technology
is available," an historian wrote, "someone will find a way to use it."
The scientist is priest, the engineer his altar boy, whether the scientist
and altar boy are physicist and computer engineer or economist and
statistician. On the other hand, historians of science have adopted a
more scientific approach to their subject (Kuhn, Latour, Haraway) and
3
This statement is obviously wrong if social theory is defined to include
biological and physical human history. Here social theory pertains to
specifically human beings and human society abstracted from biological nature,
i.e., what human beings have in common as such, not what they have in
common with other animals. "The history of nature is the history of labor,
period" makes sense only if what is uniquely human is abstracted from the rest
of nature.
80
historians of nature have adopted a more interpretive approach to their
subject (Lefebre, Hughes, Worster). No one these days can write social
history without asking, "what effects do scientific practices have on the
normative foundations of social life, values, and so on?" No one can
write the history of a forest without asking, "what does the forest mean
to the people who use it or visit it?"
Here is a fair interpretation of Marx's account of history and
nature: As new objects are produced and as old objects are produced in
new ways, both the human world and the worlds of nature and objects
are modified or transformed, creating new possibilities for, and

constraints to, production. Meanwhile, new needs are also produced,
the most important being the need to exploit these possibilities, and
overcome these constraints and barriers (and to acknowledged limits, if
any). The history of science and morality is the history of the need to
know; and also the history of Lot's wife, Pandora's box, the sorcerer's
apprentice, and the H-Bomb, that is, also the need not to look too
closely or probe too deeply. History proves that there are things that
human beings need to know and also things that we don't have to know
and shouldn't know.
When in the 1970s it was thought that fossil fuel energy would be
in short supply, or too costly, nuclear and solar power received a boost.
Synthetics of all types are human attempts to overcome the "barrier" of
high cost natural materials, and cheaper ways to appropriate natural
materials are partly the result of the ecological damage caused by
synthetics. A dialectic of the production of new needs and the need for
new production practically dominates scientific and popular
consciousness. Global hyper-capitalism today is as obsessed with
creating new products as it is creating new and cheaper ways to
produce old products: a powerful dialectic of product and process
innovation has been driving world economy since the early 1980s.
"Primitive" man's first hit and miss approach to nature may or may not
have modified nature in knowable ways or significantly changed the
ways that human beings knew nature. At the end of the 20th century,
when scientists bio-engineer new species life and create micro-
organisms whose diet consists of toxic waste, they manufacture a new
nature, and the distinction between the objective and subjective
moments of labor appears to collapse. Yet the objective moment
remains in the form of the new species life and the subjective moment
in that of the consciousness of those who not only work with the "laws
of nature" but also are able to play God and alter these very laws. At
the outer edges of theoretical physics, physicists discover that God after
all had to have created the universe; at those of cultural studies,
81
narrative forms yield their secrets only to those who deploy scientific
interpretive techniques, for example, that narrative content is pre-
determined by narrative forms. The most startling, if not the most
politically relevant, scholarly work today is being done by humanists
turned scientists and scientists turned humanist. Nature, labor, science,
and interpretation all seem to implode into one another, as content and
context, a knowledge of black holes and a kind of black hole of
knowledge (for example, Haraway's theory of the "cyborg").
Marx never answers the question, do human beings have any basic
needs (i.e., specifically and uniquely human, not animal, needs) or are
human needs infinitely malleable? A plausible claim is that the
fundamental need (or type of consciousness) produced in the process of
appropriating, using and altering nature to satisfy needs is the need for
knowledge of nature, including specifically human nature, that is, the
need for the natural, social, and interpretive studies and sciences. In the
last analysis (an argument might go), we are all "scientific men and
women" in direct proportion that the rest of nature comes to resemble
that intentionally (meaningfully) modified or created by human agency.
The telos of the human species may be — to become scientists. Marx
and Engels' hard distinction between their "scientific socialism" and
the socialism of the "Utopians" evidences this claim. And, stretching the
imagination a little, since science is based not only on instrumental
rationality (since poetry is indispensable at the frontiers of science,
where scientists invent new metaphors to described what they have
discovered or manufactured in their labs and accelerators), it is not
implausible that human beings also have a basic need for art,
expressivity, or creation, also in direct proportion that nature is made
into second nature. Since the early days of the scientific revolution of
the 16th and 17th centuries, and particularly in the 20th century when
more commodities owe their life to scientific discoveries and new
products, the types and forms of art and expression have multiplied in
proportion that science and a scientific consciousness have flourished.
This is sometimes explained in terms of the vast and often horrible
social and political upheavals and crimes of the 20th century, and our
aesthetic relation to same, but may also originate in the seemingly
constant revolutions in science itself.
Marx's account of labor and nature and Marxist accounts of
science and art are human-centered. They are based on an active
materialist philosophy (not the passive materialism of a Feuerbach nor
still less any form of idealism). From the standpoint of science, the
human project is Promethian. The humanization of nature and
naturalization of human beings is a way to thumb one's nose at the
82
powerful and to evade the idea of death, and to postpone death itself, as
well as to reduce material hardship. From the standpoint of the division
of social labor, the human project might be a striving for self-
organization, to organize the division of labor in ways that make social
labor transparent, not opaque, as it is in capitalism. Marx never said
this, but it appears to be a logical conclusion that freedom means the
freedom to self-organize labor, and democracy that labor is self-
organized in democratic forms. This may be one ontological foundation
of Marx's vision of socialism and communism. In the former, everyone
exchanges labor directly with one another, not indirectly in the form of
the products of labor. Labor becomes transparent, in a roughly
analogous way that household labor is transparent. In the latter,
communism, the distinction between labor and play is abolished, nature
becoming so familiar to human beings, both objectively and
subjectively, that the line between them is blurred or erased.
In so far as we self-consciously humanize the world, or objectify
the world in forms that are familiar to us, our ontological destiny is
homo faber, man the maker. This is the traditional view of Marx's
ontology of being. In so far as we self-consciously organize the division
of labor and laborers, our telos is political, as homo politica. We are
thus both makers of things and makers of political life. In this view,
Marx was not only the first Marxist, but also the first left-Aristotelian.
He brought Aristotle's concept of political man down to earth and
democratized it in the process.
2. Class Society
The humanization of nature and the naturalization of human beings
transpire in particular ways in particular societies, not in social and
political vacuums. "Labor in general" never effected the production of
objects or the acquisition of consciousness. In class societies, where (to
take the simplest model) one class exploits the labor of another, labor
assumes particular forms, hence nature is humanized and humans are
naturalized in historically particular ways. In late Roman times,
plantation slave labor quickly degraded both the landscape and the
direct producers. In the feudal period, work on the commons at first
enhanced, then destroyed, the land. Both nature and human
consciousness depend on the specific and historically unique form of
labor — slave labor, bonded labor, peon labor, peasant labor, wage
labor, and so on, and their many different specific historical sub-forms
and combinations.
In capitalism, labor takes the form of wage labor. The objective
result of labor takes the form of commodities and capital. The
83
subjective result assumes the form of commodity and capital fetishism.
As Lukacs demonstrated, the consciousness produced in developed
capitalism is passive, contemplative, sharply separating the knowing
subject from the known object, that is, as we have seen, a scientific
consciousness. It is the Foucaultian consciousness of the laborer, the
consumer, the client, the file, the taxpayer, the voter — roles bestowed
on individuals by those in power and their institutions, individuals who
are otherwise bereft of identity (which underlines the importance of
alternative quasi-tribal identity and place politics today). "The
culmination of capitalist rationality," Lukacs said, "is possible only

when the fate of the workers becomes the fate of society as a whole."
This means among other things that society evolves into what Italian
Marxists in the 1960s called the "social factory." Wage labor creates
distance, passivity, unhappiness, and the stultification of the worker,
who produces her own misery as well as the objects purchased at the
shopping mall to compensate for this misery. Lukacs generalized
Marx's description of the subjective moment of wage labor to society
as a whole, including technology and the state. This was possible
because society (by Lukacs' time) increasingly took the shape of a
specifically capitalist society. Capital and financial markets today not
only rule labor but also society as a whole (as the debates over GATT
and the World Trade Organization make abundantly clear). The world
is reified not only in consciousness but also in fact. "It's a great day for
coffee," screams a headline from the business pages, in the middle of a
drought which impoverishes the coffee producers while sending prices
sky high. "It's a great day for America," said George Bush at the close
of the Persian Gulf War, scripted in Hollywood,4 which some
Americans experienced as a TV mini-series. In a reified world, the line
between fact and fiction is blurred beyond recognition and the narrative
form employed may in fact define the scope and limit of the content of
the story — "may" because history is full of surprises.
In class societies, ideological modes of thinking are all-pervasive,
hence it is never exactly clear what kind of social relations or
structures, and what kind of consciousness and needs are being
produced and reproduced in the course of material activity. The first
Roman slaves were regarded as sub-human and the testimony of a slave
in a court of law was admissible only after torture had been
administered. By the period of the early Empire, the courts decided that
slaves at least resembled humans, and no longer required that a slave-
witness undergo torture. Why this was so may have to do with the
4
Larry Beinhart, American Hero: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
84
normalization of slavery, the failure of the old methods of eliciting
testimony to yield plausible results, or some other reason. Whatever the
case, the consciousness of both master and slave was significantly
altered. The evil police chief in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana
doesn't waste his time torturing educated prisoners to elicit
information; on pragmatic grounds he reserves torture for the humble
classes. This speaks volumes for the consciousness of both police chief
and prisoners. A freeman's word was worth more in an English
medieval court than a bonded servant and in American courts today a
rich man is more likely to be believed than a poor man, everything else
being the same.
The structures of class society, indeed, the definition of
"humanity" itself, tends to be opaque or invisible. Ideological views of
the nature of society (and its classes and members) and the society of
nature tend to dominate. During the period of European Absolutism,
nature was arrayed in accordance with the status structure of society
when the first taxonomers projected their own internalized social norms
onto the natural world. Even today, sophisticated nature lovers know
that the male lion, who used to be the "king of the jungle," is really the
"cowardly lion" (which robs Bert Lahr's great character in the Wizard
of Oz some of some of its charm and bathos). The English used the
"royal oak" to build ships, when a half a dozen other species would
have served better. In California, the Monterey pine is privileged in the
hierarchy of flora, and the eucalyptus reviled; in Australia, this order
sometimes seems to be reversed.
In capitalism, the equal exchange of equivalents in the market for
labor power is exploitation in a form in which it appears that no
exploitation exists. Labor, land, and capital are all regarded equally as
"factors of production." Modern or post-modern ecological science's
flirtation with chaos theory is clearly associated with (among other
things) the uncertainties and instabilities of the globalization of capital
and new world order. Material activity may reproduce fictions or
ideologies, not social insight or theory, and arbitrary methods for
understanding nature, not science. As Gramsci wrote, common sense
limits on the scope of social or political activity may not be limits
imposed by nature or society as such but rather by dominant ideologies.
A recurring example is the theory of over-population deployed to
explain global environmental degradation. How much power that
science and knowledge confer on people depends on the form of
science, and the forms of science and knowledge depend on the
structure of power in a particular society. In terms of social and
political change, it appears that human beings have very little power,
85
mainly or only because this is the common sense of the ruling class and
its agents who present social facts as natural facts, as in, for example,
the "natural rate of unemployment" and "natural rate of economic
growth."
A distinguishing feature of class society is that the conception of
labor and its execution, two necessary yet separate functions, are
lodged in two different sets of hands, the first in those of the ruling or
owning classes and their agents, the second of the propertyless and
seemingly powerless laboring classes. In ancient societies based on

irrigation, the direct producers at first collaborated in the construction
and maintenance of irrigation projects. Then a ruling class emerged to
take charge of the these projects, using them as a means to exploit the
producing classes. In ancient Egypt, the last hydraulic engineers may
have become the first ruling priests. Today, great water projects are in
the hands of the state, although many began as particular modes of
cooperation between the first farmers and ranchers in a particular
region, for example, the arid American West.
Everywhere there develops not only a division of social labor but
also social divisions of labor; not just the specialization of work but
also the specialization of workers; not just the division of labor but also
the division of laborers. Categories of people are confined to particular
functions: ruling classes rule, propertyless classes are ruled. Women
historically are confined to particular tasks, men to others, including
and especially political rule. Oppressed minorities typically perform
society's shit work. The ancient Hebrew said that man thinks, God
laughs; today, capital thinks, labor does, and God cries.
The social division of (social) labor has two world-shaking
consequences. On the one hand, humanized nature is a "class nature,"
the result of the class-based organization and exploitation of labor. This
is obvious in the case of the built environments and cultural landscapes
called Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and the geography of California's
Imperial Valley. It is less obvious in the National Parks, for example,
where everyone is invited to visit. Yet Yosemite had to be cleared of
Native Americans before it could be used by the first, private
entrepreneurs; Yellowstone Park was first conceived by upper class
adventurers; and, earlier in American history, the Catskills were turned
into park land partly at the urging of New York merchants, to prevent
logging, erosion, and the silting of the Hudson River, hence to stop the
rising cost of river transport between New York and the West. Who
decided that the great forests of the world would be clear-cut? Not
those who do the work of clear-cutting. Who decided that a hole would
86
be blown in the ozone layer, and also that measures have to be taken to
close the hole up? The question answers itself.
So, too, is the naturalization of human beings shaped by class
power and privilege. Those who conceptualize what labor will and
won't be, and what nature will and won't be, have acquired a scientific
view of nature, or are able to purchase such a view in the market for
scientists and engineers. As Adam Smith noted long ago, the minds of
the many who merely execute the decisions of the owning classes are
typically stunted and stultified. Science thus has a profoundly class
character. The ruling class today monopolizes ownership not only of

the means and objects of production but also scientific knowledge. The
scientists are the priests, others are the supplicants. By contrast, the
development of what is called "farmers' science" in India is a part not
only of a social and political struggle against global capital and the
Indian state but also against "normal science" as such.
The evils of class society are many. A particularly malevolent one
is that such societies rob the mass of people of their birthright, a
scientific and interpretive consciousness, including the knowledge of
the self-organization of material and social life, because they lodge the
power of science and social organization in the hands of ruling classes
and their agents, who monopolize power. Today, in fact, the social
divisions of (social, scientific) labor and laborers are so great as to steal
even from the scientists any real glimpse of the totality of nature and
human material existence, which in the globalized economy are
increasingly decided by financial markets.
3. Productive Forces, Production Relations, Cooperation
For Marx, the key to discovering the basis of historical continuity
and change is the development of the productive forces. The claim is
that this development is a more or less steady, cumulative but not linear
process. It is the sub-text of human history, the behind-the-scene
activity of the set designers and stage hands who provide the material
conditions for the directors and actors. The present, as a general matter,
is the uneven and combined development of all that has come before —
language, political rhetoric, manners and mores, "common sense," law,
handshakes, and neckties. Marx's claim, however, is that there is a
more powerful logic underlying the growth of society's productive
powers than that of particular cultural forms. This logic, and its
connection with the logic of development of society's production
relations, is at the heart of the materialist conception of history.
What are the productive forces? Did Marx have a stock or flow
concept of productive forces? Did his inventory include energy as such
87
(human, animal, wind, tidal, fossil fuel, etc.)? Human intelligence and
social organization? More questions can be asked about Marx's own
concept of productive forces than can be satisfactorily answered. Here
the productive forces are defined in a broad and inclusive sense. They
include human, animal, and other sources of energy; education,
intelligence, organization, experimentation and discovery, including the
development of technology and science; soils, water, forests, oxygen,
and so on; raw materials, factories, machinery. All of these (and other)
productive forces can be seen as a stock (at any moment in time) or a

flow (over some period of time). All of them in one or more ways
increase society's productive capacity and powers — the capacity to
appropriate, manipulate, utilize, and reinvent nature and to reproduce
class society. All are moments in the process of the satisfaction of
needs and the creation of new needs.
In the history of Marxist thought, the theoretically most neglected
productive force is cooperation, which takes pride of place in Capital
as the fundamental basis of human material activity and society itself.
This is consistent with Spinoza's remark that our telos as human beings
is our search for what is useful to us, which "teaches us the necessity of
uniting ourselves with our fellow men." Despite Marx's insistence that
material existence presupposes cooperation (particular divisions of
labor learned through the experience of material activity, doing new
things, doing old things in new ways), it has proven difficult to
conceptualize this category at more concrete levels of abstraction than
appear in Capital. The facts that the socialists' sworn enemies, the
anarchists, have appropriated "cooperation" for their own uses, and that
concrete historical studies of cooperation have been few and far
between, haven't helped matters.5
5
One of many exceptions: "The prime finding of the historical analysis of
capitalist development is the importance for industrial leadership of cooperative
relations between manufacturing employees and shop-floor workers.
Cooperative shop-floor relations permit high levels of utilization of investments
in machine technologies....the high fixed costs inherent in capital-intensive
technologies can be transformed into low unit costs and large market shares.
Cooperative relations can also lead employers to invest in the skills of workers
themselves — skills that enable shop-floor workers to influence the quality as
well as quantity of production" (William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on
the Shop Floor [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990],
p. 299). Lazonick finds "markedly different structures of work organization" in
different countries to "secure cooperation of shop-floor workers" (Ibid., p. 300).
Enterprises in Japan "have outperformed their U.S. counterparts because of
more thoroughgoing organizational integration: the planned coordination of the
88
What is cooperation? Abstracting for the time being from "nature's
economy" or the social ecological dimension of cooperation, it refers to
the ways producers organize or combine their labor, or in class
societies, have their labor organized and combined for them.
Cooperation has a double meaning. It denotes a certain division of
social labor and also a certain social division of labor, that is, a division
of laborers', a certain specialization of work and also of workers', a
certain functional integration of specialized tasks and also of those who
perform these tasks. In short, the division of social labor refers to labor
as a productive force; the social division of labor refers to labor as a

production relation, or relationship of property and power.
The simplest example is household labor, for example, in much of
America today. On the one side, this is a division of labor and
specialization of work, for example, child raising, lawn mowing,
cooking, repair, and so on. On the other side, it is a social division
between genders and generations. Women typically do the work of
provisioning, bringing up children, caring the for sick and aged,
producing affect, cooking, and so on. Men typically care for the
grounds, the car, the exterior of the house, the plumbing. Sis helps mom
and little bro helps dad. (Each of these forms obviously has an
ecological dimension.) Industrial labor assumes more complex forms,
for example, the planning, coordination, and control of production (and
the producers) by management, on the one side, the execution of
production by workers, on the other. There are also divisions of social
labor and social divisions of labor between town and countryside,
between metropolitan areas or regions and other regions, and between
countries and whole continents. All of these divisions have evolved in
highly complex and contradictory ways over long spans of time. Their
whys and wherefores are not immediately obvious. Who is right in the
debate about the division of labor between genders in early human
societies? Those who claim that this was a "natural" or a "social" fact
or both at the same time? Was the division of regional labor in the
Roman Mediterranean and in Han Dynasty China the result of the
consolidation and centralization of political power by Roman and Han
Emperors? Did trade follow the flag? Or did these empires appear or
become possible because regional specialization had developed to a
point that required regional political integration? Did the flag follow
trade? Clearly, the answer is both. Neither the Hans nor Romans could
create regional economies, but these economies couldn't have been
skills and efforts of individual participants in the business organization toward

the achievement of organization goals" (Ibid., p. 305).
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regional without an imperial hegemon to rule them. Something similar
is true today with respect the division of global labor, GATT and the
World Trade Organization, and America as the single hegemonic
power.
Studies of the sociology of work in the 1960s and 1970s stressed
the technical-economic or the political sides of the division of industrial
labor in modern factories and mills, but rarely both. Yet the important
point is that there are two sides to an assembly line or harvest crew —
technical-economic efficiency and the political control of laborers

(which may or may not clash, depending on circumstances). Even the
economists have opened up their "black box" of production and begun
to calculate the "costs of supervision or control" in their theories of
optimalization. So, too, the literature on imperialism sometimes stresses
the economic advantages of uneven development and a global division
of labor, sometimes the political advantages for the imperial hegemon
of a global division of laborers, indeed, of whole countries and regions.
The fact that there are many countries producing sugar, coffee, and
other foodstuffs and raw materials has the economic advantage that
alternative sources of supply are always available and the political
advantage that the imperialist countries can play off one raw material
supplier against it competitors. The relation between town and
countryside is often described as a division of labor between industry
and agriculture and also in terms of the domination of the latter by the
former.
Marx's claim is that each generation inherits the productive forces,
including modes of cooperation, bequeathed it by preceding
generations. While people often have to reinvent the wheel, as a result
of idealist philosophies and praxis, they do not have to forget (as, for
example, people have forgotten the rules of feudal baronies and praxis
of chattel slavery). In the name of the "free market," capital has
forgotten tried and true methods of agriculture, but this is first and
foremost a political and ideological, not an "economic" or material fact.
It would make an important study to discover when the two dozen or so
principles of mechanics were invented, and when, how, and why they
were deployed or not, in particular historical periods. Whatever the
results of such a study, these principles remain our legacy today. So,
too, do the different principles of cooperation. That some of these
principles are no longer used proves as little as the fact that the original
wheel is not used today. This means only that each generation adapts to
its need both ancient technologies and principles of cooperation. So, for
example, the wheel of a 1998 Porsch is about as different from the first
wheel as the Porsch itself from a Roman chariot, but without the
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primitive wheel and chariot, there would be no Porsches tooling up
Rodeo Drive. The stalking of animal prey by early hunters is as far
removed from the planned thinning of a deer herd as the first division
of labor organized to bum limestone in ancient Mesopotamia is to a
modern Portland cement factory. Yet without the cooperative
experience of organizing labor to stalk prey and bum limestone in crude
pits, there would be no modem hunt or cement factories.
Marx regarded the development of technology and the division of
labor as cumulative, the result of more or less steady "progress," that is,
he often (not always) did not problematize either (as we do today). This
is obvious in modern information technology, in which smaller
computers have more storage capacity and speed every year. It is less
obvious in space age office buildings where the division of labor seems
to have appeared out of nowhere, even though its first crude forms
might be found in the bookkeeper's shack attached to the first factory
(and doubtless well before then). Some sciences and technologies
require cooperation across many generations, for example, early
astronomy, while others presuppose cooperation over wide expanses of
space, for example, long distance flight. Some require a degree of what
Durkheim called "social density" (or social interaction and
coordination) that amazes the uninitiated, for example, the building of
skyscrapers and space craft. Others presuppose a sensitivity and
subtlety of social interaction which escapes all but the most musically
proficient, for example, a modern symphony orchestra. As a general
matter, the division of labor becomes more complex; people become
more interdependent, tools and skills more specialized, and the forms of
cooperation more complicated — and fragile. We don't only stand on
the shoulders of giants, whether our skill is literary technique,
musicology, or the design of internal combustion engines. We also
straddle the graves of ordinary people whose names might be lost but
whose technical and organizational innovations are indispensable for
our present material existence. Everyone knows who discovered the
law of gravity and the general principles of modem total warfare; who
knows who invented the first level, fulcrum, pulley, or the type of
teamwork required to move huge stones over long distances to erect
pyramids? No one. Yet these unknown artisans, tinkerers, and
organizers can claim a share of immortality just as surely as do Newton,
Galilleo and Clausewitz.
To sum up: the continuity in history is given by the development of
the productive forces, an uneven unfolding of the productive powers of
human beings and nature. Technologies and divisions of labor and
divisions of nature become more differentiated and complex and
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perhaps stamped more with the relations of production and power.
Perhaps Joseph Needham's great multi-volume history of technology in
China or J.D. Bernal's four volume history of Western science best
illustrate the first fact; as for the corresponding second fact, there is no
better source than the explosion of world environmental histories. (As
yet no one has yet taken up the inner connections between the growth
of science, technology, and organization; the development of an
increasingly differentiated nature or environment; and the evolution of
forms of economic and political power.) While social and political
upheavals may redistribute power, or result in new forms of power, the

victors must make do with the productive forces, including nature's
fecundity (or its absence), which they inherit from the losers. The
French Revolution didn't change a single principle of mechanics and
the Russian Revolution did not affect the law of the conservation of
energy, nor did they much alter the environment excepting via the
results of military actions. Yet both transformed the existing
constellations of power. The victors also have to make do with the
modes of cooperation which they inherit from the losers. When the
leaders of the Haitian Revolution took power, all they could imagine to
keep their new country going was the re-establishment of slavery, albeit
in revised forms (hence the involution of Haitian society to a
subsistence economy and ecological ruin, after the populace rebelled, a
state from which the country has never really recovered).
4, The Materialist Conception of History
One (not the only) way to understand the materialist conception of
history is to study the contradiction between society's productive forces
and production relations. This contradiction exists not only between
technology and organization, on the one side, and relations of property
and power, on the other, but also between (second) nature and the
forces and relations of production. Industrial technology and factory
organization necessarily wrote finis to surviving manorial or feudal
forms of property and power; the degradation of nature by Mayan (and
many other civilizations) brought an end to Mayan power and society.
In global capitalism today, both science-based technology and new
commodities and environmental degradation that crosses regional and
national borders demand (if they could speak) a higher degree of social
organization and planning (although only a fool would venture to
predict how flexible "flexible capitalism" will turn out to be or how
competent will be government and international planners and ecocrats).
Marxists have most often posed the problem of the contradiction
between the forces and relations of production only in macro (not
micro) terms, and also in terms which are at root ideological. They
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mistakenly define the productive forces as technology and tools and
human labor (perhaps ignoring cooperation) and the production
relations as relations of appropriation of the social product (neglecting
production). They claim that a certain technology and type of
laborpower require a certain division of labor, and that a certain
production relation results only in a certain distribution of the social
product. Productive forces are technically determined; production
relations are defined as relations of appropriation which are socially
and politically determined by ownership or control of the means of
production.
Thus, for example, the claim is that feudal serfs worked on their
own land a certain number of days each week, on the lord's land
(demense) the rest of the week. Production on both the serfs land (and
the commons) and demense is assumed to be given by the state of
technology and work organization. That's on the one side. On the other,
the surplus labor appropriated by the lord of the manor is assumed to be
determined by the political/legal conditions of the manorial system.
Forces and relations of production — the connections between human-
nature and human-human relations — are regarded as distinct and
separable, from an empirical point of view. This account, however,
ignores the fact that work relations on the demense (or the corvee, and
so on) were imposed by the lord or his agents, hence resisted, which
means that productivity and production cannot be studied
independently of power and property. The fact is that when serfs
refused to work on the demense as efficiently as they worked their own
strips; when they ran away and settled new regions; and when, on
occasion, they revolted against their masters, they negated
technological theories of production by their own praxis.
In this stunted and ideological view of the productive forces and
relations, since the first is regarded as developing independently of the
second (except, of course, during times of revolution), the claim is that
the first can be changed without changing the second, and vice versa.
This is an orthodox Marxist as well as the modern social democratic
view, which still persists despite the fact that orthodox Marxism and
social democracy (as well as really existing socialism) have partly self-
destructed. In short, this view makes a false separation between the
quantitative issue of distribution and the qualitative issue of production,
hence vulgarizing Marx's main line of argument.
The fact is that all technical processes are also social processes and
that all modes of cooperation are social as well as technical. The
cooperation between a couple cooking a meal for guests at home is
definitely a productive force but it is also typically self-organized — a
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production relation. In a typical capitalist factory, however complex
and differentiated the forms of cooperation from a technical point of
view, from a socio-economic point of view they are typically
competitive in nature (for example, the "internal labor market" within a
firm).
"Cooperation" thus becomes a key term in decoding the
contradiction between forces and relations of production because it
manifests or "embodies" both. Students cooperate with professors in a
classroom because they want to learn and also because the professor
organizes the work in the classroom in a certain way. Professors
cooperate with students because they want to teach and also because
they get paid to formally credential students. Professor-student relations
are at one and the same time the production (or reproduction) of ideas
and also the production (and reproduction) of formal power and
prestige. At any given moment in the classroom, there is a certain
ambiguity: Am I acting in my role as professor empowered to
credential students or as someone who holds or seeks to convey certain
ideas? Are you listening because you want a good grade or because you
wish to think about certain critical ideas? Or both? This same
ambiguity exists in more complex forms in all production processes
organized along class or status lines.
In any material activity, there is but one empirical fact: you see
different people doing different things in a factory or on a farm, that is,
a certain division of social labor and nothing more. The social division
of labor, or the relations of property ownership and power, is opaque or
invisible. This means that the way that property and power are
inscribed in, or put their stamp on, any particular mode of cooperation
is also invisible. Someone from Mars would be forgiven if he thought
that workers in a Pajaro Valley (California) strawberry field were
organizing their own labor, on their own land, in their own fashion,
whereas, in fact, their labor is organized by agribusiness in accordance
with the law of value, or world market.
It follows that the concepts of productive forces and production
relations (i.e., the division of social labor and the social division of
labor) are abstractions. Each concept abstracts one side of a two-sided
reality from the other side. Productive forces do not exist independently
of production relations and vice versa.
The mode of cooperation, or division of labor, is not determined by
technology (including natural) requirements alone. It is also determined
by the requirement that the propertied classes impose labor on the
propertyless classes. The former organize the division of labor and
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laborers in ways that they believe will control both, that is, maximize
the expenditure of surplus labor or production of surplus product. When
you see farm workers using a short hoe to cultivate a field, so-called
stoop labor, you witness a two-sided process. On the one side, the short
hoe in principle increases the efficiency of cultivation; on the other, it
expands the field boss's control of the laborers (not to speak of having
a certain symbolic importance, as the short hoe suggests the deference
of the farm worker to the field boss). The facts that the short hoe may
prematurely cripple farm workers and that workers have fought against
the el cortido mean only that there is a contradiction between forces

and relations of production at the micro-sociological level. The same
can be said of the traditional assembly line, which is designed and
operated to divide and control the labor force, but which in some
industries in some countries has outlived its usefulness because of a
combination of trade union power and worker resistance, and capital's
need for "flexible" work relations in the age of hyper-competitive
global capital.
The mode of cooperation in any material activity in class society is
thus "over-determined" by technological and natural possibilities, on
the one side, and the prevailing relations of property and power, on the
other. This is why cooperation, the mediation between the relations
between humans and nature and also between humans and humans, is
both a force and relation of production. It was the distinguishing mark
of the old left and social democrats that the mode of cooperation was
often regarded as more or less technologically given. Lenin believed
this, and practiced this belief when he imported Taylorism into the
Soviet Union. For the new left, which privileged the concept of power
over technological necessity, the mode of cooperation was seen as a
relation of domination in the factory and field. "What Do Bosses Do?",
the title of the first and best-known new left study of the division of
labor in early industry, answers its own question thusly: bosses boss
workers, that is, coordinate and control laborers. For the old left, bosses
coordinate and control labor. The new left's account of the capitalist
labor process is thus first and foremost a critique of the old left's
version of what bosses do. Where the old left often saw only or mainly
inputs or factors of production, the new left saw real frogs in real
gardens. For the first, workers personified a form of capital; for the
second, workers were regarded as people. In fact, both were right. The
worker is a person treated as if he is an input, an input who treats
himself as a person, an observation which underscores the
fundamentally ambiguous nature of the mode of cooperation and labor
process in capitalist society.
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5. Content and Form
Marx proposed that while there is an empirically observable
continuity in the evolution of the productive forces (hence of second
nature), no such regularity is evident in that of the relations of
production. Changes in the latter are characterized by sharp breaks or
ruptures; in the former by incremental additions and modifications
(more rapidly in some periods than others). The transition from ancient
slavery to feudalism in Europe, which occurred during the half a
millennium from c. 500-1100 A.D., witnessed more continuity in
agricultural and other techniques than in the relations of property and

power. While there was a technical revolution in agriculture after c.
1150, political and ideological changes were more marked. A whole
way of life, based on the decentralized power of the feudal manor, gave
way to a society increasingly based in the towns as well as on a
growing independent peasantry and artisanal class. Changes in the
productive forces "drove" the transformation of the relations of
production, but the changes in the former were incremental compared
with those in the latter, which were marked by periods of bloody
revolution and counter-revolution. This is why the history of
technology seems so dry, while social and political history is so
dramatic, being given to sudden upheavals and bewildering twists and
turns. Few charismatic leaders can be associated with the history of
technology and work, few if any non-charismatic leaders with the
history of revolution and counter-revolution.
Revolutionary political change permits a more rapid development
(or restoration and reconstitution) of productive forces which may have
been inhibited (or degraded) by property, power, and prestige in pre-
revolutionary regimes. Older relations of property and power, including
scientific paradigms, are overthrown and new forms established,
creating possibilities for new and different productive forces and modes
of cooperation. One cannot imagine the English industrial revolution in
the late 18th century without the political, legal, and social
transformations of the preceding century. The enclosure movement in
the home of industrial capitalism permitted the growth of agricultural
technology and divisions of labor at a rate that would have produced
"future shock" among earlier generations of yeomanry, commoners,
and gentlemen farmers. The American versions of both industrial and
agricultural technology, which quickly surpassed those of the English,
presupposed a political regime in the New World devoted to property
and liberty, based on a class structure absent of a feudal past. In the
1880s, the Japanese made a political and legal revolution that created
the pre-conditions for the import of Western technology, machinery,
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and organization. Modern Chinese productive forces would not have
exploded, as they have, without the weakening of Communist Party
control over much of the country. These and other revolutions in
property and power (including what someone called "market-Leninism"
in contemporary China) constituted what the Old Mole regarded (or
would have regarded) as historical transformation, not merely change.
Why did Marx see historical continuity in the development of the
productive forces and historical transformation in that of the production
relations?
This question raises the problem of content and form. A few

general remarks: If you play football within the form in which baseball
is organized, you get an absurdity. The same result is given if you try to
play checkers with chess pieces. If you take anything and push that
thing far or hard enough, its form will not be able to contain the
content, and it will break or crumble or die. The human body as form is
an example. It can take so much physical punishment before it is
thrown into a crisis, which either relieves the pressure, or turns into
another disease or illness, or kills the patient. You can push the
patriarchal form of organizing the relations between genders so far,
then at a certain point women will rebel, for example, stop having
babies, which is what happened in the old USSR because women were
expected to work full-time in wage labor and also at home under
adverse conditions without any extra compensation. Abstract
expressionism as an art form, the heyday of which was the late 1940s
and 1950s, could contain only a highly introspective, psychological
content. Once art made a political turn in the 1960s, the demise of
abstract expressionism as an art form was a foregone conclusion. In
Santa Cruz, California, at the Cabrillo Music Festival in the summer of
1994, a professional fiddler wrote and played a concerto for fiddle,
using the classical form of concerto for violin. The work was a flop: the
concerto as a musical form could not happily contain the bluegrass-like
content of fiddle music. Opera singers often botch pop songs when they
try to imitate pop singers. The slave form of labor, in the last instance,
proved to be inconsistent with the commodity form of value. And so
on.
Here a word of caution is useful. History is a messy business and
social forms can and do continue to survive well after their content has
outlived its usefulness. Theodor Adorno called this the "neutralization
of culture," one example being Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. The
handshake, a democratic form of the Roman practice of grabbing
forearms to greet a comrade, has little to do with the realities of modern
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life. The necktie is a vulgarization of the Elizabethan collar, as Veblen
remarked.
These examples appear to be trivial, yet suggest that ruling class
cultures survive well beyond their time. While there is no (knowable)
way that modern electronics production (content) can be organized
within the feudal manor (form), upper class hosts still judge a dinner
party to be a success if the aesthetics of the table and the food are
pleasing to the guests. Only a class that lives off the labor of other
classes can develop cultural forms, for example, art for art's sake, torn
from the context or content of culture. Pierre Bordieau has shown that
the success of a working class dinner party is measured by the amount
of food left over, that of a middle class party by the quality of the food
— quantity being taken for granted by middle class but not working
class families. Some of the first finely engineered machine tools were
made as a hobby by (or for) early industrialists in the machine tool
industry. At the level of ruling class life, and social existence in general
insofar as ruling class forms permeate the whole society, we can find a
plethora of forms that have lost any connection with their original
context or content. An important example is liberal democracy, a
political form which developed so that the early bourgeoisie had proper
representation in governing bodies called parliaments. We still live with
this form, although it has outlived its utility for the capitalist class (and
also for labor, for that matter), which is why within liberal democratic
forms one finds today an increasingly authoritarian content, on the one
hand, and outside these forms one finds a movement demanding radical
democracy in all institutions, including the state, on the other.
If we define productive forces as content (the objective material
interchange between human beings and nature) and production relations
as the social form in which this interchange evolves or develops, sooner
or later the content will push up against the limit of a particular form,
which will be thrown into crisis — in capitalism, an economic crisis, or
a rupture or breakdown in the circuits of capital and in the existing
relations between capital and labor. For Marx, privately organized
relations of production (and appropriation) are too narrow or
constricted to "contain" the increasingly social productive forces. This
is especially true given the humanization of nature and the
naturalization of human beings. All modern countries manage science,
the most important productive force, within forms organized by
governments, mainly in partnership with big capital — to take an
obvious example. Science in large measure is already socialized. It has
even become internationalized; collaboration between scientific teams
across continental borders is becoming a norm, not an exception. More
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Nobel Prizes in the sciences are awarded jointly to two or more
researchers. There is no way that capitalist production relations, flexible
as they have proven to be, can make systematic use of feudal forms of
labor, not with the domination of finance capital and financial markets
in world economy today. It's easy to show that the manorial system had
to give way as soon as the productive forces developed to the point at
which the former could no longer organize and develop the latter.
Marx's claim is that over time the productive forces become
increasingly social in nature because they are cumulative (more

productive, numerous, differentiated, specialized, requiring more
functional integration). At a certain point, everyone becomes dependent
on everyone else; every town has its Costco or Walmart, a more social
form of distribution than Woolworth's and Macy's. Small business
becomes more dependent on big business, in the role of suppliers,
consultants, and the like.
Doubting Thomases need only contrast the technology and mode
of cooperation of early hunting and gathering societies with the
technology and division of labor in a well-run factory today Years ago,
labor could be pushed around, even brutalized; today, labor is often
being enticed into becoming part of the solution, less often seen as part
of the problem.
As noted above, when the production relations (form) can no
longer contain the productive forces (content), the former are thrown
into crisis (just as is your body when you overdo drugs or eating).
When this occurs, there are three possible results: first, the production
relations may be overthrown and transformed into a new form; second,
these relations may bend or loosen up, to accommodate the new
content; third, the production relations may defend themselves (so to
speak), often violently, with the result that old structures of power are
reinforced or rebuilt. In all three cases, the results are crisis-induced or
crisis-driven.
So far so good. But our story is complicated by the fact that one
productive force, the mode of cooperation or division of labor, is also a
production relation. This means that the classical Marxist account of
continuity in the development of productive forces, and crisis in the
production relations, and the possibility of new production relations
(possible new forms of power and property) requires amendation.
Given the two-sided and potentially contradictory character of
cooperation, any abrupt change in the production relations is also likely
to lead in an abrupt change in the division of labor. Something like this
happened in Cuba after 1959. Similarly, since any division of labor is
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typically associated with a certain complex of technology, a revolution
in the production relations may revolutionize technology, as well. Seen
this way, there may be less continuity and more change in history than
many orthodox Marxists have thought.
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, dockworkers raised the
slogan, "be the masters of the docks, not the slave to tonnage!" At this
historical moment, not only power but also the organization of labor
drastically changed. When the political revolutions that overthrew or
tamed European absolutism were completed, national systems of state

administration were restructured and modernized. In the post-Mejii
period in Japan, feudal forms of organizing labor were imported into
the new factories, which, however, also deployed Western divisions of
labor which were unthinkable before the 1880s. One can think of other
examples, but the message is clear. Revolutions in the relations of
production at the very least create the conditions for revolutions in the
forces of production, and at the most lead directly to drastic changes in
the division of labor. This is why the history of productive
organization, for example, Alfred Chandler's classic account of
American management, tends to be more dramatic than histories of
technology per se, although not so dramatic as the history of
revolutionary political changes and transformations of property and
power structures. In Cuba, the history of the technology of the sugar
mill is a story of incremental change; the history of the organization of
labor in the fields and mill is more abrupt; the history of the failed
revolution of 1933 and the successful revolution of 1959 is as dramatic
as the most compelling novel. Jorge Armada's The Violent Land, an
historical novel set in Brazil, rivals the best of narrative histories when
it comes to descriptions of abrupt changes in power and property.
Armada's account of technology and work organization on the cocao
plantations also rivals the best of histories of technology and work
organization. The dramatic love interest is tied to the former; the
undramatic story of the grinding exploitation of labor is linked to the
latter. This was at a time when Armada was a political radical and
(unconsciously?) deployed the theory of productive forces and relations
to tell his frightening and powerful story.
6. Karl Marx, Meet Karl Marx
Many students of Marx, friendly and hostile, have remarked that
there are "two Marxisms" — Marx the scientist and also the founder of
the First International; Marx the author of the theoretical history titled
Capital and the organizer of the struggle to reduce the working day;
Marx who wrote that there is no "royal road to science" and the one
who said that the point is not to understand the world but to change it;
100
the objectivist and subjectivist Marx; the determinist and voluntarist
Marx; the theorist of the logic of capital (and history itself) and an
interpreter and a leader of the working class movement.
Is Marx a scientist, or what some have called a "productive force
determinist?" Is history a narrative of developing productive forces
banging up against the limits of existing production relations, the
former bending or breaking down the latter from time to time in
reformist or revolutionary upheavals? Is Marxism the study of the birth,
rise, decline, and demise of historical modes of production (and the
combination of different modes of production called "social

formations")? A theory of historical, structural change in which
individuals merely personify historical categories? Or is Marx an
agitator, a "production relation determinist?" Is history the history of
class struggles, as the Old Mole wrote in the Communist Manifesto? Is
Marxism simply an interpretation of history in which individuals and
historical actors are seen as real people in real historical situations,
acting in the name of universal ideals and material interests? In sum, is
Marxism a science or an art?
The answer is "both" or "all of the above." Marx is the scientist
who thought that he had found the key to unlocking the secrets of
continuity in change in history, and also the historical actor who
believed that he understood (and could help to bring about) historical
change in continuity. He believed that "material existence determines
consciousness" and also that human beings actively produce their
consciousness. History is not a narrative which unfolds independently
of the consciousness and will of historical personages; nor is it
whatever determined men and women wish to make it. History is a
narrative with the standard ingredients of motivation, conflict,
suspense, and resolution of conflict, stories of strange characters,
surprising plot twists, and, very often, emotionally unsatisfying
endings. Perhaps Marx's history can be likened to a story which the
characters make up as they go along, but always within the limits of
material, cultural and aesthetic, political, and psychological
possibilities.
Marx's method is, therefore, nothing if not ambiguous, which
reflects the ambiguity of life in general and class society in particular.
After the old man died, Marxists more or less abandoned the method of
ambiguity adopted by their master and began to take sides, hence
failing Montaigne's test that "to live with ambiguity is the sign of
maturity." Both an overground and underground tradition of Marxism
quickly appeared: the first can be called "objectivist," the second
"subjectivist" Marxism. Seemingly opposites, "determinism" and
101
"voluntarism" in fact constitute two sides of an unreconcilable
contradiction: if historical development is determined ahead of time,
not even the most powerful will can make any difference; alternatively,
if history is an open book, powerful wills can write whatever they wish
on its pages. Clearly, both cannot be true; in fact, neither makes any
sense. "People make history but not under conditions of their own
choosing." Without Lincoln, the Civil War might not have been
brought to a successful conclusion; without the Civil War, there would
have been no Lincoln. Without a Great Depression, no Franklin
Roosevelt; without Roosevelt, no New Deal. The times make men (sic)
and men make the times.
The fact is, however, there are periods in which history runs a more
or less predictable course. Until 1989, the structural properties of the
Cold War changed very little (especially after the Bandung
Conference). American Presidents adopted a Cold War mentality and
the national security state seemed to be written in stone. There was a
kind of inexorable logic to the Cold War once the old socialist countries
tried to "catch up with the West" and America and its (sometimes)
reluctant junior allies decided to destroy the USSR. After 1815, until
the rise of German and American competition, world economy
followed a more or less predictable path under the tutelage of Great
Britain. Clear-cutting a forest will produce certain definite results, as
surely as will a neurotic marriage. A bullet in your brain is almost
certain to result in death.
There are other times, however, when history is puzzling and
unintelligible. No important and lasting disputes arose among historians
when the history of Britain's hegemony in the 19th century was written
and any competent psychologist can predict the possible outcomes of a
severe neurosis. But there many different views of the origins of the
Cold War, the meaning of World War II, and what the American Civil
War was all about. Between 1939 and the late 1940s, and during the
first half of the 1960s, historical actors ceased to personify social or
historical categories because the categories themselves were thrown
into question or doubt. System disintegration undermined social
integration, as it were. These were times of crisis, when no one knew or
could know "what would happen next" or "what could be made to
happen next." During World War II, there were those who wanted to
sue for peace with Hitler; in 1860, few if any imagined the
"unconditional surrender" of the slave South. Major wars qualify as
periods of "abnormality": on the one hand, powerful national and
regional interests are at stake; on the other hand, the personality of a
Chamberlain, Churchill, Stalin, or Roosevelt count for much more than
102
during so-called normal times. There are periods when what any
individual does or does not do may have an important bearing on the
outcome (e.g., Hitler's paranoia, John Brown's raid, Rosie the Riveter).
There are periods when social struggles, including class struggles,
overcome the inertia of history, for example, the CIO organizing drives
in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The Italian
Renaissance is a good example: a vacuum of political power in Italy
created chances for strong, talented, and ruthless men to create and
assume positions of great power, which yielded startling changes in
property relations, the arts and sciences, and the productive forces
generally. There are "normal times" when people "live lives of quiet
desperation" as well as "times that try men's souls," when ordinary
people are called on to do extraordinary things. These truisms, indeed,
banalities, have to be repeated because they are banal; few souls fail to
grasp the ambiguity of the external world and their role in it, and how
and why their lives assume a life and death importance at times, while
other times it makes not a whit of difference how they conduct
themselves.
The argument here is that "normal times" are marked by changes
in both the productive forces and production relations. What makes an
era "normal," however, is that the dominant relations of production are
loose or flexible enough to accommodate the growing social productive
forces. Today, capitalist production relations are more flexible, the
business news replete with stories of mergers, acquisitions, joint
ventures, strategic agreements, and other forms of business
collaboration which break down the boundaries of particular
transnational corporations. Modern technology, especially
communications technology, is so "social" in nature that capital cannot
fully exploit its possibilities without collaborating with other capitals.
Sematech, a consortium of electronics companies, helped turn around in
the U.S.'s position in the world market for computer chips. A similar
story can be told of the deals between American and foreign auto
companies to develop joint production facilities in America. Until the
economic crises of 1997-1998, most business news (although not
political news) had a certain sameness and predictability, compared
with the economic turmoil of the 1970s, for example. No one can doubt
that downsizing, outsourcing, worldwide sourcing, restructuring,
growth of part-time and temporary workers, unemployment,
polarization of wealth and income, and growing "developing country"
markets are definite global trends. By contrast, when the productive
forces grow beyond the capacity of the existing production relations to
contain or make use of them, especially during times of economic crisis
103
and during wars and their immediate aftermaths, history is driven less
by the cumulative development of the productive forces and more by
social and class struggles in the production relations, and also
individual personalities, as is true today
The American Civil War is an example, as are the defeat of the free
blacks and popular classes generally with the Great Compromise of
1877, a political act, which permitted the North to industrialize in
earnest, and made possible the deep reforms of the progressive era,
when mass production resulted in a crisis of overproduction and

American overseas imperialism. So is the New Deal, a depression
caused by overproduction and disproportionality and financial crises
germinating in the 1920s together with the absence of national and
corporate planning mechanisms and institutions enabling international
cooperation. Capitalism per se was not overthrown, but the prevailing
assumptions, mores, and laws governing the scope and limit of the
power of capital drastically changed. No one could imagine the forced
draft industrialization of the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1938
without understanding the nature of Stalin's dictatorship established a
few years earlier. Napoleon's conquest of Europe transformed property
laws, making room for the growth of the productive forces in Europe,
and Britain's defeat of Napoleon opened up European markets, which
led to a more rapid growth of technology and industry. Colonial power
in the "third world" was typically based on an unholy alliance of
imperialist rulers, comprador capitalists, and landed classes which
blocked or distorted the development of industrial capitalism in the
South; nationalist development models after World War II, introduced
by anti-colonial forces, provided a strong impetus to the growth of the
productive forces, which, however, at a certain point reached their
limit. Then, counter-revolutions beginning in the 1960s, flourishing in
the 1970s and 1980s, designed to break the back of the nationalists and
leftists, led to the triumph of neoliberal export models of growth, with
their concomitant rapid growth of technology, industry, and trade and
economic crises. In these and many other cases, social and class
struggles assume a significance which they do not have in "normal"
times. The undergrowth or debris of old social orders are cleared away,
relations of property and power are transformed, and the productive
forces generally surge ahead. Fordism as a mode of organizing labor
and Keynesianism as a mode of regulating economies (both modes of
cooperation) received a boost during and after World War I and a big
push after World War II.
104
7. Conclusion
The limits of form (property and power relations) on the
development of content (the forces of production) provide the context
in which social and class struggles assume an historical significance
which they would not otherwise have. This is true not only of the
"development" of the productive forces but also (as today) of the
possibility of restructuring and reinventing productive forces that are
destructive in and to nature. When there are no formal limits to the
development (or reinventing) of technology, that is, when legal

restraints or boundaries are loose or non-existent (e.g., Internet), a
"populist" as well as capitalistic content flood the prevailing forms of
property.
Within any mode of production or social formation, particular
configurations of technology and divisions of labor are typically
associated with particular social divisions of labor or class or social
structures. Yet history is full of examples of changes in the division of
labor within particular forms of class society, and vice versa. One
cannot simply assume the limits of particular social formations, nor still
less the limits of particular material contents within these social forms.
The problem is, how to identify the limits of any mode of production
and social formation? Are there, for example, limits to global
capitalism today, or have global financial markets, widespread stock
ownership and credit borrowing, the flexibility of work relations within
particular capital units and also between capitals, new forms of
government-business collaboration, the development of regional
production systems, and the like given global capital an indefinite lease
on life? Is it possible to imagine barriers to accumulation turning into
limits as some green economists think? If so, are these barriers-limits to
be found in nature or are they the result of social movements or both?
No one, at this time, knows for sure; all that we can do is to raise the
methodological question to guide study and political praxis.
So far as the history of Marxism is concerned, however, it is
mistaken to equate "class struggle" Marxism with periods of rapid
change and social revolution and "scientific" Marxism with periods of
so-called normality. It is true that Marxists have shifted their focus
from economics to ideology and power during revolutionary times, for
example, the work of Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, and others during the
upheavals of the early 1920s and Mao, Ho Chi Mihn, Fidel, Che, and
others in the South in the 1960s (and Marcuse in the North, during the
same period). And it is true that "scientific" Marxism has flourished
during more or less normal times: examples are the work of Kautsky in
the late 19th century, Latin American Communist Parties in the 1950s,
105
and the translation of Marx's theory of history into the language of
English analytical philosophy and the rise of "analytical Marxism"
during the quiescent 1980s.
This is the standard view of Marxism. As the science of capitalism,
Marxism dominates during periods of capital's hegemony; as an
interpretation of subjectivity, consciousness, political identity, and class
struggle, during times of social or political turmoil — the first with the
spotlight on the productive forces, the second with the focus on the
production relations.
But this is a partial truth, and perhaps not even the main truth. The
fact is that there has always been a "subjectivist" Marxism developing
in the shadow of scientific Marxism, even when the wheels of
capitalism turn with minimal social friction. And scientific Marxism
has always contended for hegemony within the left movement even
during times of revolution or social upheaval. The work of I.I. Rubin in
the Soviet Union of the 1920s may be mentioned in this respect, as well
as that of the school of critical theory which did not disappear with the
end of the crisis of the 1930s and World War II. In the period after the
social storms of the 1960s and early 1970s, there were Marxist writers
who kept their sights set on popular consciousness and action, fetishism
and reification, and similar problems taken up by "subjectivist
Marxism." The class struggle school of Marxism remains alive today
— a period in which global labor unity seems to be more elusive than
ever. On the other side, there have been many revolutionary times when
official Communist Parties failed to jettison their "scientific" Marxism,
opposing rebel forces which they regarded as merely populist or wrong-
headed. Mao is the paradigm example when he broke with Communist
orthodoxy and "headed for the hills" to organize the peasantry. The
Cuban Communist Party originally opposed Fidel Castro as an
"adventurer." While Marxism has always developed in cycles, caused
by and sometimes causing social and political change, at a deeper level,
the two Marxisms have always been in contention, often at
loggerheads. The basic problem with scientific Marxism is that it can
and has drifted so easily into reified categories of thought; the trouble
with subjectivist Marxism is that it can and has supported the illusion
that anything and everything is possible at any time. The old,
ponderous French Communist Party is a fine example of the first, the
Hegelian Marxism of the "Toni Negri school" an example of the
second. The point is to sublate both into a new, third term, which is
neither the first nor the second, but which contains elements of both.
106

James O'Connor - A Prolegomenon To Ecological Marxism

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A prolegomenon to an ecological marxism: Thoughts on

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This essay is a "prolegomenon" to "Culture, Nature, and the Materialist

CNS 10 (2), June, 1999 77

Marx, at the highest level of social abstraction, this knowledge is

single historical process.

are modified or transformed, creating new possibilities for, and

culmination of capitalist rationality," Lukacs said, "is possible only

seemingly powerless laboring classes. In ancient societies based on

character. The ruling class today monopolizes ownership not only of

productive forces can be seen as a stock (at any moment in time) or a

as a productive force; the social division of labor refers to labor as a

skills and efforts of individual participants in the business organization toward

technical-economic efficiency and the political control of laborers

upheavals may redistribute power, or result in new forms of power, the

the el cortido mean only that there is a contradiction between forces

agricultural and other techniques than in the relations of property and

This question raises the problem of content and form. A few

increasingly social in nature because they are cumulative (more

tamed European absolutism were completed, national systems of state

combination of different modes of production called "social

when mass production resulted in a crisis of overproduction and

development (or reinventing) of technology, that is, when legal

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