We socialists have a saying that every ruling class helps to dig its own grave. As excellent evidence, consider the massive report first issued after three years of research by President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends.
The Report is full of statistical matter which will be of invaluable use for us in our propaganda. Here, the present writer wishes to emphasise the open acceptance, though without acknowledgement, of course, of the basic proposition of Marxism. first laid down by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, eighty-five years ago and later stated by Marx as follows:
The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage in their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production, these turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.
The above generalisation was for long completely ignored by the professional sociologists of the universities. Later it was condemned as a false and pernicious doctrine generally being misinterpreted out of all recognition. In recent years many historians have adopted it as the real clue to history and the only tool by which they could justify their claim to be "scientific historians". In "Recent Social Trends" the principle is stressed very clearly though the revolutionary conclusions drawn by Marx are not drawn by the Committee, or to be more specific, are only vaguely hinted at in their indefinite suggestions as to future changes. The following are extracts from the Introduction:
Scientific discoveries and inventions instigate changes, first in the economic organisations and social habits, which are most closely associated with them. The next set of changes occurs in organisations one step further removed, namely in institutions such as the family, the government. the school and the churches. Somewhat later, as a rule, come changes in social philosophies and codes of behaviour, though at times these may precede the others.
(From an article by R.W. Housley, Socialist Standard, March 1933.)
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