Page 165 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

142 Communication and Evolution of Society

plexity are unsuitable as directional signs; system complexity is equally
ill-suited to be the basis for evolutionary stages of development.
c. The connection between complexity and self-maintenance be-
comes problematic because societies, unlike organisms, do not have
clear-cut boundaries and objectively decidable problems of self-mainte-
nance. The reproduction of societies is not measured in terms of rates
of reproduction, that is, possibilities of the physical survival of their
members, but in terms of securing a normatively prescribed societal
identity, a culturally interpreted “good” or “tolerable’’ life.?®
Marx judged social development not by increases in complex-
ity but by the stage of development of productive forces and by
the maturity of the forms of social intercourse.2* The develop-
ment of productive forces depends on the application of tech-
nically useful knowledge; and the basic institutions of a society
embody moral-practical knowledge. Progress in these two dimen-
sions is measured against the two universal validity claims we
also use to measure the progress of empirical knowledge and of
moral-practical insight, namely, the truth of propositions and
the rightness of norms. I would like, therefore, to defend the
thesis that the criteria of social progress singled out by historical
materialism as the development of productive forces and the
maturity of forms of social intercourse can be systematically justi-
fied. I shall come back to this.

Ill

Having elucidated the concepts of social labor and history of the
species, I want to look briefly at two basic assumptions of his-
torical materialism: the superstructure theorem and the dialectic
of the forces and relations of production.
1. The best-known formulation of the superstructure theorem
runs as follows:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into
definite relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the de-
velopment of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure
and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The