Page 150 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

127 The Development of Normative Structures

societies failed and about the innovations with which modern
bourgeois society met the evolutionary challenges. I would like
to illustrate with two examples the &7vd of question that, in my
view, requires that we again take up historical materialism.
In an in-house working paper, R. Funke contrasted two
theoretical approaches to the analysis of developed capitalist so-
cieties: theories of ‘‘still-capitalism,”” which start with the idea
that the capitalist organizational principle is already limited in its
effectiveness by a new political principle of organization that has
to be further specified; and, on the other hand, theories of “yet-
to-be-accomplished-capitalism,’’ which start with the idea that
capitalism is still being established, that it is still in the process of
clearing away the remains of tradition from quasi-natural social
relations and infrastructures and of integrating them into the
accumulation process and the commodity form. From evolutionary
perspectives the significance of the same facts is rather different
according to whether they are supposed to support a view of the
state springing into functional gaps in the market as a substitute
or one of the administrative establishment of the commodity
form for previously quasi-natural social relations. The same
crisis phenomena signify in one perspective the exhaustion of
capitalistically limited ranges of variation and, in the other, the
dilemma of a capitalism that has to transform inherited social
relations and infrastructures without being able to regenerate their
stabilizing powers. If, as I shall assume for the sake of my argu-
ment, the rival interpretations could explain the available data
more or less equally well, how can we decide between them?
If we had a theory of social evolution that explained the transi-
tion to the modern world as the rise of a new and, moreover,
well-defined, organizational principle of society, there would be
a possibility of examining which of the two competing approaches
was more compatible with this explanation, for these two different
interpretations advance different organizational principles for
capitalist development. According to the first version, the prin-
ciple of organization consists in a complementary relationship
between a nonproductive state and a depoliticized economic sys-
tem. The latter is organized through markets—that is, in accor-
dance with general and abstract rules—as a domain of decentral-