Page 176 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

153 Historical Materialism

wage labor), is as yet too imprecise to permit unambiguous com-
parisons.°° To achieve greater precision, Finley recommends
adopting the following points of view: claims to property versus
power over things; power over human labor-force versus power
over human movements; power to punish versus immunity from
punishment; privileges and liabilities in judicial process; privi-
leges in the area of the family; privileges of social mobility,
horizontal and vertical; privileges versus duties in the sacral, po-
litical, and military spheres.*’ These general sociological points of
view certainly permit a more concrete description of a given
economic structure; but they broaden rather than deepen the anal-
ysis. The result of this procedure would be a pluralistic compart-
mentalization of modes of production and a weakening of their
developmental logic. At the end of this inductivist path lies the
surrender of the concept of the history of the species—and with
it of historical materialism. The possibility that anthropological-
historical research might one day force us to this cannot be ex-
cluded a priori. But in the meantime, the path leading in the
opposite direction strikes me as not yet sufficiently explored.
It points in the direction of even stronger generalization,
namely, the search for highly abstract principles of social organi-
zation. By principles of organization I understand innovations
that become possible through developmental-logically reconstruc-
tible stages of learning, and which institutionalize new levels of
societal learning.” The organizational principle of a society cir-
cumscribes ranges of possibility. It determines in particular:
within which structures changes in the system of institutions are
possible; to what extent the available capacities of productive
forces are socially utilized and the development of new produc-
tive forces can be stimulated; to what extent system complexity
and adaptive achievements can be heightened. A principle of
organization consists of regulations so abstract that in the social
formation which it determines a number of functionally equiv-
alent modes of production are possible. Accordingly, the eco-
nomic structure of a given society would have to be examined at
two analytic levels: firstly in terms of the modes of production
that have been concretely combined in it; and then in terms of
that social formation to which the dominant mode of production