THE PARADOXES OF ECONOMIC DETERMINISM – 2019-4

The criticism of Marxist theory of socioeconomic formation

Summary  

Hovsep I. Aghajanyan
In their theory of socioeconomic formation K. Marx and F. Engels tried to present the patterns of human history. Marxism considered the basis for the change in these formations to be the operation of the law of the interaction of productive forces and production relations. According to this logic, Marx and Engels presented the history of social development as a sequence of the so-called primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist and future communist social system. According to Marxism, socio-economic formations are determined by the relationship between the base and the superstructure. A basis is an economic system conditioned by proprietary relations. According to the nature of the basis, a superstructure is formed, i.e. set of political, legal and ideological relations. For this reason, Marxism considers the sphere of spirituality to be derivative with respect to the basis.

In the article it is shown that the Marxist theory of the emergence and transformation of private property and socio-economic formations does not correspond to reality. As a result of the analysis of the socio-economic, political, legal systems of Ancient Rome and Greece, it is substantiated that they were not classical slave-owning states. Marx and Engels explained the socio-economic, spiritual, cultural, state-political, i.e. contradictory and complex civilization processes from the point of view of class antagonism, the basis of which is the relationship of private property. The thousand-year history of mankind shows that such confrontations are just external manifestations of the underlying processes taking place within society. Moreover, on the basis of private property, internal incentives for human life are built, which, first of all, have spiritual and psychological motives, are manifested in the sphere of material production.

The main events of the history of mankind cannot be separated from the general process of civilization and presented as a controversial theory. Marxism, ignoring the processes of civilization, on the basis of possessive relations built the logic of transformation of the social system, which is conditioned with complex and contradictory institutional relationships. The key to revealing the essence of the transformation of society is the knowledge of the internal logic of civilization processes. Marxist criteria for assessing the nature of the social system do not work, because they are built on false and divorced from reality schemes. For this reason, Marxism did not pass the historical test, as it presented the internal motives of complex social events from the point of view of their external manifestations.

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