Page 154 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

131 Historical Materialism

framework.* The version set down by Stalin needs to be recon-
structed. My attempt to do so is also intended to further the
critical appropriation of competing approaches—above all of
neoevolutionism and of structuralism. Of course, I shall be able
to make plausible only a few viewpoints from which such a re-
construction might be attempted with some hope of success.
I would like first to introduce and consider critically some basic
concepts and assumptions of historical materialism; I shall then
point out certain difficulties that arise in applying its hypotheses
and advance and illustrate an (abstract) proposal for resolving
them; finally, I shall see what can be learned from competing
approaches.

I
To begin I shall examine the concepts of social labor and history
of the species, as well as three fundamental assumptions of his-
torical materialism.
1. Socially organized labor is the specific way in which humans,
in contradistinction to animals, reproduce their lives.

Man can be distinguished from the animal by consciousness, religion,
or anything else you please. He begins to distinguish himself from the
animal the moment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a
step required by his physical organization. By producing food, man
indirectly produces his material life itself.

At a level of description that is unspecific in regard to the human
mode of life, the exchange between the organism and its en-
vironment can be investigated in the physiological terms of ma-
tertal-exchange processes. But to grasp what is specific to the
human mode of life, one must describe the relation between
organism and environment at the level of labor processes. From
the physical aspect the latter signify the expenditure of human
energy and the transfer of energies in the economy of external
nature; but what is decisive is the sociological aspect of the goal-
directed transformation of material according to rules of instru-
mental action.®
Of course, under ‘‘production’’ Marx understands not only the