Page 170 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

147 Historical Materialism

It is advisable to distinguish between the potential of available
knowledge and the implementation of this knowledge. It seems
to be the case that the mechanism of not-being-able-not-to-learn
(for which Moscovici has supplied intuitive support) again and
again provides surpluses that harbor a potential of technical-
organizational knowledge utilized only marginally or not at all.
When this cognitive potential is drawn upon, it becomes the
foundation of structure-forming social divisions of labor (be-
tween hunters and gatherers, tillers and breeders, agriculture and
city craftsmen, crafts and industry, and so on) .3° The endogenous
growth of knowledge is thus a necessary condition of social evo-
lution. But only when a new institutional framework has emerged
can the as-yet unresolved system problems be treated with the
help of the accumulated cognitive potential; from this there
results an increase in productive forces. Only in this sense can
one defend the statement that a social formation is never de-
stroyed and that new, superior relations of production never
replace older ones “before the material conditions for their ex-
istence have matured within the framework of the old society.” *”
Our discussion has led to the following, provisional results:
a. The system problems that cannot be solved without evolutionary
innovations arise in the basic domain of a society.
b. Each new mode of production means a new form of social inte-
gration, which crystallizes around a new institutional core.
c. An endogenous learning mechanism provides for the accumula-
tion of a cognitive potential that can be used for solving crisis-inductng
system problems.
d. This knowledge, however, can be implemented to develop the
forces of production only when the evolutionary step to a new instt-
tutional framework and a new form of social integration has been
taken.
It remains an open question, how this step is taken. The de-
scriptive answer of historical materialism is: through social con-
flict, struggle, social movements, and political confrontations
(which, when they take place under the conditions of a class
structure, can be analyzed as class struggles). But only an analytic
answer can explain why a society takes an evolutionary step and
how we are to understand that social struggles under certain