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Economic Determinism

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

During Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' creation of the ideology of Communism, they inductively surmised what they saw as a law of history, an 'inexorable law', that ran throughout the course of history. They also believed that, by tracing this law through history, they could predict with positive assurance the pattern of man's progress in the future.

The law of 'economic determinism' is simple: self-preservation is the supreme instinct in man, and therefor the whole pattern of human conduct must always have been governed by the fundamental laws governing survival, a dialectual process between man and nature (see co-evolution). This reasoning leads to the conclusion that all elements of historical consequence result from 'economic determinism', or man's effort to survive.

Contents

1 Economic Determinism's relation to Marxist philosophy

2 Marxist Views of the Human Mind

3 Conclusion

4 Sources

5 Related Articles

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Economic Determinism's relation to Marxist philosophy

Marx and Engels said everything man does, whether organizing a government, establishing laws, supporting a particular moral code, or practicing religion, is merely a result of his desire to protect whatever modes of production he is currently using, to secure the necessities of maintaining the status quo of his modus operandi. Furthermore, Marx and Engels believed, should a revolutionary force change the mode of production, the dominant class will immediatly set out to create a new society to protect this new economic order. In the modernity of their era, Marx and Engels felt the property class had essentially accomplished the same the, the establishment of a new societal and economic order, instinctively creating a society protective of their capitalist interests. They made this statement to the Bourgeois in the Communist Manifesto: "Your very ideas are but the outgrowh of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence (system of law) is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction determined by the economic conditions of the existance of your class."¹ From this, it is seen, Marx and Engels did not believe men could arbitrarily choose any one of several forms of society, but only that one which promotes the prevailing mode of production. The very nature of man's materialistic make-up requires him to do this. At the foundation of all activity of society lies 'economic determinism'.

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Marxist Views of the Human Mind

Marx and Engels possessed a very mechanistic view of the way the human mind works. After the brain receives impressions from the outside world, they said, it automatically moves the individual to take action (see Activist Theory). They asked this: "Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means."&sup2 According to them, the thing which we call 'free will' is nothing other than an awareness of the impelling forces which move an individual to action; in taking action, he is not free to change the course his very nature dictates.

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Conclusion

Marx and Engels viewed this law of 'economic determinism' as the creative force in human progress. They also felt the Judeo-Christian code of ethics was merely a tool of the bourgeois, and that the code should be reversed by the bourgeois, in order to improve upon humanity and therefore improve upon society. Thusly reaffirming their stance, that human beings are not the creators of society, but its products, they stated: "The final causes of all social changes and political revolution are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's insight into internal truth and justice... but in the economies of each epoch."³ Therfor, they advocated a change in economic structure as the only valid way of improving society and refining the intellectual make-up of humanity.

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