From Mono- to Multi-Dimensional Vision: Is capitalist productivity really “advanced”?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an exerpt from the author’s book in Chinese on philosophy and social theories published in 2013. The book partially summarizes the results of the author’s decades-long exploration in the realm of ideology and is rich in ideas both old and new at the same time – new expositions in modern terminology of traditional Chinese thought as applied to social issues and ideologies of the world today. Any comment and criticism and any offer to help improve the English translation of the whole book will be welcome and appreciated. For a list of contents of the book with links to other translated parts, please see:

II. Human Society: A dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole (continued)

II-2. Multi-dimensional and multi-level structure of human society (continued)

II-2(8). From Mono- to Multi-Dimensional Vision: Is capitalist productivity really “advanced”?

Traditional socialist theories of political economy had another loophole: Duo to its inability to break through and transcend the limit of anthropocentrism, its view of productive force and production relations was confined to those within the narrow vision of human society per se. Despite some degree of cognitive value in specific contexts, the discourse based on concepts in such limited senses has ignored the huge impact left by inter-human relations on a lower level on man-nature relations on the topmost level and failed to go beyond the restricted lower-level vision in its reasoning, thus abetting capitalism in pushing the planet towards an ecological crisis, which is threatening the survival of humanity today.

The concepts of productive force and production relations in the narrower senses only see the role of humans and assign the No. One place to man’s manipulative power over nature, that is, science and technology, among all productive forces. In fact, in the broadest sense, it is the power of nature that is the No. One productive force. And the relationship between man and nature should be considered as the No. One or primary production relations. It is Nature that has given birth to the human race and created all the basic conditions for its survival and multiplication. But since modern times, humanity has stopped veneratiing the great Nature and wrongly shifted his worship over to the idols of money, position of power, and false reputation while acrediting all that he is enjoying to himself. He has taking-it-for-grantedly never been satisfied with what he has had but at the bottom of his heart still blaming Nature for not providing sufficient resources for his unrestrainedly wasteful consumption, as evidenced in capitalist economics textbooks, which begins with the “scarcity of resources” proposition as the primary theorem to start with. As a result, a greater part of all the resources made ready by Nature for the human and all other living speicies during the hundreds of millions of years long before the birth of humanity has been consumed, not to be regenerated within a short period of time, while leaving poisonous soil, water and air all over the planet Earth, severely upsetting the balance of nature and exhausting its tolerance towards mankind to the ultimate minimum.

In the discourse based on concepts in such limited senses, the greater the productive forces, the better for us humans because that means fuller satisfaction of our desires. But if placed against the broader background of man-nature relations, human productive forces should be differentiated between the positive and the negative ones: Only those forces which comply with the balance of nature as a whole and so are favorable to the survival of humanity are productive forces in the positive sense and should be encouraged, whereas those which upset the natural balance of all existence and thus threatens human survival are counter-productive or negative forces and should be checked. Then, all those production relations that stimulate, indulge and protect counter-productive forces are of course backward or even reactionary relations while only those that favor the development of real (positive) productive forces (both natural and human) are advanced production relations. The kind of conceptualization that does not distinguish between the positive and the negative in talking about productive forces and in labeling capitalist production relations, capitalist political-economic systems and capitalist ideologies, that are believed to be favorable to such indiscriminately defined “productive forces”, as “advanced” production relations and “advanced” superstructure – this kind of conceptualization is but a mechanical linear way of thingking.

Furthermore, to counterpose productive forces and production relations to each other in a clear-cut way is itself another manifestation of a mechanical way of conceptualiztion. What is a “force”? It is the impact exerted by one thing on another. That is to say, any force, including productive force, always involves two related parties, i.e., embodies a relationship.

First of all, the relationship between man and nature is one of exerting forces in both ways, or reciprocal: on the one side, man’s remaking and utilization of nature on a limited local scale while comlying with nature on the whole and, on the other, nature’s “producing” of human and all forms of life together with all basic material conditions for their survival while also imposing restrictions on men involving punishments for noncompliance. Therefore, there is not only reciprocity but also overlapping, i.e., not total counterposition, between the productive forces and production relations in man-nature relationships.

Then, as to the inter-human production relations and the political and cultural superstructure that serves specific production relations and matching economic system, they are no other than embodiments of forces which either support real productive forces or promote counterproductive forces, and so are themselves important forms of either productive or counterproductive forces. The productive power possessed by the human community as a collective whole is not equal to, but far surpass, the mechanical totalling of all separate individuals’ or all separate buisness units’ productive capacity. That is because, according to the systems theory, that is, a non-mechanical philosophy, the capacity or power of an organic whole (whose organicity is provided by no other than the favorable production relations and matching superstructure) far surpasses the mechanic totalling of those of parts. Therefore, a society’s political-economic structure and its matching ideology do themselves embody, without actual “transformation” or “reverse action”, kinds of forces either positive or negative or both (co-existing and offsetting each other), in their relation to social production.

Traditional socialist theory of political economy rightly pointed out that the capitalist system produced negative results in hindering the development of productive forces as manefested in the fact that Western capitalist countries have committed counless criminal acts of crude violence during their military colonization of the world, the two world wars and many more local wars they launched, and even more wars they have been inciting all over the world till today for the purpose of “divide and rule” and for political control of the whole world in the times of their primitive capital accumulation and later continual expansion through militarily-backed political and economic colonization, resulting in the killing of innumerable human lives and in looting and destroyong innumerable material resources. However, inspite of its political, moral and ideological denuciation of the above, traditional socialist theory, due to its lack of dimenisons, and limited scope of vision under the influence of the mainstream anthropocentrist and Eurocentrist perspectives, failed to clearly indicate how great a part of the productive forces in the positive and constructive sense has been destroyed by the capitalist system domestically and globally and how great a part of the “productive forces” which has been supposedly possessed by the capitalist countries has actually been counterproductive forces in being used for aggressive and predatory purposes resulting in the destruction of real productive forces domestically and globally. It has failed to exclude such destructive forces from what it has counted as “advanced productive forces”, in the same way capitalist theory of economics has been counting social products used to clear up pollutions as part of GDP and dismissing the costs incurred by capitalist indusries but borne by the whole human society as “externalities”, so that socialist theory has over-estimated by far the social productivity of the whole capitalist system, especially that in the present era of monopoly capitalism. Consequently, some leaders of the traditional socialist movement could not sober-mindedly propose and stick to a correct line of thought and action as regards how to look at and deal with the capitalist system, but “kneel at its feet”, so to speak, and prettify its economic and political systems and ideology and even go so far as to actually set about restoring capitalism in formerly socialst countries.