Page 149 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

126 Communication and Evolution of Society

{In reference to the second question} it is another question
whether in Marx historical materialism did not have the rather
incidental role of merely complementing the analysis of capitalism
with a backward glance at precapitalist societies and whether the
analysis of the contemporary formation of society ought not to
stand on its own feet. Marx was concerned to identify and to
explain the developments that showed the structural limitation
of adaptive capacity and made it possible to ground the practical
necessity for a change in the organizational principle of society.
If it is true that historical materialism cannot contribute much
to these questions, then the interest in questions of historical
materialism has to arouse the suspicion of escapism. But I am of
the opinion that Marx already understood historical materialism
as a comprehensive theory of social evolution and regarded the
theory of capitalism as one of its subparts. Leaving Marx’s view
to one side, the theory of social evolution has a precisely spe-
cifiable, systematic significance for an analysis of the present
that inquires about the exhaustion of the innovative and adaptive
potential of existing social structures.
Assumptions about the organizational principle of society and
about learning capacities and ranges of possible structural varia-
tion cannot be clearly checked empirically before historical de-
velopments have put the critical survival limits to the test. Evofu-
tionarily oriented analyses of the present are alway handicapped
because they cannot view their object retrospectively. For that
reason, theories of this type, whether Marxist or non-Marxist,
are forced to monitor their assumptions—assumptions that already
underlie the delimitation and description of the object—on an
instructive theory of social development. Characterizations of
society as industrial, postindustrial, technological, scientific, cap-
italist, late-capitalist, stace-monopolistic, state-capitalist, totally ad-
ministered, tertiary, modern, postmodern, and so on, stem from
just as many developmental models connecting the contemporary
formation of society with earlier ones. In this regard, historical
materialism can take on the task of determining the organizational
principle of contemporary society from the perspective of the
origin of this social formation—for example, with statements
about the systems problems in the face of which traditional