Page 175 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

152 Communication and Evolution of Society

centuries B.c. in China, India, Palestine, and Greece.*9 How can this
be explained on materialist principles
?
e. The controversy between theories of postindustrial society, on the
one side, and theories of organized capitalism, on the other, also be-
longs in this context. It involves, among other things, the question of
whether the capitalism regulated through state intervention in the de-
veloped industrial nations of the West marks the last phase of the old
mode of production or the transition to a new one.
f. The classification of so-called socialist transitional societies is a
special problem. Is bureaucratic socialism, compared to developed
capitalism, in any sense an evolutionarily higher social formation; or are
?
the two merely variants of the same stage of development
These and similar problems have led as important a Marxist
historian as Hobsbawm to cast doubt on the concept of anzversal
stages of development (in his introduction to Marx’s “‘Pre-
Capitalist Economic Formations’). Of course, there remains the
question of whether the aforementioned problems are merely
lining the path of a normal scientific discussion or whether they
are to be understood as signs of the unfruitfulness of a research
program. I am of the opinion that the alternative should not be
posed in this way at present. Perhaps the concept of a mode of
production is not so much the wrong key to the logic of social
development as a key that has not yet been sufficiently filed down.

Vv

The concept of a mode of production is not abstract enough to
capture the universals of societal development. Modes of produc-
tion can be compared at two levels: (a) regulation of access to
the means of production, and (b) the structural compatibility
of these rules with the stage of development of productive forces.
On the first level, Marx differentiates according to whether prop-
erty is communal or private. The viewpoint of exclusive disposi-
tion over the means of production leads, however, only to a
demarcation of societies with and without class structures. Further
differentiation according to the degree to which private property
is established, and according to the forms of exploitation (the
exploitation of village communities by the state, slavery, serfdom,