The historical possibility and necessity of (Ilyenkov’s) anti-innatism

The nature/nurture controversy: A recent example

The nature/nurture debate is basically concerned with the question of whether mind and mental functions are deep biologically innate structures or if they are emergent processes conditioned and largely determined by social environment. For instance, Goodwyn (2010), aiming at criticising the emergent theories of mind, admits that recent developments in genetic research and neuroscience have made the emergent theories of psychological functions more plausible. He falsely proposes that the only alternative to an innatist theory of mind is a “blank slate” theory of mind (Merchant, 2010, p. 534). From within an evolutionary psychological framework, Goodwyn argues, for instance, from the fact that people learn certain things more easily than others, types of learning are domain-specific and based on innate psychological structures (2010, p. 504). He also draws on evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker (1997) who states that “innate, domain-specific mental structure is unquestionably selected for” (as cited in Goodwyn, 2010, p. 504). Goodwyn draws on Gallistel, Marler, and Gazzaniga et al. ¹ and concludes that the human brain is larger than the brains of other animals owing to its larger capability for solving problems and that these capacities have been built into our brains by natural selection (p. 505).

Goodwyn concludes that “there seems to be abundant evidence that the mind is crammed with innate predispositions, perceptual biases, recognition mechanisms, emotional and expressive subroutines, behavioural urges, and more. As more cross-disciplinary work on evolutionary neuroethology continues, these will come into sharper focus” (2010, p. 517).

Contrarily, Knox (2010), drawing on Oyama, Deacon, Karmillof-Smith, and Panksepp and Panksepp, proposes that “both physical and psychological end-products (bodies and minds) emerge out of developmental processes” (p. 523) and are in constant interrelationship with the environment and continuously reshaped by a stream of current experience. Furthermore, drawing on Vygotsky (1978) and Tronick, Knox emphasises the role of caregiver and the cultural environment in shaping the infant’s mind (2010, pp. 529–530). ² When the child first hears the caregiver’s speech, perhaps she cannot distinguish it from other types of sounds and noises. It is the gradual acquisition of language that enables the child to distinguish meaningful voices from mere sounds: through language sound turns into voice; language and meaning emerge simultaneously.

Merchant (2010) argues that developments in genetics, embryology, and neuroscience undermine nativist unidirectional positions such as Goodwyn’s. Following Gottlieb, Merchant states that “there is irrefutable research evidence to indicate bi-directionality, that is, genetic activity also leads to function which leads to structure” (p. 534). According to epigenetic findings from studying twins coming from different economic backgrounds, individuals of the same genotype can have different neural and behavioural outcomes (Merchant, 2010, p. 535) and thus different minds. Following Nelson et al., criticising the innatist views of Chomsky concerning “deep structures” in language acquisition, Merchant states that “it is the actual experience of language which leads to the development of the specialised mind/brain structures responsible for it” (p. 537). He concludes that both neuroscience and epigenetic research make the innate domain-specific models of mind implausible while providing further evidence in favour of neuroconstructivism and emergent developmental theories of mind (p. 541). ³

The innatists mostly but not exclusively tend toward what Bakhurst (2008, p. 416) calls “brainism” (a physicalist reductionist tendency), while the emergent theorists tend toward what is known as personalism. Ironically, there is a feature common to these various and conflicting views: the basic distinctive cognitive feature of the cognising subject, whether it is the brain/mind or the person, is defined in terms of problem-solving and the larger capabilities of human beings in solving problems compared to other animals (e.g., see Bakhurst, 2008, p. 424; Goodwyn, 2010, p. 505).

Ilyenkov’s activity-centred social theory of mind is different from the aforementioned and can contribute to the nature/nurture debate due to its emphasis on the creative essence of the human mind and activity which is rooted in humans’ social modes of being. Bakhurst draws attention to this unique aspect of Ilyenkov’s theory of the formation of mind writing that “When Ilyenkov characterises the distinctive character of human thought, his emphasis is always on creativity, universality and unpredictability” (2008, p. 423). However, he does not exploit this distinctive feature of Ilyenkov’s approach to the human mind. Human beings not only respond to stimuli and solve problems, but more importantly, they pose novel questions and create new problems owing to socially developing needs, which in turn are both the precondition and the consequence of their social activity. Ilyenkov’s anti-innatism should be understood and analysed against this background.

The social makeup of the mind and higher mental functions

Ilyenkov’s theory of mind converges with and is strongly influenced by the psychological theses of the prominent Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. One similarity between the two is their approaches to Marxian methodology and its inherent Hegelian logic. Vygotsky identifies his task as “creating one’s own Capital” (1978, p. 8); he alludes to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist relations of production, which begins with commodity as the “cell,” the fundamental unit of capitalism. Similarly, criticising the official Soviet “diamat,” Ilyenkov and Korovikov state that philosophical method cannot be reduced into a bulk of ready-made generalisations based on the laws discovered by sciences; philosophy cannot be a science of science but it should define itself by its subject matter, that is, “theoretical thought” (as cited in Bakhurst, 2016, p. 7). ⁴ Moreover, they praise Marx and Engels for their “exemplar application of philosophy to particular branches of concrete knowledge, in particular to political economy,” which proves “that positive knowledge is itself able to reach, and is obliged to reach, that very final essence of the object of research, beneath, above and beyond which there is nothing to find for the reason that there is nothing more” (Ilyenkov & Korovikov, 2016, Thesis 12, as cited in Bakhurst, 2016, pp. 25–30). Additionally, Ilyenkov’s most important contribution to philosophy and Marxian methodology is his monumental Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital (1960/1982), which is dedicated to analysis of Marx’s critique of the capitalist economy with particular attention to Marx’s labour theory of value.

Ilyenkov’s collaboration with Alexander Meshcheryakov, who is a prominent Vygotskian psychologist specialising in the education of deaf and blind children, contributes to deepening his view of the social nature of human being (Bakhurst, 2016, p. 1). Meshcheryakov identifies the shortcoming of the previous efforts for educating the deaf and blind children as being the insistence on teaching language to the child without previously providing her with the necessary experiential depository to which language, concepts, and any conceptual and sign system correspond. For Ilyenkov, the world that the child confronts is not simply a world filled with other people, but a world filled with human-made artefacts. The process of the emergence of consciousness is the process of assimilating and manipulating these artefacts. “Language, for Ilyenkov, is just another artefact, albeit a supremely complex and sophisticated one” (Bakhurst, 2008, p. 426). Elsewhere, Bakhurst notes that “Ilyenkov’s conception of the mind, the culmination of his research, may be seen as a descendant of the position conceived by the psychologist Vygotsky” (1991, p. 16).

Traditional psychological schools’ conceptualisations regarding mental processes of primitive peoples suffer the dualist approach which considers the individual and the social as two totally distinct and discrete categories that may be related only mechanically. Moreover, it detaches society from particular practical-productive human activity. Hence follows the rigid, abstract dichotomy of “collective representation” or “social consciousness” vs. individual consciousness. Such an abstract and formal view regarding consciousness is shared by Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. Materialist psychology, the principles of which were initially set forth by Vygotsky, considers “higher cognitive activities” sociohistorical in nature. Accordingly, “the structure of mental activity—not just the specific content but also the general forms basic to all cognitive processes—change in the course of historical development” (Luria, 1976, p. 8).

According to Vygotsky, the main source of errors and misconceptions of traditional psychology concerning the development of higher mental functions is viewing these processes not as historical, social, and cultural phenomena but as natural and biological (1931/1997b, p. 2). He also criticises traditional psychology within the same lines: traditional psychology divides phenomena of consciousness into its forming components, into its atoms, and thus it fails to analyse and study these phenomena in their organic integrity, in their wholeness. The traditional empirical method of psychology resulted in a pure formalistic explanation of consecutive appearance and disappearance of forms of behaviour and psychic functions. This is the result of the naturalistic approach that fails to distinguish “between two genetic orders different in essence and nature and, consequently, between two basically different orders of laws to which these two lines in the development of … behavior are subject” (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 3).

Subjective empiricism and objective behaviourism have three features in common: they reduce higher mental processes to natural processes; they reduce higher mental functions and complexes to elementary elements; and they ignore the social and cultural determination of patterns of development of behaviour. Both views picture mental life as a mosaic composed of separate pieces of experience, “a grandiose atomistic picture of the dismembered human mind” (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 4).

Objective psychology rejects differentiating lower and higher mental functions; it ends up dividing reactions into innate and acquired. Subjective empiricism, on the other hand, divides mental functions into different classes, that is, the one that is exhausted by the maturation of elementary functions, and a second story of mental functions of unknown origin above every elementary function (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 4). Subjective empiricism is a form of naturalism that fails to explain the genesis and development of higher mental functions.

A proper notion of development of human behaviour that begins from the historical and social determination of human behaviour considers the notion of signification as its regulatory principle. Such an approach should bring human being forward, to the centre, so that determinism and determination of behaviour development is humanised: “Not nature, but society must, in the first place, be considered as a determining factor of human behavior” (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 59).

Memory, as a higher mental function, is an example of how humanised mental functions are at work culturally. To remember with the use of signs is to turn an internal process into an external activity. In the case of “natural” memory, something is remembered, in the case of memory as higher mental function, human being remembers something:

The very essence of human memory consists of man actively remembering with the help of signs. In general … in the first place, [man’s] individuality is due to the fact that man actively participates in his relations with the environment and through the environment he himself changes his behavior, subjecting it to his control. (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 59)

There are three characteristics of higher mental functions:

The materialist stance approaches human consciousness within the complex of its social and historical existence. The emergence of human psychic functions is not an instinctive motion but a formation that requires ontogenetic development of socially formed functions that are mediated (first and foremost) by parents. Human mind is the ability to unite human needs (which although may be organic are not “natural) with the object that satisfies the need through the use of bodily movements and socially produced organs and instruments of activity (Ilyenkov, 2007b, p. 88). Ilyenkov states:

If [psyche] is not an “instinct” but a highly complex formation that arises after birth and requires ontogenetic development of a corresponding “functional organ,” then the problem of the emergence of the psyche coincides with—and does not stand in opposition to—the problem of ontogenesis of the corresponding zones of the brain. But the organ here is created by the function, and not the other way round, not the function by the organ, by a “structure” that exists prior to it. (2010, p. 16)

It is notable that mental functions (psyche) are socially formed, socially mediated. If higher mental functions are produced within and preceded by forms of human activity, then in every historical era consciousness inevitably assumes a specific form, which, in turn is both the subject and the object of that mode of activity. As Marx states, “if an economist of antiquity had been asked: what is a worker? he would have had to answer, following the identical logic: A worker is a slave (because the slave was the worker in the labour process of antiquity” (1992, p. 995). Thus, Ilyenkov states,

The “organs of the psyche” therefore include (as an internal condition of its functioning) only those nervous mechanisms that are not only a condition but also a consequence of “psychic” activity—activity of the organism in external space, activity with external objects that are distinct from the organism’s own body and exist outside it (and independently of it). (2010, p. 16)

Organs of activity (sense organs) are not organs of the psyche but are its prerequisites. However, this is the case only at the beginning. As activity, and consequently consciousness, develops, these organs become proper organs of activity as products of consciousness. A sense organ, in the beginning, is only an organ to randomly satisfy a need; later, it is produced as organ-proper of activity. Only after such refinement can it also assume the proper function of a sense organ; that is, it appears then as an organ that can sense for the sake of sensing and can distinguish between sensing and acting. “The action is reflected onto itself—onto the body of the acting organism—and whatever was not present in the action will also not be present in the feelings” (Ilyenkov, 2010, p. 19). Consciousness, thus, assumes a conceptual, that is, “ideal” existence. The ideal has a law-like structure: it defines the universal norms of a culture, which should be internalised by the subject in order to enable it to conduct its life activity (Ilyenkov, 2012, p. 154).

The relationship between human being and nature, as well as between humans themselves, together with their forms of activity (their consciousness, will, imagination, and forms of thinking), inevitably bears the mark of the peculiar socio-historical relations (of production) within which humans perform their activity. Moreover, in contrast to fetishism (in the form of, say, idolatry), ideality or the ideal represents a form of mediation between human and the social reality (including “nature”) which is peculiar to the capitalist society, on the one hand, and which is rooted in previous forms of human activity and yet, is not reducible to either, meaning that it can be separated from the conditions of its formation and be projected, although critically, onto the future forms of societies. The form of appearance of the ideal and ideality is the concept and conceptuality. “Ideality … is nothing else but the form of social-human activity represented in the thing, reflecting objective reality; or, conversely, the form of human activity, which reflects objective reality, represented as a thing, as an object” (Ilyenkov, 2012, p. 176). The sociality of human consciousness or consciousness as a social relation is manifest in its ideal makeup.

(Ilyenkov’s) anti-innatism

Humans’ physical environment is endowed with ideal properties. These ideal properties, normative in their essence, determine the type of activity of individuals within the cultural environment, which is itself a product of this process of “idealisation.”

By idealising the environment humans change it qualitatively. This idealisation is not reducible to subjective imagination: the ideality Ilyenkov has in mind is the ideality the value-form assumes: value is not corporeal, yet it is not reducible to the individual’s subjective imagination. The value that money represents, as Marx argues, cannot be found either in the chemistry of commodities, nor in the chemistry of money. In the absence of the concept of value and its objectification, say, in the form of money, the “real” dollars in one’s pocket are as subjective and imaginary as the imagined dollars in one’s pocket. As Bakhurst puts it, “once idealized, the ‘external world’ no longer exercises a purely physical influence over the subject. Rather, objectification makes possible a new mode of interaction between human agents and their surroundings: a norm-governed interaction mediated by meanings, values, and reasons” (1991, p. 244).

Thinking, therefore, for Ilyenkov, is the ability to act with reference to this norm-mediated mode of interaction with the world. The ideal forms the medium that “delays” the human’s response to the stimuli; it is the medium that transforms a direct response (behaviour) into activity (mediated response).

Ilyenkov’s approach to thinking and activity determines his conceptualisation of consciousness: just as Vygotsky (1925/1997a) defines consciousness as the body’s capability to emerge as the stimuli of its own activity, Ilyenkov argues that activity is first and foremost the norm-mediated spatially expressed activity of body: so is the case with thinking as a particular form of activity. “The substance of the mind is in general life activity, the activity of a living organism, understood as the independent movement of this organism in space filled with objects” (Ilyenkov, 2007d, p. 88); mind is the derivative of the external and reflexive action of the organism (see also Bakhurst, 1991, p. 245).

Thus it follows that the “content” of the so-called mental states is not reducible to physiological states or in particular to physiological changes and reactions within the brain. Not the brain, but the person thinks with the use of the brain. “The brain is but the material, anatomical-physiological organ of this labour, mental labour, that is to say, intellectual labour. The product of this special labour is precisely the ideal. And not the material changes within the brain itself” (Ilyenkov, 2012, p. 162). As Bakhurst notices, Ilyenkov’s anti-reductionist thesis concretises his conceptualisation of the individual as a social being (a social relation) because in this view thinking becomes an activity that is possible only within a social context (1991, p. 249): the person’s “ability to think with the aid of this brain … not only ‘develops’ (in the sense of ‘improves’) but also first emerges only together with his attachment to social-human culture, to knowledge” (Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 11).

Ilyenkov’s anti-innatism thesis, that “higher mental functions are not genetically inherited capacities of the brains” (Bakhurst, 1991, p. 249), is based on his anti-reductionist position. Bakhurst argues that like Vygotsky and Akselrod, Ilyenkov has a particularistic view of dialectical method; that is, dialectical method is not a set of universal laws that explain motion but it points to the method of identifying the particular logic of each concrete phenomenon that is to be analysed (1991, p. 250). (The core of Marx’s criticism of Hegel is the latter’s reduction of dialectics to a set of universally applicable, prefabricated laws: Hegel fails to fulfil his promise of laying the foundation of an “immanent” criticism of phenomena and overcoming the essence–appearance duality; see Marx, 1970, p. 18.) Furthermore, this is not only characteristic of science but of all cognition that it is not a consequence of following a procedure or a set of rules:

It is true that the ability (or skill) to think cannot be “grafted” into the brain in the form of a collection of “rules,” formulas, and—as people like to say nowadays—“algorithms.” A human being is still a human being, much as some would like to turn him into a “machine.” In the form of “algorithms” you can “insert” into the skull only a mechanical, that is, a very stupid “mind”—the mind of a cashier, but not the mind of a mathematician. (Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 11)

Ilyenkov does not imply that acting physical bodies are capable of every kind of activity; rather, he states that they are capable of adapting to new situations and environments; in contrast to both animals’ and machines’ environment, human environment is in part the product of human activity and thus of acquiring the particular logic of concrete situations. Through concepts, human beings are capable of acquiring the logic of new situations they have never confronted before. Concept designates “the ways of understanding meaning”; “the word ‘concept’ in dialectically interpreted logic is a synonym for ‘understanding the essence of the matter’, the essence of phenomena which are only denoted by a given term” (Ilyenkov, 2012, p. 174). The anti-innatism thesis is the criticism of the fetishistic formulation of the social reality which is manifest in idealist formulations that attribute independence to the ideal social reality (see Ilyenkov, 2012, p. 180). As Bakhurst notes, anti-innatism reveals a profound truth about human being’s creative powers, which is also politically significant, “for to recognize it was to acknowledge society’s power, and hence its responsibility, to facilitate the development of all, so that each of its members might flourish as ‘whole persons’ (‘tselostnaya lichnost’)” (1991, p. 253). Human beings who are born with biologically normal brains have individual specificities, talents, and “gifts”; therefore they are potentially talented and gifted. And if talents are not so much widespread a phenomenon, then the blame should not be put on nature but on entirely different circumstances—say, social conditions (Ilyenkov, 1969, p. 97). As Ilyenkov states,

Intelligence is not a “natural” gift. It is society’s gift to a person. It is, incidentally, a gift that he will later repay a hundredfold—from the point of view of a developed society, the most “profitable” of “capital investments.” An intelligently organized—that is, a communist—society can be constituted only by intelligent people. And never for a minute must we forget that it is precisely the people of the communist future who are sitting behind school desks today. (2007a, p. 12)

The criticism of fetishism and idealism necessarily entails anti-innatism.

Ilyenkov on contradiction

Every philosophical and logical system, inevitably, faces contradictions and intends to resolve them. Contradiction is the principle of the self-movement of a system: motion is possible only on the basis of the inner contradictions of a system. Practical immanent criticism of a system that overcomes the age-old subject–object dualism is possible only if the inner contradictions of a system are realised. Ilyenkov presents “contradiction” not in the narrow, formal logical sense of the term; such contradictions (e.g., p and ~p) are to be barred by rules of formal logic. Contradiction, here, means “the unity and coincidence of mutually exclusive theoretical definitions” (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 233).

Contradiction appears when the phenomena that form the subject matter of a science are systematised conceptually. A concept, as the logical reconstruction of the essential relations within phenomena, is not based on a mere generalisation of common features of the individual members of a set; rather, it is the expression of the unity of differences. Concept reveals the common genetic root of different members of a set; it reconstructs the process of development of this common root into cognisable features of individual members of that set. Appealing to Marx, Ilyenkov formulates the relation between conceptualisation and contradiction:

The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations … Translated into the language of logic, this proposition means it is useless to look for individual definitions of the essence of the genus through abstraction of the individual property possessed by each individual representative of this genus. (1982, p. 69)

The approaches that aim at wiping out contradictions in order to allegedly arrive at the concept of phenomena are inevitably fetishistic. Metaphysical thought, according to Ilyenkov, reduces theory to a piling up and removal of empirically observed antinomies. It explains these “antinomies” in terms of deficiencies of cognitive apparatus and theoretical systems. Thus, it looks for empirically universal laws that dissipate such contradictions: contradiction, in this view, is a purely epistemological-cognitive anomaly. Whereas dialectics aims at resolution of contradiction by deducing it from the movement of the world:

The only way of attaining a rational resolution of contradictions in theoretical definition is through tracing the mode in which they are resolved in the movement of the objective reality, the movement and development of the world of things “in themselves.” (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 244)

Natural and social sciences, to the extent they are genuine theoretical-conceptual systems, aim at explaining the motion in terms of such contradictions.

Contradiction is also an essential aspect of the development of human mind. Contradiction is a sign of the existence of a question, which cannot be solved with the use of available logical and formal procedures. In such a case further and deeper analysis of facts appears as a need or a requirement. Contradiction “is an indicator that the knowledge recorded in generally accepted propositions is excessively general, abstract, and one-sided” (Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 19) in the face of this particular problem.

According to Ilyenkov, a mind that is trained with stereotypes and has only learned to apply prefabricated procedures cannot become independent. Such a mind abhors contradictions; in the face of contradictions it collapses into hysteria. Human thinking, according to Ilyenkov, is different from animal thinking exactly due to its attitude toward contradiction (for an interesting example concerning animals’ reaction to contradictions, see Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 19). Teaching one to think independently, which is the prerequisite of the emergence and development of a truly human mind, requires providing the mind with the skills of handling contradictions properly, that is, the mind should be trained so that it perceives the contradiction not as a mere formal anomaly, but as an impulse for further and deeper examination of phenomena. “This is an elementary requirement of dialectics” as “the real logic of real thinking” (Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 20).

Contradiction is the limit of the thinkable. A contradiction is a phenomenon that transcends the present limit of thinking, which itself is set by humans’ social-historical activity. Progress in knowledge means expanding the limits of the thinkable; that is, to turn the unthinkable into the thinkable. This is how a contradiction is resolved, though in a contradictory way: “A sharply formulated contradiction creates a ‘tension of thought’ that is not released until the fact solely by means of which it is resolved is found” (Ilyenkov, 2007a, p. 24). Marx’s resolution to the problem of finding a particular commodity, namely labour-power, which does not violate the supreme law of exchange of equals for equals, but which also creates new value, according to Ilyenkov, is a brilliant example of how a contradiction is resolved scientifically. Labour-power is “a commodity whose consumption is a creation! A thing that appears to be impossible, ‘unthinkable’—because it is ‘logically contradictory’” (Ilyenkov, 2007d, p. 25).

Human mind emerges only when an obstacle, a particular question, is resolved with the use of a new tool. This process is initiated with the introduction of an obstacle that prevents the organism from satisfying its needs with the use of biologically given organs. Deploying a tool in such cases is the sole way of fulfilling the task. The tool, the deployment of which amounts to satisfaction of the need, therefore, is itself a part of the obstacle (as its use depends on acquisition of skills required for its deployment). Such a tool, according to Ilyenkov, is any human artefact, say, a spoon: “A spoon is a pass into the realm of human—social—culture” because like any other artefact it is “a bridge-obstacle … created by man for man, [it is like] any artificial tool that man places between himself and an object of his organic needs” (2007d, p. 89). Such an object is contradictory; it is the third term, the mediating link, which facilitates the passage from animality to humanity.

Knowledge should be acquired with respect to some objective situation whose probable solution imposes the deployment of a set of rules by the subjective consciousness of the student. In this case, the objective presentation of the situation amounts to the acquisition of these rules as subjective laws of action. Contrarily, if the rules are presented as a subjective set of rules for activity, then the student will act with them as what they are, that is, as external objects that exist alongside other objects; as objective rules existing independent from the subjective mode of action or as fetishes. So be the case, in the latter situation innatism of some kind is inevitable. On the contrary, if the former method is deployed, anti-innatism will be the necessary outcome:

The entire art of the pedagogue must, from the very start, focus not on inculcating set rules regarded as tools or instruments of action, but on organizing the external, objective conditions under which learning activity is to take place … Then this rule can and must be given expression in words and signs. Then—and not before—the rule can be brought into verbalized consciousness. (Ilyenkov, 2007c, p. 73)

In other words, as Meshcheryakov (1979) also notices with regard to the education of the deaf and blind, the problem is not to develop speech skills (language) in pupils first, but is to provide the deaf and blind with the experiential depository, which forms the foundations necessary for acquisition of language and concept-formation. The concept cannot be given to the person but the person should be provided with the requirements necessary for the formation of concepts. In this way, the apparent theory–practice (knowledge–object) dichotomy and the problem of “application” of knowledge to reality is also resolved. “Knowledge then appears to the student precisely as knowledge of the thing, and not as a special structure situated outside the thing” (Ilyenkov, 2007c, p. 74).

Abstract labour and accumulated social knowledge

Capitalist society is a society of contradictions. The nature of capitalist relations of production is such that it produces the possibility of its own negation. Capitalist society is simultaneously the most equal and the most unequal society. The equality in capitalist society is formal: it means that the individuals that form the capitalist society can be equated quantitatively. Such formal equality is the necessary consequence of the process of capitalist production, the goal of which is the valorisation of capital; it is determined by the dual character of labour. In this regard, Marx states: “A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour” (1992, p. 135). Complicated labour is the more qualified labour that may produce a commodity in less time, so that a smaller quantity may be considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. This passage implies that although in capitalism there is a tendency towards sophistication of labour, which means increasing the productivity of labour-power, this complicated labour should be analysable into simple labour: such analysability and identifiability is determined by value. Interestingly, the idea of universal equality (between members of society regardless of their class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) in capitalist society is brought forth by this temporalisation of the production process, which is the result of the dual character of labour and commodity.

This “equalising” tendency of capitalism is also manifest in the process of self-valorisation of capital that turns money and commodity into moments of itself in circulation. Circulation of capital has no other goal but itself; it does not aim at satisfying particular needs. Moreover, becoming the substance and the subject, it has a dehumanising effect, where the capital-owner is just a personification of capital (Marx, 1992, p. 254).

On the other hand, capitalist society is the most unequal form of society because it subordinates freedom to the rule of capital. Capitalist growth is possible only at the expense of the individual. Growth of capitalist wealth, that is, the expansion of value, by itself does not bring about the prosperity and freedom of the working population; rather, it ties their existence to the compulsion of work and subordinates them to time. As Murray notices, the questions regarding wealth—how much there is and how it is distributed—neglects a fundamental question: “What is the social form and purpose of wealth?” (1999, p. 28). The purpose of the value-form of wealth is but the growth of value or valorisation.

Freedom in capitalist society is unfreedom. As Marx states, individual freedom in capitalist society, which has a dual sense, is the condition not of human emancipation, but of transformation of money into capital: “as an individual [the worker] can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale” (1992, p. 272). This dehumanising character and formality of freedom and equality in capitalist society is formulated by Marx as “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham” (1992, p. 280).

Although capitalist production needs to revolutionise production techniques in order to increase the productivity of labour and maximise the extraction of surplus from labour, it renders value-producing labour irrelevant to the process of production. There is a growing gap, in capitalist society, between the increase of the productivity of material wealth and the increase of value. This gap or contradiction also is manifest in the growth of the accumulated social knowledge in the form of capital and emptiness of individual labour; or between the objectified totality and the individual. As Postone notices, this gap has two opposed moments:

On the one hand, as structured by value, it becomes expressed as an increasingly antagonistic opposition between the objectified totality and individuals: the former becomes increasingly rich and powerful, while much individual labor and activity becomes emptier and powerless … On the other hand, though, the same development … makes proletarian labor more superfluous as a source of material wealth. In rendering proletarian labor potentially anachronistic from the standpoint of the production of material wealth, it renders value itself potentially anachronistic. (2003, p. 359)

On the one hand, application of science makes productive human labour irrelevant; on the other hand, capitalism cannot abolish labour because valorisation depends on the exploitation of productive human labour. Value is bound to direct human labour time expenditure and the growth of productivity makes it irrelevant to the process of production of wealth. This irrelevance signifies an important aspect of capitalist society and its inner contradiction. The contradiction in capitalist society, in the final analysis, is not between existent social structures or groupings but between the existing social structure and relations of production and a future that has become possible (Postone, 2003, pp. 360–361; see also Kurz, 1986, p. 54).

In capitalist society, on the one hand, the urge to increase the production of surplus-value requires constant transformation and development of productivity; on the other hand, since production of value is bound to direct human labour time expenditure, capitalist society is dominated by abstract time—the eternal present time, which signifies the continuous reconstitution of the capitalist relations of production. Capitalist relations of production yield the formation of new types of knowledge and skills, namely knowledge and skills that are not the results of the immediate accumulation of the knowledge of immediate producers, but are accumulated knowledge and skills of humanity in general, yet this knowledge itself becomes subordinate to capital’s valorisation.

Despite that, in order to increase the production of surplus-value, in particular relative surplus-value, capitalism revolutionises productive forces not only in the technical sense, but also socially. This is to say that capitalist relations of production yield appropriate forms of social organising, controlling, and managing production process too (Marx, 1992, p. 448). Marx states that the formation of large-scale organised production amounts to the emergence of new productive powers of producing individuals which is collective in its nature: it is not collective only because a large number of people are involved in the process of production, but also because this newly emerged productive power is larger than the sum-total of productive powers of the individuals involved. It should be noted that what is at stake here is the production of use-value or of material wealth (Marx, 1992, p. 447).

The dual character of capitalist production, that is, production of use-value and of value, amounts to the dual character of capitalist management, which is despotic in nature and thus, if not practically negated, intensifies the unfreedom (Marx, 1992, p. 450).

Although the capitalist benefits from this social productivity due to the increase in productivity of labour (which means a decrease in the necessary labour time for commodity production) and because he has paid the labourers individually and thus this increase comes to him as a free gift, and despite the fact that through this process the productive powers of labour becomes those of capital (Marx, 1992, p. 449–450), it does not increase the amount of the value produced (Postone, 2003, pp. 327–328).

With the further unfolding of capital, the social powers of labour, which Marx refers to as “species capacities,” will be subsumed to capital completely. Although at the beginning of the process it is only evident to the cooperating labourers that their social productive power inherently belongs to capital (Marx, 1992, p. 451), in the course of development of large-scale industry, these powers become intrinsic powers of capital and completely separated from the labourer and as a power that rules them. This follows from the form of production that requires from the outset the free wage-labourer who sells her labour-power (Marx, 1992, p. 452):

It is a result of the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital. (Marx, 1992, p. 482)

Capitalist large-scale production, according to Marx, appears simultaneous to the birth of capital. Capital necessarily transforms labour process into a social process. Moreover, the socialisation of labour process is a method employed by capital in order to increase productivity for the sake of maximisation of profitable exploitation. So it is the case, though in a socially alienated form, capitalist relations of production point toward the possibility of overcoming these relations and to human emancipation, which means the social reappropriation of powers of social labour by human beings.

With the rise of large-scale industrial production, however, the aforementioned social character of labour is completed. The technical innovations, which were necessitated by the transformations in the mode of production (Marx, 1992, p. 506) were not solely motivated by technical requirements; rather, they were dictated by capital’s movement of self-valorisation: it is with real subsumption of labour to capital that value becomes the truly universal mediating factor in society; the real subsumption of labour to capital could only be realised via large-scale industrial production with the use of machinery (Marx, 1992, p. 508).

The introduction of machinery, which is constituent of large-scale industrial production, not only objectifies the production process, but also puts the objectified past labour (mental and physical) at the free service of capitalist production. Machine transforms the past objectified labour into the natural forces of social production (Marx, 1992, p. 510). With the objectification and independence of accumulated past labour, the capabilities and skills of labour are appropriated by machinery as the means of capitalist production: “Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labour-power” (Marx, 1992, p. 545).

Large-scale mechanical production intensifies the labour process, meaning that makes it possible for capital to extract more value out of labour in a given time interval. Although the intensification of labour process through introducing ever more developed machinery amounts to an increase on the use-value dimension of productive labour, the machinery enters the valorisation process to the extent that its value is transmitted to the products gradually or by reducing the labour time necessary to reproduce the worker. “Marx grasps capitalist industrial production in terms of this duality: as a process of creating material wealth, it ceases to depend necessarily on direct human labor; yet, as a process of valorization, it necessarily remains based on such labor” (Postone, 2003, p. 342). Moreover, with the introduction of machinery, the worker does not employ the means of production but is employed by the machine: thus follows the separation of the intellectual powers of production from its manual powers, where the former are transferred to capital and confront the labour as powers of capital dominating labour. The very extensive social knowledge and gigantic body of science, which are the natural forces of the relations of production and are constituted by labour’s “species-activity,” appear in the alienated form of the powers of the master (Marx, 1992, pp. 548–549).

With large-scale industrial production, the powers of capital are not only the alienated form of the powers of immediate producers, but are the alienated form of the accumulated social skills and knowledge. Moreover, since production of material wealth becomes a function of social knowledge, skills, and techniques, the labour of the worker becomes more emptied and unskilled. Yet, since the valorisation process depends on the expenditure of immediate labour time, a total replacement of human labour by social knowledge and skills is not sought by capital. “Thus, there is a structural antagonism between the alienated forces of production and living labor, wherein the former become more developed while the latter becomes increasingly empty and fragmented” (Postone, 2003, p. 344). Development of industrial production yields a system of production where the worker becomes not the subject, but an object and a component part of the production process.

Capitalist society, thus, is a society where people are under the domination of capital, which appropriates the socially produced accumulated knowledge and skills in an alienated form as its own powers. Industrial production is the materialisation of the process of valorisation and the logic of capital. Through industry, social powers and skills of the use-value dimension of labour are transformed into the natural powers of social production. Industry is the point of contact between human beings and nature; thus, the natural forces and laws that are objectified in the form of scientific knowledge are but the laws and regulations of productive activity mediated and determined by the logic of capital. However, the dual character of capitalist production brings about the possibility of a positive reappropriation of the accumulated social knowledge by society (also see Postone, 2003, p. 354).

Capital’s relations of production, on the one hand, produce and reproduce the conditions of unfreedom and domination of people by value, while, on the other hand, in a contradictory way bring about the possibility of overcoming capitalism and thus its forms of social domination and unfreedom. The increase in the productivity and skills of the use-value dimension of labour, which makes the expenditure of immediate labour time (abstract human labour) irrelevant to the process of producing wealth, and which is manifest in the gigantic amount of accumulated social knowledge and scientification of industry, and the objectification of this social knowledge, although in alienated form as powers of capital, in the form of sciences and skills provides the real material ground for a possible communist reappropriation of these skills and human emancipation. The communist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Marx, 1989, p. 89) is a condensed form of expressing this possibility. Just as the productivity of the use-value dimension of labour is more than the linear sum of the productivity of each labourer, so the scale of accumulated social knowledge is far larger than the sum total of knowledge of each individual contributing to the production of this mass. Additionally, as the scale of knowledge and its fields of application grow beyond the sum of individuals’ knowledge, accumulated knowledge expands more rapidly due to new questions that arise as a function of the human activity of applying this very knowledge. Moreover, just as with the introduction of large-scale industry where the social skills and knowledge become independent of immediate producers, the knowledge in a particular field, say a particular branch of science, becomes independent from those who contribute to the production of scientific knowledge in that particular area. The aforementioned communist principle is the acknowledgement of this situation and the possibility it lays before society at the service of human emancipation.

Conclusion

Capitalism is itself a contradiction, as it is the third term that relates the human prehistory (Marx, 1904, p. 13) to true human history, that is, communism. Unless this contradiction is not resolved for the benefit of all humanity, all developments that can serve the humanisation process of future human society function as dehumanising instruments at the service of capital. The rapid growth of accumulated social human knowledge and scientification of production can function as a tool that emancipates humanity from the compulsion of bodily work. However, under the capitalist relations of production, such growth, due to capital’s demand of valorisation, turns huge masses into surplus population—disposable human-garbage, while making work into torture for the working population.

Ilyenkov’s anti-innatism is another form of addressing the separability of socially produced knowledge from existing relations of production and reappropriation of the former by society. Such possibility is brought forth contradictorily by capitalist relations of production: capital is a leveller; it tends to formally equalise individuals so that one can be expressed in terms of quantities of another just as any amount of labour (sophisticated or simple) is identifiable with a certain amount of another labour. Ilyenkov’s anti-innatism, therefore, is a criticism of a system of material production and education that is based on a quantified comparison between individuals, which corresponds to the logic of capital. This principle does not claim that everybody can and should know exactly the same thing—ironically such a levelling approach is inherent in the capitalist education system. As Ilyenkov states:

Some comrades are afraid that such a theoretical position may lead in practice to underestimation of the special biological-genetic innate characteristics of individuals, or even to leveling and standardization. These fears, it seems to me, are groundless. It seems to me that, on the contrary, any concession—even the smallest—to the naturalistic illusion in explaining the human mind and human life activity will sooner or later lead the theorist who makes this concession to the surrender of all materialist positions, to complete capitulation to theories of the Koestlerian type. (2007b, p. 67)

An education system subsumed to capital concerns with knowledge as an end product, a fetish only; it disregards the creative process of formulating knowledge as the outcome. The concern of capital is putting science at its own service, just like any other force of nature. The aim of the existing scientific education is to quickly reproduce the “skilled” labour which is required at different levels of production, including scientific production itself. Thus follows the factory-like form of cramming students into classrooms: here the aim is not to produce true scientists in large numbers but to cut out the surplus population of these skilled workers so that they serve other “lower” branches of industry. Due to the logic of valorisation of capital, the existing education system does not intend to create the conditions of flourishing independent, emancipated minds but to produce automatons—not mathematicians but cashiers, as Ilyenkov puts it. To the contrary, anti-innatism is the criticism of such a levelling tendency, which prevents flourishing of individual skills and talents, and which in turn is the expression of the subsumption of the individual by the social. Ilyenkov’s stance, which is rooted in his anti-innatism, on the contrary demands for an education system that encourages the child from the beginning to actively participate in the process of producing genuine knowledge. Elaborating on Elkonin and Davydov’s research, Ilyenkov states:

In this research an attempt is being made to organize the individual assimilation of scientific knowledge in such a way that it should reproduce in compressed and abridged form the real process of generation and development of this knowledge. Here the child is from the very start not a consumer of set results embodied in abstract definitions, axioms, and postulates but, so to speak, a “co-participant” in the creative process. (2007a, pp. 42–43)

Such an education system should also be designed in response to the specific individual needs of each person so as to provide her with the opportunity for developing her talents to the maximum. It also emphasises that the “norm” for the human mind is not mediocrity, or lack of creativity and talent, but on the contrary,

the “norm” for humans is precisely talent and that by declaring talent a rarity, a deviation from the norm, we simply dump onto Mother Nature our own guilt, our own inability to create for each medically normal individual all the external conditions for his development to the highest level of talent. (Ilyenkov, 2007b, p. 67)

The human being is not a natural being but a social animal. The biological provides only the basis, the necessary tools for human activity:

This means that any social departure, any action, any manifestation of social life in man is made possible by biological mechanisms—above all, by mechanisms of the nervous system. On the other hand, all the biological functions of man’s organism are subordinated to the performance of his social functions to such a degree that the whole of biology becomes here merely a form of the manifestation of a principle that is quite different in nature. (Ilyenkov, 2007b, pp. 64–65)

Ilyenkov’s approach has a dual meaning; first, the biological in human beings is subordinate to the social; the key to humans’ biology is its social existence and not vice versa, just as the key to the anatomy of the ape is human anatomy (Marx, 1993, p. 105). Second, although biology is the precondition of the genesis of human being, with the emergence of human being as social species biology becomes a function of the social, just as is the case with the emergence of higher mental functions, which do not simply supersede the biological functions but qualitatively transform them into their own moments. “Thus, we can regard the biological functions of the organism as a form of the manifestation of the historically determined social functions of the given individual” (Ilyenkov, 2007b, p. 65).

Anti-innatism is the criticism of naturalistic positions that naturalise and eternalise the conditions of human unfreedom. Everything specific to the human mind is socially mediated and (inter-)actively produced. The naturalistic and physicalist approaches seek genetically inherited (inborn, a priori) forms of brain activity that determine modes and forms of human social activity. Such approaches totally ignore the fact that there are a whole range of acquired specifically human brain activities such as categories of logic and moral norms, which cannot be explained biologically. Thus, according to Ilyenkov, the picture of evolution that arises from such stances “looks like a process of rising passivity,” where “the ant is more active than the monkey and the monkey more active than human” (1969, p .95). The human mind can appear only with the deployment of human artefacts, that is, “objects created by labor, objects that correspondingly demand artificial—that is, shaped in labor process itself—modes of action with them” (Ilyenkov, 2007d, p. 90). Therefore, in each specific historical era emerges a specific form of human mind, because the form of mind is determined by the form of human artefacts and the skills required for putting them in action. The capitalist mind-form, which is attributed with genetically inherited capabilities, and which, among others, according to Kant, is a “gift” to the few, ironically yields its own antithesis: the quantifying tendency of capital acts as a leveller; it defines every individual person in terms of a specific quantity (of skills and “gifts”) of another person, and therefore, the last semblance of uniqueness of the individual human mind under the capitalist relations of production disappears. Anti-innatism is historically possible and necessary in the aforementioned sense: it is the expression of the desirability, possibility, and necessity of the reappropriation of socially accumulated knowledge that is the condition of the emergence of the truly social individual.