Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 00:31:08 -0500 (EST)
From: Viraj Fernando <viraj-AT-interlog.com>
Subject: M-TH: [Ralph] Marx's Integral Conception


MARX'S INTEGRAL CONCEPTION OF NATURE AND SOCIETY.

According to Marx and Engels, the same laws of dialectics operated in
nature, human history and thought. That is to say in the *most abstract*
sense all material processes are analogical. And for all material processes
to be analogical they have to follow certain patterns of propagation. These
abstract patterns manifest three tendencies and these tendencies are what we
call the laws of dialectics. [Besides these main tendencies there can be sub
tendencies which we have not yet identified but we intuitively know by
practice. Therefore we can not apply the above as "wooden trichotomies" as
Marx calls it]. Another such tendency which is identifiable is what is
termed the 'law of Uneven and Combined Development'.

In the 'Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy' Marx draws the
analogy between development of society from antiquity to bourgeois society
and the development of animals from lower forms to the higher. How the
rudimentary developments in the lower stages can be understood only when
they are fully developed in the higher forms.

'Bourgeois society is the most advanced and complex historical organisation
of production. The categories which express its relations, and the
understanding of its structure, therefore, provide an insight into the
structure and the relations of production of all formerly existing social
formations the ruins and component elements of which were used in the
creation of bourgeois society. Some of these unassimilated remains are still
carried on within bourgeois society, others however, which previously
existed only in rudimentary form have been further developed and have
attained their full significance, etc. The anatomy of man is the key to the
anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, rudiments of more advanced forms in
the lower species of animals can only be understood when more advanced forms
are already known. Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to the economy of
antiquity, etc., but it is quite impossible [to gain this insight] in the
manner of those economists who obliterate all historical differences and who
see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena. If one knows rent, it
is possible to understand tribute, tithe, etc., but they do not have to be
treated as identical'.

Best regards/ Viraj
 





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