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These general remarks set the stage for a related set of problems which have bedeviled historical materialism almost from its inception. There are various pairs which, according to Marxism, are reciprocally related, and it is often said that only a ‘mechanical’ version of Marxism could deny this two-way causality. This is the mechanical materialist conception, not the dialectical materialist conception. True, the productive forces, practice, and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions such aspects as the relations of production, theory, and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role . . . This does not go against materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism. Thus, base and superstructure, forces and relations of production, being and consciousness, production and consumption, exchange value and market price, nature and praxis, are all said to constitute reciprocally related pairs. But, as Mao’s remarks make clear, such reciprocity is supposed to be in addition to some kind of asymmetry, not at its expense. In every example, the first of the reciprocally related pairs is held to be, in some way, primary, or basic, or ultimately decisive, or determinate in the last instance. All of these qualifications are asymmetric qualifications, for if, for example, base determines superstructure in the last instance, it is not meant to be equally true that superstructure determines base in the last instance. Thus, historical materialism is committed to finding ultimate causal asymmetries between causally reciprocal things, and it has never really been clear how this is to be done. Naturally, particular causal relations are asymmetric. If something's happening in the base leads to something else’s occurring in the superstructure, then that is an asymmetric causal relation. But, with reciprocally related pairs, such asymmetric particular causal relations hold in both directions between the pairs. Clearly, what Marxism needs is a. way to establish some sort of priority or causal asymmetry at the general level, the level of kinds, and it is this which has never been clarified by historical materialists. In particular, if praxis and nature were only reciprocally related, each would be ‘equally’ a function of, or dependent on, the other. There could be no grounds for selecting nature (or praxis) as in some sense primary or basic, for these would be asymmetric qualifications. Both ‘basic to’ and ‘primary in relation to’ name asymmetric relations. If nature is primary in relation to praxis, then praxis cannot be primary (in the same sense) in relation to nature. But the primacy of nature over praxis (or over thought or mind) is what any realist position demands. How then shall we account for this asymmetric primacy while at the same time preservinga dialectical or reciprocal perspective? It is worthwhile pausing at this point, if only to show why one candidate for introducingthe desired asymmetry at the level of particular occurrences will not work. Suppose someone tries to interpret ‘ultimately decisive’ in a temporal sense. Although now, it might be said, individual occurrences at the level of the forces of production cause happenings or events at the level of the relations of production, and vice versa, the circle of mutual interaction began at some time by an individual happening at the level of the forces of production. The circle was begun by one individual event from one side of the pair, and that is sufficient for claiming that, in an asymmetric sense, that member of that pair is ultimately decisive or primary. But it is easy to see why such a simpleminded solution is not going to work. We will, on such a reading, be pushed farther and farther back in history to find our initial moment in the causal series, and such a search begins to look like a search for the Tirst cause’, a search which Marx accused the political economists of, and against which he warned in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Moreover, such a reading of the primacy of forces over relations of production would still not permit us to say that present forces of production determine (ultimately) present production relations, and hence would not justify a Marxist analysis of any social formation subsequent to the first cause which concentrated on the forces of production of that society. Similarly for the priority of nature over praxis. Nature and praxis reciprocally interact. The asymmetric priority of nature over praxis cannot be established merely by the claim that there was a nature at a time before there was praxis. Such priority is not very interesting, any more than the ‘priority’ of the blue bulb over the red would be on the grounds that we began the circuit with an occurrence of the blue’s lighting. There is no sense in which the blue is ‘ultimately decisive’ over the red at later times, and no methodological reason to investigate the bulbs in such a way that made attention on the blue bulb primary for any study of the ‘feedback’ mechanism. If we want to introduce asymmetries into our pairs, temporal priority of an event occurrence of one kind over any event occurrence of the other kind is not what we want. There is a tendency within historical materialism which, surprisingly, seems to deny any real asymmetry at any level between such pairs. There are remarks of Engels which might just suggest this: In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out of the general interconnection and consider them in isolation, and there the changing motions appear one as cause and the other as effect. But the real culprit here is Oilman, in his recent Alienation. Oilman’s argument is that Marx, following in the philosophical footsteps of Spinoza and Hegel, assumes that there are necessary, internal relations between each thing and every other thing. On this conception an internal relation is certainly a reciprocal relation. If a is internally related to b, b is internally related to a. If all relations are internal, how can we establish any asymmetries at all? ... to single out any aspect as the determining one can only be a way of emphasizing a particular link in the problem under consideration. Marx is saying that for this factor, in this context, this is the influence most worth noting, the relation which will most aid our comprehension of the relevant characteristics.40 Oilman seems to argue, then, that there are not really any asymmetric relations between things, but that we look at things ‘as if there were such asymmetries in order to aid our comprehension. But then we want to know if we could have just as well comprehended things from the contrary asymmetric perspective. Could we just as well have studied production so that it appeared ultimately determined by consumption and distribution? Is it just arbitrary that Marx considered the being-determining-thought relation tom loose from the general interconnection of things, so that he might just as well have chosen to consider the thought-determining-being relation as the ultimately decisive one? Of course these choices are not, for Marx, arbitrary. It is true that these choices, choosing these asymmetries over the reverse asymmetries, ‘most aid our comprehension of the relevant characteristics’. But is this not so because there do exist these asymmetries in the natural and social world? The reason why it most aids our comprehension to study consumption as determined ultimately by production rather than as ultimately determining production is that— ■ consumption is ultimately determined by production! Not all relations between things can be internal relations, because this affords us no opportunity to find real asymmetries in the world, and no opportunity to explain the nature of science, whereby such asymmetries are investigated. If all relations are internal, if everything is interconnected to everything else, then that is all that can be said. That we want to say more is clear evidence that there are other kinds of relations, namely asymmetric ones, where the reverse is not equally true. The first thing which must be pointed out is that the pairs we have mentioned make it seem that causality is a relation between particular things (in the widest possible sense of ‘thing’). Causal relations appear to hold between the forces and relations of production, exchange value and prices of production, being and thought. As long as this is not seen to be a misleading way of speaking, the problems of reciprocity and asymmetry will never be solved. Causal relations hold between events, or states of affairs, or happenings, or processes. Engels often speaks of causality between ‘motion’, and this is, 1 think, his way of marking the same point that I am getting at. Causality holds between the motions of things, not between things (or moments, or factors, if one prefers more Hegelianesque ways of speaking). Thus, according to Engels, motions ‘pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect’.41 Sometimes he speaks in the language of substantives: ‘overproduction and mass misery—each the cause of the other’.42 But these substantives can easily be converted into descriptions of types of events or states of affairs—‘commodities being overproduced’ and ‘the working class’s being impoverished’. Causality holds always between events or states of affairs, or whatever, but never just between things. We saw before that in those cases in which reciprocal causal relations held between two kinds of events or states (falls in the value of the pound, increases in the rate of inflation), we could reintroduce asymmetry at the level of particular events. But we also found reason to doubt that this was the asymmetry that historical materialists need. We assumed that the single kind of event which happened to the pound which yielded both causes and effects was its falling, and the single kind of event which occurred to the rate of inflation and which yielded both causes and effects was its rising. I propose to reintroduce at the level of kinds a more interesting sort of asymmetry than the asymmetry which exists at the level of particulars by abandoning this assumption. Let us say that two things (base and superstructure, for example) are reciprocally related when events or states of one cause events or states of another. Now, the kind of events or states of the first which are cause of some events or states in the second may not be the same kind of events or states of the first which are the effects of events or states of the second thing. For instance, suppose a blue heating element and a red cooling element are wired together so that the blue element's heating causes the red element to light, and the red element’s cooling causes the blue element to light up. This provides us with reciprocity, since the two elements are interconnected, although the kind of connection is different in each direction and is itself asymmetric. The blue’s heating and the red’s lighting are asymmetrically connected, as is the red's cooling and the blue’s lighting. But why would such an asymmetry be of any more interest than the temporal one at the level of particulars, where the features of*each of the cause and effect which were causally relevant were the same? Two examples may help us answer the question: base and superstructure; nature and praxis. Marx and Engels both spoke often of form and content when they discuss these problems of the relations between base and superstructure. In Capital, Volume I, Marx speaks of the form and content of law.43 Engels often uses the distinction, especially in his correspondence. In his well- known letter to Bloch, Engels asserts: . . . according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this, neither Marx nor I have asserted . . , The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure . . . also exercise their influence upon the course oflhe historical strugglesand in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which ... the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary . . . . . . the economic ones are ultimately decisive but the political ones, etc., indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.4-1 In a letter to Mehring (September 28 1892), Engels criticises Prussian romanticists of the historical school who fail to deduce ‘the form of economy from production’, and instead deduce ‘production and distribution from the form of economy’. Again, in the same letter, Engels praises such romanticists who ‘might have seen in the case of feudalism how here the form of state evolves from the form of economy’. I do not say that these remarks constitute a theory. But they suggest that Marx and Engels were thinking that there were different aspects (form and content) of base and superstructure which were involved in the interaction. Sometimes form and content are employed by Marxists to suggest what is relatively inessential (the form) and what is relatively essential (the content). For instance, Jakubowski says that ‘the forms of state are as diverse as the forms of capitalist economy to which they correspond. They have only one essential feature in common, which is that they express the domination of the bourgeoisie.’45 Jakubowski seems to contrast form as inessential with what is essential. I do not have a more developed theory about how to execute this programme. But surely some such programme is necessary. We want to hold that such a pair as base and superstructure displays causal reciprocity, and yet, unlike the simple examples of light bulbs and heating elements, there is some interesting sense in which base is ultimately the primary partner in the pair. We cannot achieve this unless the asymmetric connections between'them in one direction use different kinds of events or properties than the connections in the other direction, and unless one set of events, properties, states, or whatever are more ‘important’ or ‘basic1 than the other. Perhaps, in setting out this distinction between form and content, one could rely here on some of the work of the Marxist structuralists to explicate the notion of structure or form. It ought to be noted, though, that the impression one gets from the scattered remarks of Marx and Engels is that content is basic and form relatively inessential, whereas structuralists presumably would insist that form is what is essential in understanding a mode of production. On the question of the different features or properties to use in the different directions in which causality connects nature and praxis, there are more obvious candidates. Indeed, as I have already mentioned in Chapter III, we need to distinguish natural and artificial properties. Human praxis is able to impose many new forms or properties on what there is in the world. Men can act on, change, transform, refashion nature. To use Hegelian jargon, the world in this way becomes ‘mediated’ by praxis. Feuerbach did ‘not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry, and of the state of society . . . Even the objects of the simplest ‘sensuous certainty’ are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse.’ That a cherry tree appears in Germany is the consequence of human activity. Thus, the independence of nature from praxis is its essential independence, the independence of its existence, not the independence of all its many forms and properties from the existence of praxis. Even if there were no human beings, no thought, no mental activity, no praxis, there could still be a world, a nature, for the existence of nature is not dependent on the existence of praxis. Although some of nature’s properties e.g. that cherry trees grow in Germany, are dependent on praxis, its existence is not. Such a claim has no necessary temporal requirement. It would be true even if, somehow, nature and praxis were miraculously co-terminous in their origins. Nothing can just exist with no features or properties at all, in a wholly indeterminate way. Thus, natural things not only exist independently of praxis, but some of their properties must be praxis-independent as well. Not only is the existence of cherry trees praxis-independent (although their property of being cultivated in Germany is not), the essential structural properties of cherry trees—whatever it is that makes a tree a cherry tree— is praxis-independent too. Thus, for naturally occurring animal kinds, their genetic structure is praxis-independent; for naturally occurring elements, their subatomic structure is praxis-independent. For artificially occurring things, whether paintings or plant hybrids, whatever is used to make them is (ultimately) praxis-independent too. Of course, many of the non- essential properties of naturally occurring things are in fact praxis- independent too. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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