Marxism: A Positive Science of Capitalist Development

Abstract

Comte’s theory of historical change had emphasised the concept of determinate laws, that history necessarily moved through a succession of stages culminating in the scientific epoch of positivism. For Comte, as with Montesquieu, Smith and Ferguson social change was not a random process dependent on purely subjective and accidental elements, but the result of an underlying structure of forces — material and moral — that generated both direction and meaning. As was argued in the previous chapter, many of Comte’s fundamental ideas were derived from Saint-Simon, but in Comte’s reworking of Saint-Simon’s theories the concepts of industrialism, production, class formation and class conflict were stripped of their contradictory and negative aspects and integrated into an organismic, consensual model of society. But Saint-Simon’s writings contain both positivistic and socialist elements. The development of socialism as both an intellectual current and socio-political movement owed much to the influence of Saint-Simon’s followers. The Saint-Simonian school, in particular the writings of Enfantin and Bazard, argued that production must be socially organized.