Economic Determinism?

[Lefteris]

Could someone explain it to me or suggest some books about it?
I've heard about its relation with Marxist philosophy but according to wikipedia many Marxist thinkers don't agree to it.

Sorry if its a pretty elementary question but I don't really undertand it from wikipedia.

[swagbucks]

Hi, I'm learning as well so please take my answer with a big pinch of salt as I'm answering to say what I think it means and why I think it's true. I could easily be wrong though, I don't speak commie much.

Economic determinism (and I think this Marx might have been the one to come up with this first, or at least make the idea popular with his writing) is the idea that people's lives are largely determined by their economic situation, specifically their relationship to the means of production (this is an important commie term, i'm pretty sure it means the things that make our food and stuff). So a field where you can plant stuff to grow is a means of production (MOP hereafter) as is a massive factory. I guess workers themselves are MOP too (?).

So someone who owns enough of the MOP to live off other people's labour (like a dude who owns a factory) has a different relationship to the MOP than I do. I have to sell my labour to people like him and he gets to set the terms of my labour. So we have very different life experience, chances etc.

This can be expanded to society as a whole. So if we live in a time and place where the economy is based largely on farming land owned by aristocrats who need a bunch of peasants to work it then the propaganda of that society stresses things like everyone staying where they are, innovation being a dangerous thing, if your life is terrible now and you do what you're told you'll go to heaven/come back as a nobleman...

I think most Marxists do believe in economic determinism, I'm not sure you could be a Marxist without doing so because Marx is all about relations to the MOP making classes whose struggle with each other moves history along.

Not everything in life is economically determined. So I could fall over tomorrow and get brain damage which would have a big effect on my life but isn't determined by the economy. But as I live in Britain my complicated relationship to the MOP means I get better health care than someone who's not rich in a country where they don't have free healthcare. I'm pretty sure I'm closer to owning the MOP than a land worker in Nepal is.

As I say I'm learning too. Hopefully, if what I've written is wrong someone who knows what they're talking about will come and tell us what's what.

[Thirsty Crow]

Could someone explain it to me or suggest some books about it?
I've heard about its relation with Marxist philosophy but according to wikipedia many Marxist thinkers don't agree to it.

Sorry if its a pretty elementary question but I don't really undertand it from wikipedia.
In short, economic determinism (more correctly called monodeterminism, but that's another matter) postulates that the way people produce their means of subsistence and their means of production exhibits a crucial impact upon 1) social development as a whole and 2) areas and spheres which aren't "economic".
This is also related to the base - superstructure metaphor (superstructure - the production of ideas, law, culture, morals, ideology etc.).

What's really important here is not determinism, but what's economic in fact. In short, the economy already consists of human relations - class relations - as Marx puts it, the social relations of production are themselves a productive power of mankind. This view has, I believe, largely been lost to whole generations of Marxists. For instance, when discussing the notion of the means of production:

(this is an important commie term, i'm pretty sure it means the things that make our food and stuff)It's not only the tools of production - but as I said, the relations in which humans organize their production, and general social knowledge as well.

This form of "economic determinism" needn't manifest itself as fatalism, arguing that there is only a one way work of "determination" at play and that it is predetermined by the development of technology.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

"Economic determinism" gets thrown around a lot, but I think a proper way of thinking of economic determinism is that all human action is fully determined by economics, in the same way that many sociobiologists think that all human action is to spread genetic material. Consciousness is considered epiphenomenal: one goes through the motions of thinking and choosing, unaware that their thoughts are determined by economics.

Few Marxists today interpret Marx as being this kind of economic determinist, although many non-Marxists seem happy to knock down this straw man. I believe this is another remnant of the influence of Marxism-Leninism (aka Stalinism).

Some people just use "economic determinism" to slander the idea that economics has the primary causal weight in many (if not most) human situations, something which I think is properly attributable to Marx. It implies that recognizing this causal primacy necessarily renders consciousness epiphenomenal, which is an invalid conclusion to draw.

[Art Vandelay]

Some people just use "economic determinism" to slander the idea that economics has the primary causal weight in many (if not most) human situations, something which I think is properly attributable to Marx. It implies that recognizing this causal primacy necessarily renders consciousness epiphenomenal, which is an invalid conclusion to draw.

It is indeed often used as a flippant way to write off Marx's work as monolithic; I heard it a few times, from professors or students, while I was in university. Its utter nonsense that Marxists are economic deterministic. All it really shows is a total misunderstanding of dialectical materialism. Marx never claimed that socialism would necessarily triumph over capitalism and his methodology stems from the premise that nothing is static, instead having a unity and conflict of opposites, which gives it motion. How that could be interpreted as deterministic is beyond me.

[ckaihatsu]

Comrades are correctly identifying 'economic determinism' as being a strawman construction that's casually and incorrectly attributed to Marxism.

The danger here is that 'economic determinism' *implies* that human society, and its economy, is simply, irreversibly on "auto-pilot", due to its economics. It's basically saying that the world is on a course of *predestination*, which is neither Marxist nor factual. 'Economic determinism' strips mass consciousness and human agency out of the equation, which -- finally -- is decidedly *counter-revolutionary* in its conclusion, since it would mean that class struggle simply isn't deterministic at all.

[Dave B]

Actually the kernel of the idea, before analysing how it fits into the broader idea of economic determinism, is quite simple and fairly well understood elsewhere.

It is intellectualised in psychoanalysis under the term ‘rationalisation’.

So to using perhaps a somewhat dated example that Karen Horney used of a married man, who doesn’t like washing up the dishes and doing the housework etc.

[I will move onto more serious ones later.]

Then you might be attracted to the ideology of male chauvinism and that it is demeaning, ignoble, unnatural and not right for men to perform such tasks.

In order to justify, or ‘rationalise’, sitting around and having the woman running around doing it.

And if ‘ethnically’ you are in a position where you perceive that you economically benefit, even as a worker, from institutionalised ‘racism’ then you might be more prone to adopt and accept the ideology that ‘justifies’ it.

It is interesting of itself because it appears that the default ‘natural’ position is a communistic one; and that non egalitarian social structures and shitting on others etc is, of itself and on its own, unacceptable and requires an external ‘rational’ or ‘intellectual’ justification to make it acceptable.

So to trivialise it a bit for instance, and for the moment even avoiding any ‘economic’ issues; you can’t just go around gassing “jews” and trampling over “Palestinians”, for whatever reason, you have to construct an ‘ideology’ to justify it by designating the objects as ‘rats’ or ‘insects’ etc to make it OK.

The rationalisations don’t have to be quite so crude and can employ higher moral paradigms.

So the British capitalist class led the working class to war in 1914 to do something about the German’s propensity marching around with Belgium babies impaled on their bayonets etc and Tony Blair to get rid of the ‘uniquely evil’ Saddam Hussien, and WMD.

Today ‘think tanks’ provide the often ‘moral’ justifications and rationalisations or general ideology for what is capitalistically economically necessary for themselves.

But we understand that?

In fact if something has some universal truth in it there will be a non intellectual pre Marxist proverb for it thus;

cut one's coat according to one's cloth ;

Or to plan one's aims and activities [super structural ideology] in line with one's resources and [material] circumstances.

But “one's resources and [material] circumstances”, or material needs ‘mostly’ ‘determine’ the plan, rather than the other way around; according to Marxist historical materialism.

So it’s the ‘tail wagging the dog’ kind of thing, or ‘follow the money’.

;eg the French president after gulf oil arms deal kickbacks on geographical Iran treaties etc.

It isn’t rocket science at the end of the day.


However the new ‘plans or ideologies’ tend to be evolutionary modifications and adaption’s of old super-structural ideologies rather than a throw ‘the baby out with the bath water’ revolutionary change.

So you get the so called thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis thing.

But this doesn’t necessarily just affect the imposition of the ideology of the ruling class on the labouring masses; as it can also independently affect the economical self interests of the ‘labouring classes’ themselves.

As laid out excellently I think in the last chapter of Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’.

The Artisans as the skilled self employed saw their enemy as the Merchant capitalist class and wanted to set up a guild type, price fixed, co-operative retail system for small producers, and perhaps smash machines operated by unskilled operatives, and everything would be dandy.

The ‘communist’ factory working class saw themselves, as part of an inevitable technological process, and permanently catapulted out of the economic sphere of the independent self employed and into mass production and, ‘progressively’, the rented wage slaves of the owners of machines or capital.

They didn’t see a practical solution to their ongoing and ‘progressing’ problems in producing and selling steam engines, ships and rolled steel in Owens labour bizzaars.

Hence, as Engels pointed out, the ideology of Proudhonist independent small scale, albeit syndicalist/co-operative production, of producing ultimately low capital intensive commodities for a market.

Made sense in Southern Europe where proudhonism was ideologically popular; but looked a bit daft to 5000 workers in a steel mill.

Even though Proudhon jumped through ideological hoops to accommodate that reality.

Culturally even today middle class workers still hanker after the idea of being self employed workers; now regarding their intellect/skill, as kind of their own handloom, as their own private means of production.

I think when it comes to ‘economic determinism’ you have to accept, or not, that capitalism does shit on other systems because it is better 'materially', rather than ‘morally’, eg people turning with Gun Boats etc.

And the associated ideology is determined by it .


Nietzsche was probably revolutionary after a sense in that he threw overboard all previous super-structural ideologies as in the self explanatory ‘Beyond Good and Evil’.

And that power, located in the individual or superman, was everything.

I think he was taking the piss.

[Hit The North]

Comrades are correctly identifying 'economic determinism' as being a strawman construction that's casually and incorrectly attributed to Marxism.

The danger here is that 'economic determinism' *implies* that human society, and its economy, is simply, irreversibly on "auto-pilot", due to its economics. It's basically saying that the world is on a course of *predestination*, which is neither Marxist nor factual. 'Economic determinism' strips mass consciousness and human agency out of the equation, which -- finally -- is decidedly *counter-revolutionary* in its conclusion, since it would mean that class struggle simply isn't deterministic at all.

I don't think it necessarily has that teleology built into it. Economic determinism is, in its general manifestation, the view that the economy is the decisive influence over other levels of society, so it can accommodate the effects of economic decline as well as economic development. You need to add some botched version of hegelianism to give it its teleology.

Anyway, Marx never argued that the 'economy' is decisive, but the 'material conditions', which is more general than the narrow view of 'economics' that bourgeois critics of Marxism hold in their limited brains.

But we should be very careful not to elevate idealist factors to the same level of determination, or give them equal explanatory value, that we afford to material factors, or we might find ourselves lapsing into a kind of bourgeois humanism.

Marx viewed capitalism as a self-reproducing system that did not directly rely on human will. It unfolds according to its own internal logic and we, as human beings, are caught up in the web of its various determinations. That's why grabbing hold of society and revolutionizing it is such a damn difficult task.

[ckaihatsu]

['Economic determinism' is] basically saying that the world is on a course of *predestination*, which is neither Marxist nor factual.





I don't think it necessarily has that teleology built into it.




Marx viewed capitalism as a self-reproducing system that did not directly rely on human will. It unfolds according to its own internal logic and we, as human beings, are caught up in the web of its various determinations. That's why grabbing hold of society and revolutionizing it is such a damn difficult task.


Agreed, and thanks for the critique.

I realized later that the term 'emergent' -- instead of 'predestined' -- is what's called for in my wording above.

Here's my use of the term from another discussion, for the sake of definition:





[I]n terms of empirical possibilities, who's to say that low-level, grassroots, anarchist- and communist-type organizing, post-capitalism, *wouldn't* possibly spontaneously build up to global scales, in a self-emergent kind of way -- ?


Also, this topic / question of economic determinism fits nicely into a framework I created, for just such an occasion:


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

http://s6.postimage.org/zbpxjshkd/1_History_Macro_Micro_Precision.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/zbpxjshkd/)

[Dave B]

Economic determinism is the idea of the particular ‘organisational’ [social] way we have do things or make stuff determines the way we think about stuff.

Or as it is a dynamic or evolving process the new ways we have have do things or make stuff, new practical realities modifies pre-existent ideas.

This can cause serious problems when it comes to religious texts which weren’t written for finance capitalism eg Islamic finance

http://www.islamic-finance.com/item5_f.htm

And equally, in the same text, the somewhat laid back and the now inappropriate acceptance of slavery.

The materialist concept is that new material circumstance change ideas to produce a system of new material circumstance and essentially adaptive new ideas. Only to be transformed again by yet further changes in material circumstances.

Just like Darwinian evolution where animals and plants etc evolve or change to adapt better to their environment/ecosystem. In the process changing their own environment/ecosystem/material circumstances and so on.


As opposed to Hegel who had the same process but with ideas driving the process; which is still a common concept.

I suppose it is the concept of ideas eg steam engines developing to solve new material problems and necessity being the mother of invention etc.

Pure scientific researchers and astro physicists who believe we will never be able to travel faster than light might be justified in thinking otherwise.

I went to a lecture by a geologist researching in tectonic plate formation for fun basically but as he stated people like themselves have to submit a proposal of impact assessment or something to get funding, or in other words what bloody use is it.

He said that it might help finding locations of new oil deposits which went down well; as if he really cared about that.

I think human scientific curiosity and for that matter some kind of Kropotkinist mutual aid communistic social instinct, and in fact later Darwins thesis in his second book, might be part of our innate or ‘human essence’ or ‘material condition’.

As opposed to often claimed ‘Marxist’, post 1845, proposition that we are all ‘ideologically’ blank slates with ‘aggregates’ of economically determined social relations written on it.

Anyway from Fred on the matter

Engels to J. Bloch In Königsberg London, September 21, 1890



According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.

The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.

There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.


We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany,

Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power).

Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.


In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting force, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition.

For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.


I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm) is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusion to it in Capital (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1867-c1/index.htm). Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1877/anti-duhring/index.htm) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm), in which I have given the most detailed account of historical material which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideology (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1845/german-ideology/index.htm) was not published in Marx or Engels lifetime]


Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly.

And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too....
[....]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm

[Brotto Rühle]

Capitalism will end, either by socialist revolution, or by the end of humankind.

[Rafiq]

Capitalism will end not naturally by it's own mechanisms, but when the proletariat defies the balance of nature and, after amassing a strong political and societal basis, in a gesture of irrational passion, confirms the triumph of it's will over the very mechanized, normal and rational state of things, over the laws of nature itself. The heavens itself will roar in chaos as the Earth is conquered by a force with a single purpose that will be sought through even if it means the destruction of the entire human species.

[Remus Bleys]

Capitalism will end not naturally by it's own mechanisms, but when the proletariat defies the balance of nature and, after amassing a strong political and societal basis, in a gesture of irrational passion, confirms the triumph of it's will over the very mechanized, normal and rational state of things, over the laws of nature itself. The heavens itself will roar in chaos as the Earth is conquered by a force with a single purpose that will be sought through even if it means the destruction of the entire human species.
Or you know, it eventually destroys itself, taking us all with it.