Page 169 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

146 Communication and Evolution of Society

tem problems that, when the structural dissimilarities between
forces and relations of production become too great, threaten the
continued existence of the mode of production. But this learning
mechanism does not explain how the problems that arise can be
solved. The introduction of new forms of social integratton—for
example, the replacement of the kinship system with the state—
requires knowledge of a moral-practical sort and not technically
useful knowledge that can be implemented in rules of instru-
mental and strategic action. It requires not an expansion of our
control over external nature but knowledge that can be embodied
in structures of interaction—1in a word, an extension of the auton-
omy of society in relation to our own, internal nature.
This can be shown in the example of industrially developed
societies. The progress of productive forces has Jed to a highly
differentiated division of labor processes and to a differentiation
of the organization of labor within industries. But the cognitive
potential that has gone into this “‘socialization of production”
has no structural similarity to the moral-practical consciousness
that can support social movements pressing for a revolutionizing
of bourgeois society. Thus the advance of industry does not, as
the Communist Manifesto claims, “replace the isolation of the
laborers by their revolutionary combination’’;** rather it replaces
an old organization of labor with a new one.
The development of productive forces can then be understood
as a problem-generating mechanism that triggers but does not
bring about the overthrow of relations of production and an evo-
lutionary renewal of the mode of production. But even in this
formulation the theorem can hardly be defended. To be sure, we
know of a few instances in which system problems arose as a
result of an increase in productive forces, overloading the adaptive
capacity of societies organized on kinship lines and shattering the
primitive communal order—this was apparently the case in Poly-
nesia and South Africa.?> But the great endogenous, evolutionary
advances that led to the first civilizations or to the rise of European
capitalism were not conditioned but followed by significant de-
velopment of productive forces. In these cases the development
of productive forces could not have led to an evolutionary chal-
lenge.