Fettering, development and revolution

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 170-188

  Carter, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040482102     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2265.00072     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
2. and History, Labour and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
3. Cohen focuses upon the development of the forces of production. In KMTH, the forces of production are said to comprise means of production (such as machines) and labour power. The latter comprises, amongst other things, skill and knowledge. For brevity's sake I shall refer to the development of the forces of production as 'technological development'. It is also worth noting that Cohen, in HLF, observes an ambiguity in the term 'development' (see ibid., p. 115). For example, 'development' could refer exclusively to producing new knowledge and skills or it could also refer to expanding the use of current techniques. Consequently, on the second, wider construal, the varieties of Development Fettering, Use Fettering and Net Fettering (to be discussed in section II, below) all fetter what could be subsumed under the term 'development'. This is how 'development' in the title of this article should be construed. However, the term 'Development Fettering' in what follows is confined to the first, narrower construal.
4. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, p. 134.
5. See Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p. 363.
6. See V. I. Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 6.
7. See Alan Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988), Ch. 6
8. and 'Functional Explanation and the State' in Paul Wetherly (ed.), Marx's Theory of History: The Contemporary Debate (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992).
9. For further clarifications, see Alan Carter, 'State-Primacy and Third World Debt', Hey J, XXXVIII (1997), pp. 300-14
10. and, especially regarding the environmental implications of the State-Primacy Theory, 'Towards a Green Political Theory' in Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie (eds.), The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).
11. See Karl Marx, 'Preface to the Critique of Political Economy' in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 388-91.
12. G. A. Cohen, 'Fettering' in idem, History, Labour and Freedom, pp. 109-10.
13. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).
14. Cohen, 'Fettering', p. 111 n.
15. Karl Marx, 'The Future Results of British Rule in India' in McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, pp. 332-3.
16. Perhaps because misuse of the productive forces leads to such suffering that the workers are forced to overthrow capitalism? But, then, why did they allow capitalism in the first place? Moreover, some time after 1848 Marx abandoned any such absolute immiseration theory.
17. See Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique, Ch. 2;
18. also see Alan Carter, 'Revolution, Lenin and the Party', Cogito, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 66-73.
19. However, it should be noted that the State-Primacy Theory is equally applicable to other epochal transitions. Michael Taylor, for example, argues that state actors were responsible for selecting new relations of economic control in France from the fifteenth century. See Michael Taylor, 'Structure, Culture and Action in the Explanation of Social Change', Politics and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1989), pp. 124-6.
20. For several examples from non-European countries which can be argued to corroborate the State-Primacy Theory, see Alan Carter, 'The Nation-State and Underdevelopment', Third World Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (December 1995), pp. 595-618.
21. Nevertheless, a complete account of revolutionary transformations would require an explanation of why the mass of people occasionally revolt. ACRU Fettering might be employed to explain what precipitated the changes in Russia in 1917, while the State-Primacy Theory would be employed to explain the nature of the final outcome.
22. I owe this formulation to Ted Benton, who once, humorously, characterized my position in this way.
23. In the past, large numbers of people with a comparatively low level of technical skill - soldiers - were required when the general populace did not wish to comply with the state. The compliance of numerous soldiers, who were then especially significant, was necessary for the State-Primacy Thesis to hold. However, for the state to retain power, there has been a tendency through history for fewer significant people to be required., but for them to be more technically skilled. This is because of the development of the instruments of social control and coercion: from street television cameras and other forms of electronic surveillance to nuclear weapons fired by the turn of a key. Operatives of sophisticated surveillance equipment are especially significant when there is a crisis of legitimacy among the population at large. The State-Primacy Thesis usually holds, however, because of a wide compliance among the population, thus empowering the state. But when the state lacks compliance, the State-Primacy Thesis will not hold. The important issue, it seems to me, is not whether the State-Primacy Thesis is true or not. The really important issue is how to ensure that it does not hold in the future. Unfortunately, when even revolutionaries argue for a post-revolutionary state, then future compliance with the state is less likely to dissolve and it is more likely that the State-Primacy Thesis will hold.
24. These features of the State-Primacy Theory might help to deter its too hasty rejection by mistakenly thinking that it has to explain a lot more than it plausibly does explain. Moreover, the State-Primacy Theory is more robust than might at first be thought, even when it is taken as more than a heuristic with respect to the explanation of intra-epochal social facts, because ascertaining whether or not state interests are being satisfied is not always as straightforward as it might seem. There are, no doubt, occasions when the state fails to do something that would, at first glance, appear to be in its interests. But anything the state chooses to do will have opportunity costs. Doing one thing might mean that something more important could not be done, and the balance of state interests might therefore rule it out.
25. See Carter, 'Towards a Green Political Theory'.