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Posted by Peter Van der Biest on June 05, 19103 at 11:55:04:
In Reply to: Sociology posted by fatma on May 08, 19103 at 20:36:00:
: The relationship between progress and social change
For Marx technological progress and social change are very closely intertwined, not to say that in the last ysis social change is steered by the development in the material forces of production (his expression for technology).
The most basic relationships which exist in our everyday life are those that refer to the fact that organised society, in the last ysis, is a means of material survival. The way we relate to nature, through technology, also determines the way people relate to eachother. If we change technology, we do not only change our relationship to nature, but also our social relations. For example: the most developed societies based on late-neolithic early metallic technology are on one hand those societies which prospered on the central management of irrigation: the primal civilisations of the Near, Middle and Far East, the Pre Columbian Indian Civilisations etc. ; on the other hand, especially around the meditteranean those societies in which slavery progressively became the productive basis of society.
On this social sphere of productive forces and the social relations which correspond to them (Marx calls this the infrastructure of society) a political superstructure arises, to which in its turn the predominant ideas and cultural representations correspond in their own right.
This is not a closed minded determinism. Marx describes this correlation as a correlation in the last instance, as an essential correlation, which serves as a framework for all the other social phenomena.
The best and most complete summary of his ideas on historical materialism is to be found in his preface to his 'Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' (1859)