Page 162 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

139 Historical Materialism

labor power is combined with the available means of production.
Regulation of access to the means of production, the way in which
socially employed labor power is controlled, also determines in-
directly the distribution of socially produced wealth. The rela-
tions of production express the distribution of social power; with
the distributional pattern of socially recognized opportunities for
need satisfaction, they prejudge the znterest structure of a society.
Historical materialism proceeds from the assumption that pro-
ductive forces and productive relations do not vary independently,
but form structures that (a) correspond with one another and
(b) yield a finite number of structurally analogous stages of
development, so that (c) there results a series of modes of
production that are to be ordered in a developmental logic. (The
handmill produces a society of feudal lords, the steam mill a
society of industrial capitalists. ) 1
In the orthodox version, five modes of production are distin-
guished: (1) the primitive communal mode of bands and tribes
prior to civilization; (2) the ancient mode based on slaveholding;
(3) the feudal; (4) the capitalist; and finally (5) the socialist
modes of production. The discussion of how the ancient Orient
and the ancient Americas were to be ordered in this historical
development led to the insertion of (6) an Asiatic mode of pro-
duction.'® These six modes of production are supposed to mark
universal stages of social evolution. From an evolutionary stand-
point, every particular economic structure can be analyzed in
terms of the various modes of production that have entered into
a hierarchical combination in a historically concrete society. (A
good example of this is Godelier’s analysis of the Inca culture at
the time of Spanish colonization. ) ?°
The dogmatic version of the concept of a history of the species
shares a number of weaknesses with eighteenth-century designs
for a philosophy of history. The course of previous world history,
which evidences a sequence of five or six modes of production,
sets down the wwzlinear, necessary, uninterrupted, and progressive
development of a macrosubject. I should like to oppose to this
model of species history a weaker version, which is not open to
the familiar criticisms of the objectivism of philosophy of his-
tory.?2