MATERIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS - PART 1 of 2

Today most people conceive of consciousness as something quite distinct from matter. This essay will argue that consciousness is an evolutionary level of matter which has developed the capacity to reflect itself. It is accordingly important to understand just what matter is, as well as how it evolved, if we are to avoid idealistic confusion and guard against inferring into the concept of matter, however innocently or subconsciously, distinctions that do not really exist.

The most common metaphysical illusion concerning matter is that it is a substance independent of the forces acting upon it. This illusion results when we confuse the two fundamental questions of materialist theory, the question of the nature of matter as the objective reality that exists independently of our minds, and the question of the structure of matter. It is the task of science to provide an ever more complete analysis of the structure of matter, without presuming that at any given moment in history it can provide absolute answers. New discoveries in our understanding of the structure of matter do not invalidate our understanding of its nature. It is important to see that matter is everything, that its structure includes all those phenomena - substance, force, motion, consciousness, that are usually defined separately, and that none of these phenomena develop out of the unknown and unknowable, but that all are implicit in matter from the very beginning.

Our conception of the material world is continually changing. One of the most dramatic of these changes occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries with the formulation of Laplace's evolutionary theory of the origin of the solar system. Scientific interpretations arise in history in ways not unrelated to other kinds of thinking, and so the same period brought the idea of historical development explored by the Scottish historians David Hume and William Robertson, the first social history by J.G.Herder, the philosophy of Hegel, and later, the discoveries of Darwin and Marx. The significance of this new interpretation was that for the first time nature itself acquired a history. Nature was no longer a permanent and eternal Newtonian system, subject only to repetitive mechanical motion after the first "push" from a creator. Since Kant and Laplace, nature has been viewed as being in continual motion and development, subject to self-induced, qualitative change. Hegel first formulated the notion that this continual motion and development proceeds in terms of contradictions, though he conceived this dialectical approach in idealistic terms.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century then, a world view came into being that challenged the mechanistic conceptions of the eighteenth century, and conceived of life not as something new and apart from and imposed upon matter, but as a form of matter resulting from its motion and qualitative change. This motion is inseparable from the existence of matter. Matter without motion cannot exist, and the degree of measured motion bears directly on the "amount" of matter that can be measured, as for instance, when particles are accelerated to very high speeds and their mass increases. Immobility is only an appearance (a form of motion), and does not represent the negation of motion; rest is simply a special case of motion, dependent on the relative position of the observer.

It is also important to view the various phenomena of matter as interdependent. Only as a result of our pragmatic training and the requirements of limited, workaday logic, do we consider objects to exist independently of each other. In reality there is no element of the material world that is not in constant relation with all other elements, and any change in a particular form of matter involves changes in all matter -- to be sure, in different degrees, of different natures, and involving different types of motion. Mechanical motion, chemical motion, biological motion -- all presuppose each other. Moreover, these various forms of motion are connected in time, move from lower to higher forms of motion through a process of differentiation. The development of organic matter from inorganic matter, the evolution of life, and the emergence of consciousness are all stages in the general process of nature, with an enormous variety of particular sub-processes, moving in the direction of ever greater differentiation and consolidation.

Motion, then, is not a "force" imparted to matter, but a dialectical relation between various interdependent elements and forms of matter. To "create" motion is an illusion that neglects the chain of transfers of motion. Early man first used mechanical motion to generate heat through friction, while advanced societies, reverse the process and use heat energy to generate mechanical motion.¹ Mechanical energy, heat energy, chemical energy, electrical energy are simply different forms of material motion, not separate phenomena, and the transformation of one form of motion into another demonstrates the interdependence of these various forms.

As a result of this dialectical view of the interdependence of the various forms of matter, the notion of "force" in nature, as a separate metaphysical entity, disappears. Nothing is "added" to matter in the course of its history and there is no "life-force." Matter, because of its own characteristics, is in dialectical motion and continually changes form, resulting in the transformation of inorganic matter into organic or "living" matter and, ultimately, the transformation from animal to social existence. This is all a consequence of interdependent and interacting processes, each stage being the product of preceding developments, without the intervention of any sort of invisible hand or non-material agency.

A growing number of scientists are reaching agreement with regard to the development of a unified theory describing the origin of life. It is their conception that the cooling of the earth produced a condensation of water vapor, forming the seas, and that the washing of carbon and nitrogen into these seas, the formation first of simple and then of larger, complex organic molecules through the oxidation-reduction process - perhaps triggered by the bombardment of these substances by cosmic or ultraviolet rays -- turned the seas into a colloidal solution or organic "soup." Through this series of changes there emerged the so-called coacervates, colloidal clusters separated from the sea by a skin. Through molecules floating in and out through this skin, the chemical and electrical conditions inside changed, leading to a crucial step, the formation of a metabolism.

Metabolism is a relation between a discernible unit and its environment. The function of a metabolism is to prevent or postpone the breaking up process inherent in matter. Matter is constantly changing. If we look at a process from the position of a given structure, change means the breaking up of that structure. So the metabolic process -- a building up and breaking down of compounds to release energy -- serves to postpone the absorption of a particular structure back into its environment. The tendency of primitive organic structures to break up was dialectically counterbalanced by the metabolic process and the tendency to form molecular clusters, as those coacervates "fed" on the material of which they themselves consisted. The coacervates most efficient in this process survived the longest, (developing to what Oparin² called "an optimum size" when they "broke down" {divided} into two) for if the existence of a coacervate is determined by the food intake in the form of molecules through its skin, and division into two increases the skin surface, division increases the potential for food intake and thus for growth and a continued life span.

Life, then, is interaction, in its most primitive form consisting of organic compounds of temporary stability, characterized by a dynamic balance between growth and decay. The coacervates evolved into living entities resembling bacteria, which depended upon organic food for energy, thus producing a scarcity of organic compounds in the sea. This scarcity initiated, in a manner of speaking, a "backward" evolutionary movement, in which some of these developing organisms developed the capacity to make use of, less complex organic substance, and ultimately inorganic matter. Some organisms -- the blue green algae -- became food-makers, enriching the food supply of organisms that continued to live on organic compounds, creating the potential for more complex growth as they themselves were consumed by now rapidly differentiating evolving organisms.

The appearance of chlorophyll, and hence photosynthesis, in food-makers like the blue-green algae led to the release of oxygen and the formation, over an enormous period of time, of the atmosphere. The seas had protected the living matter from the lethal effects of ultra-violet rays, but now the oxygen rich atmosphere and the layer of ozone at its outer edge provided a protective function which made possible the emergence of aerobic [living on air] organisms. Because of their greater efficiency in energy production as compared with anaerobic [living without oxygen] organisms, aerobic organisms flourished and developed in many different directions as the process of evolutionary differentiation continued. The distinction between plant and animal life, between creatures whose life processes were or were not based on chlorophyll, was still ambiguous with the appearance of the flagellates, but soon afterwards a separation between autotrophs [a microorganism which uses inorganic material for nutrients] and vegetable eaters occurred.

The next milestone was the development of multicellular organisms and the consequent separation of functions among the cells of a singe living creature. The coelentera (sponges and jellyfish) are of particular interest because they provide examples of primitive differentiated cells within multicellular creatures. In the hydra a hollow central tube serves as the digestive apparatus, while in the medusa, a particular form of hydra, a stem of nerve cells performs many different functions. An early, more complex type of nervous system appears in the earthworm in the form of interconnected specialized tissues, or ganglia. The earthworm has both sensory and motor nerve cells; stimuli are transmitted from the creature's periphery to its center, and from its center nervous excitation is communicated to its muscles.

The further evolution of animal life witnesses the continuing centralization of ganglia and the eventual formation of the spinal cord and the brain. Simultaneously there takes place greater differentiation between different parts of the nervous system: parts function as receptors of light, heat or sound stimuli, others as motor nerve cells, and still others as connecting links, bringing about the increasingly effective coordination of various types of cell groups.

What we see in this very condensed presentation is a marvelous example of the interaction of processes, of a rich series of contradictory and yet intertwined motions that defy understanding if conceived in simple linear terms. The physical action of the earth's cooling creates a new biological environment. Radiation from space that at a later stage is so inimical to organic processes here helps to stimulate them. In retrospect it is apparent that inorganic matter is not different from organic matter, but merely a relatively less differentiated condition of matter in general. Eventually organic matter reacts back upon the physical environment, creating the atmosphere and revolutionizing the conditions of its own existence. The ultra-violet rays that may once have triggered the life process now threaten its stability and continued development, but under new conditions more advanced living creatures can evolve and specialize at an accelerated rate. Life is developing dialectically, and the various stages of dialectical change are represented by new levels of differentiation, culminating in the development of awareness as a feature of quite sophisticated forms of material organization.

Consciousness, however, is not simply a new characteristic of these sophisticated organisms, unanticipated by developments in more primitive living beings. Such an idea would contradict a dialectical approach and introduce a metaphysical property into the chain of events in the evolution of life. In The Dialectics of Nature³, Engels wrote, "A planned mode of action exists in embryo wherever protoplasm, living protein, exists and reacts, that is, carries out definite, even if extremely simple, movements as the result of definite stimuli. Such reactions take place even where there is as yet no cell at all, far less a nerve cell." Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism⁴, talked about this planned mode of action, in its most primitive form, as a capacity of matter to "mirror" or reflect certain aspects of the environment. The translation is inadequate, but it has been suggested that he was thinking of the interdependence of matter and the capacity of a particular element to "move in response" to the flux of natural change. [Leontyev⁵ defined this characteristic of the first living substances as "irritability," a rudimentary form of sensory awareness. Irritability, however, should not be confused with the actual dialectical relationships that exist in nature, where subject and object, the irritating agent and that which is irritated, do not exist in separate categories.]

What actually occurs in the evolution of life is not a haphazard appearance of new qualities but a process of greater and greater differentiation at ever higher levels expressing a tendency of living things to establish new connections, new types of metabolic relationships between increasingly differentiated parts of nature. The relatively separate existence of differentiated organisms means that their metabolisms are compelled to perform ever more efficiently. The more living things particularize (i.e. adapt to ever more particular conditions of their environment) themselves, and consequently develop more particular needs, the less can the objects of these needs be found in the general environment. The higher the degree of differentiation, for example, the greater the need of the organism to direct itself toward the particular type of food necessary for its sustenance. At the same time, the greater the differentiation, the more vulnerable the organism may become to other organisms and the vicissitudes of the environment, so that particularization also implies a greater need of the entity to protect itself. Engel's "planned mode of action" in protoplasm, then, at a very early stage of differentiation, represents the emergence of an incipient ability to respond to an environment in terms of directing-protecting actions. This is the historic origin of the "orienting reflex" discussed by Pavlov. Though in its most primitive forms this cannot be called consciousness, it is that aspect of material existence in differentiated forms leads to an awareness which, in turn, changes qualitatively into consciousness. The capacity of certain simple organisms, the primitive amoeba , for example, to move toward food, is no longer merely a physical-chemical process, but a physiological one, a movement qualitatively different from physical processes in the inorganic world. Qualitatively different, but interconnected and continuous with all other forms of nature.

After these most primitive physiological process there appears a form of conscious activity that we might refer to as "purposeful" action, an activity that appears only in animals with nervous systems. Thus the earthworm is able to fill its hole by drawing in leaves by their sharp angle first. It "knows" how to do this by instinct, by which Pavlov meant an ability to perform useful actions, developed over time and passed on - inherited - for the purpose of adjusting an organism to its surroundings. Pavlov called this an unconditioned reflex, and we observe this type of activity among bees, ants, birds, beavers, and so on, who develop a type of functioning that on the surface looks like intelligent action. It is, of course, fundamentally different from human behavior, in that it is intelligent or social in appearance only. The physiology of these creatures develops over time; their actions are rooted in relatively permanent connections in their nerve centers, not as a result of individual, learned experience, but as a result of genetic experience. Unconditioned reflexes or instincts are merely conditioned reflexes which through the process of natural selection and the mating of successfully adapting species, unite into the genetic matrix, a point of "qualitative change." The development of unconditioned reflexes is nevertheless a vital link in the development of conscious humans.

While there are some indications that conditioned reflexes can be found even in ants and bees, they become significant only with vertebrates. The unconditioned reflex implies the ability to adjust to surroundings phylogenetically, to coordinate the activities of the species as a whole -- hence the apparent social behavior. The conditioned reflex implies ontogenetic adjustment, the modification of individual behavior required by more complicated environments. Animal behavior is frequently a combination of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes, but animals can be said to possess a type of consciousness only in so far as they have the capacity for conditioned reflexes. The type of consciousness based upon the conditioned reflex is referred to as the first signal system, and this is the manner in which the higher orders of animals engaged in planned action. But Engels⁶ noted "...animals merely use external nature, and bring about changes in it simply by their presence; man, by his changes, makes nature serve his ends. He masters it." Animals have a passive relation to nature, humans an active one. With the exception of humans, even the highest orders of animals only change nature exhaustively, not productively. It is only with the development of cooperative production that a second signal system develops, which is characteristic only of humans. Still, the appearance of this higher stage of consciousness must not be mechanically separated from the lower stages of consciousness associated with other vertebrates. Pavlov stressed the similarity between the two as follows: "It cannot be doubted that the entire foundation of the nervous activity which is connected with the cerebrum is the same with higher animals as with human beings."⁷

A continuing series of changes in nature leads us away from such conditions as the warm, tropical climates in which dinosaur flourished. In the Mesozoic age the environment could sustain only reptilian life. The Cenozoic age signals the rise of mammals, an increase in the size of their bodies, the specialization of the brain, teeth, the limbs, and the arrival of the primates, the first tarzoids [tarsier] and lemurs, approximately forty million years ago. Man's ancestry continues, during the Eocene age, from tree types to progressively developed tarzoids with many simian features, and from these, during the Oligocene age (35 to 25 million years ago), to small gibbon-like animals, to the larger, generalized apes of the Miocene age (25 to 12 million years ago), and to the Australopithecine of South Africa and the primitive pithecanthropus or "ape-man" During the Pleistocene age, the major age nearest our own, we observe the transition to "Mousterian man," two forms of which are the Neanderthal and the less specialized Acheulian types. The contrast at this point with modern representatives of Homo Sapiens is, according to LeClerc, "so slight as to be quite unobtrusive."⁸

The entire evolutionary history of the primates is characterized by one special feature, the progressive expansion and growing complexity of the brain. This first occurs with arboreal life, because a qualitative increase in nervous activity results from the development of arms and hands that can be used for grasping and collecting, vastly increasing the range of adaptive capabilities. Seen dialectically the growth of the brain affects other parts of the body, because increased mental capacity permits the retention of certain general physical features that in many other mammalian groups are lost by specialization through physiological adaptation. The development of the brain makes possible a flexibility in adjustment to environmental conditions through nervous direction, rather than through the development of unconditioned reflexes and structural changes. This retention, by more mentally developed creatures, of certain less specialized anatomical characteristics is of the utmost importance to their evolutionary potential, as it provides them with a certain plasticity with respect to changes in their surroundings. While some animals turned into highly specialized creatures as they adapted to a specific environment, among the primates the general functions of the body were increasingly under the direction of the brain, until, as Engels put it, "the cunning of the ape becomes the basis of the intelligence of Homo Sapiens."⁹

The social evolution of Homo Sapiens begins more or less as mental development affects this change in physical development, and the transformation of humans first into social beings, and later into "individual" beings, takes place as a series of successive levels of estrangement. Changes in their surroundings no longer affected humans directly, but were mediated through the social organism; humans react to these changes through their membership in society.

The first such estrangement occurs with the formation of "hordes." Horde organizations practice organized collecting, and these are premature steps in the development of communication. The second stage is the formation of primal social organizations involving definite cooperation in production, and the using of nature to augment the yield of nature. This is fundamentally different from the horde stage, since the hordes are really only a transition between the animal stage and the social (human) stage, in that with hordes there is an organized collecting effort vis-à-vis nature, but it is not yet an effort that directly changes nature, adapts nature to humans.

The second stage, Cooperation in production, produces an estrangement from the product, because it is no longer individually but collectively acquired. The product is not one's "own," in a direct sense, but is produced through interaction with others. Estrangement from the product, as Marx puts it, is at the same time estrangement from the external sensuous world: cooperative production separates individual humans from the sensuous world that more primal groups had dealt with more directly. Nature, in this sense, becomes opposed to humans, antagonistic. Furthermore, in estranging themselves from nature, humans also estrange themselves from themselves. An animal, in contrast, cannot conceive of itself as it reacts directly in response to nature. But humans, now conceiving their products to be the result of collective effort, see themselves not as an individual entities, but as one of many, as a "species-being," or social being. Humans now reflects themselves in themselves. This extremely critical estrangement, generalized by collective labor, leads from sensuous consciousness to self-consciousness.

In the rising of awareness in humans, the formation of "hordes," there is at first only what can be called "magical" thinking. Magic is that stage where conception, theory, and acting are still undifferentiated, where the human acts "instinctively" and does not yet consciously conceive of its social or productive relations. They are still a part of nature but independent from nature. This "coincidence" of thinking and acting signifies that humans act in a certain way and expect certain results without being able to rationally explain why they expect them. Bourgeois philosophical arrogance implies in the term "magical" a confidence in unknown forces, but such a concept is a kind of ideological perception based on contemporary mental states. Proto-humans knew that certain things would result from certain actions, but only in terms of a confidence that they were, of course, incapable of justifying scientifically. This kind of awareness is established not only by unconditioned reflex instincts, but most importantly, by conditioned reflexes as well. At this stage of social life however, real conditions encountered in human activity that can be absorbed and transformed into experience, cannot yet be reflected or rationalized abstractly.

Beyond this stage of magical thinking lies self-consciousness, true abstract thinking, the capacity of humans not only to act as a species beings but to visualize and understand themselves as such. This kind of thinking begins with the appearance of exploitation. Exploitation is the result of the development of separate classes with contradictory aims, and consequently two forms of abstract thinking, each "inadequate," develop. The thinking of the ruling class takes the form of ideology, or false consciousness. The thinking of the laboring class takes what might be called a "utopian" form.

To summarize: the overriding interaction between humans and nature still exists, but through a series of estrangements humans develop from a stage of which 1) they are totally part of nature and do not contemplate themselves (horde life); to 2) an awareness of their difference from nature (the primitive magic of tribal life); to 3) an understanding of which they can conceive of themselves abstractly as social beings (ideological or utopian thought in class societies), to 4) near the end of the process of class struggle, to a point at which they emancipate themselves from inadequate abstract thinking and embraces dialectical theory (seeing as a whole), overcoming the distortions resulting from class divisions.

One of the most important products of, and vehicles for, the evolution of consciousness is language. The history of consciousness can be said to be the history of language, and vice versa. A definite relationship is manifested between the development of language and change in the social structure.

The physiological process by which external stimuli impinge upon the sense organs, producing excitations that are received in the cerebral hemisphere as sensations, which then direct automatic motor responses was defined by Pavlov as the first signal system. This system serves the function of adjusting the organism to its surroundings. But with all animals except humans this adjustment is passive, while in humans it is active. The potential for this active response is given in their cooperative labor, by means of which they overcome nature, or more specifically, the scarcity of nature. It is in this process of cooperation that humans evolve language. Indeed, the means of effectuating cooperation is language, and this second signal system is unique to humans.

The words of language do not reflect an "inner state" of humans, nor do they directly reflect external nature. Words are not experienced in the brain as the sensations of external objects are experienced, but are abstractions of these sensations. That is, if the sensation is a sensorially perceived signal of an object, then the word is a signal of a signal, a signal with conceptual rather than sensory meaning. The elements of language do not produce in the brain vivid reflections of particular objects, but twice removed reflections that owe their existence, not to nature or sensory experience, but to the cooperative pattern of human activity. Language cannot emerge without this cooperative activity: words are formed in the furtherance of this activity, and are therefore reflections, or signals, of social reality rather than the reality of nature. Cooperative existence cannot, so to speak, be seen, tasted, touched or smelled through direct individual experience; cooperative relations can be experienced only in the process of production, by means of communication. This second signal system is this totality of conceptual patterns known as word stimuli, reflecting all the interactions of basic cooperative work activity. Our whole social form of being is embodied in language, and one would therefore expect general differences in social structures to be reflected in language structures. This is indeed the case.

Linguistic science distinguishes three general language structures: monosyllabic languages, agglutinative languages, and inflecting languages.

Monosyllabic languages such as those of the Chinese, Tibetans, Annamese [Vietnamese], Burmese, which are characterized by the fact that one character does the job of many words of any inflecting language. In Chinese, for example, there are no declensions, conjugations, tenses, genders, prepositions, conjunctions, and no root forms for persons or numbers. Contrary to what one might at first think, this is precisely why Chinese is so difficult - one must learn not only a great many characters, but also many different meanings for each character, depending on the juxtaposition of groups of characters. There is no distinction in monosyllabic languages between past, present, or future. Grammar is entirely represented by syntax, by the position of a word within a larger unit of expression. Considerable weight is given to intonation in order to convey proper meaning, whereas in the inflecting languages, to which English belongs, there is, relatively speaking, little importance given to intonation. In River valley economies, where societal change was at a relative minimum, in contrast with Western societies, the pattern of alienation (the development of classical exploitative social relationships) never developed in any decisive form. This does not mean that exploitation did not exist in places like China, but only that there was no basic work slavery - the peasant and the serf never lost minimal citizen's rights. The rights of the peasantry were enormously restricted, at times, but outright slavery existed only in two special forms: domestic slaves, and the prisoners of war who were used in non-productive labor and mining operations. These mining operations were productive in an absolute sense, but they were not basic in establishing the nature of productive relations for the society as a whole. in order to characterize a society as a slave society one must do more than merely show the existence of slaves - one must show that slavery was a basic, and not an accessory, feature of such a society. The question is what did the slaves do, was their activity was essential in preserving the overall class structure? Chinese society was one that developed from primal conditions directly to feudal conditions, so that a clear schism between ideology and utopian thinking never appeared. This is why China did not develop the kind of thought that is called Western science, but on the other hand, in an early phase of human society made so many of the major technological contributions such as the development of the wheel, gunpowder, printing, and so on. These were innovations that came from responsible participation in the process of production, and were not, as in the West, the results of alienation and abstract contemplation of the production process.

With agglutinative languages there is a putting together of words with one word in a group becoming dominant, retaining a large measure of its original meaning, while the other words attached to it may modify its meaning somewhat, but principally indicate the particular situation involved. Agglutinative languages function descriptively rather than analytically, and are used by primal peoples, that is, in societies prior to the development of class divisions. Abstracted conceptualization has not yet arisen, and society exists not by virtue of a centralized organization or ruling class, but by simple agglomeration, through undifferentiated social clusters. The structure of agglutinative language is very flexible, since knowledge is accumulated in terms of similar situations experienced, but without abstract conceptualization similarity does not imply identity. Nor is there any need to emphasize or submerge the individual person, so the base words of these languages are linked to prefixes and suffixes that serve to identify the particular person, thing, or situation to which one is referring. To indicate a road one would have to speak of a particular road - there would be no general term for a road, because the abstraction did not as yet exist. Neither did a general person exist - one had always to speak of a particular person with particular characteristics. Nor is there any systematic declension.

It is important to note that the idea of system itself is absent in both the agglutinative and monosyllabic languages, since the systematizing force of exploitative society is absent. In other words, grammar, in the sense that we understand it, does not exist. Syntax exists, but developed systems of conjugation and declension, as methods of expressing different relationships of objects, or nouns, to each other and to individuals, cannot appear in primitive communal societies, because such relationships are characteristic only of acquisitive societies. For example, when we say that a language possesses no grammar, we mean that there is no genitive, no indication of a property relationship, of the fact that something belongs to somebody. Similar points can be made about the other cases. Grammar fundamentally differentiates between "I," "you," and "he," and consequently presupposes certain fixed social relationships that appear only under acquisitive conditions.

With the inflecting languages, the word itself is constantly changing. This represents a true system of grammar, composed of syntax -- word positions relative to each other -- plus changes in word forms themselves. There are conjugations, declensions, and tenses. Inflecting languages are characteristic of exploitative societies, in which there is a highly organized, divided, and interdependent labor force, defined by its relationship to private property. In its simplest form, the meaning of private property is that the means of production belong to an individual, and that this individual's activity is representative of the activity of exploitative units in society as a whole. A language structure evolves around sentences that embody the whole private property relationship, expressed as highly intricate distinctions between subject, object, and predicate, between a dominant thing and the relations of dependent things to it. Exploitation is the basis of systematic grammar.

Grammar is more highly diversified and complicated in the early stages of Western society than in the later stages. In ancient Greek, for example, there is a far more intricate grammar than in Latin. In Homeric Greek there is a tense called the aorist, which has no reference to either the origin or the completion of a process -- that is, it is a tense in which there is as yet no concept of a process, akin to musical forms like the Gregorian chant, which lacks any sense of "becoming." Fully developed private property relationships, and the consequent theorizing of the ruling class about the production process which has a beginning and an end, had not yet evolved. To the degree that it does evolve, more and more of the complicated transitional forms that lead from the agglutinative stage to the inflecting stage are discarded, so that today grammar in its purest form can be studied only in Latin, and not Greek. Latin is more logical, more simplified, and has a far more discernible system than the innumerable "exceptions" or substructures that characterize Greek, remnants of a transitional period in the development of language. For the same reason, the concept of the "future" appears along with private property and its production processes. The perception of processes is an aspect of commodity production, which is carried on with exploited labor and appears as something alienated from man, an activity seemingly carried on for its own sake, for the manufacture of exchangeable commodities rather than directly usable goods. In a process of production, from the moment raw materials are obtained, a discernible future is apparent; a potential product and profit from this product exists for which there has to be an expression. Prior to this point in social history, there are no special tenses for the future, or for that matter for the past - the past becomes a problem to society only when the present has to be explained for, as when in Greek society after the development of debt slavery, the debt slaves were told that their condition was not the result of the present state of affairs, but of their own individual guilt in the past. And just as the past "would have been" the present, except for the defaulting of the exploited class (by becoming indebted and propertyless) so there arises the conditional form, which by its statement of an unrealized possibility clearly reflects the contradiction within exploitative society.

The history of language in its general aspects is the history of consciousness. There are minor differences - developments that are not always direct expressions of class differences, particularly in modern times -but basic language structures do record differentiations in consciousness and in ruling class ideologies. Such a thesis cannot of course be developed mechanically, as Stalin pointed out in Marxism and Linguistics, where he argued against scientists who wanted to establish for the entire period of modern history -- the last thousand years or so -- the direct dependence of language forms on changes in the social structure. Stalin showed that this was nonsense, because language in its basic grammatical aspects was fixed long ago, and has remained essentially what it was up to the present. The changes that have since occurred are minor and not solely determined by class relations. The connection that can be traced between language and society applies to the formation of that society, at least for the three basic language structures and their corresponding forms of social organization: the monosyllabic structures of ancient river valley societies, the agglutinative structures of primal communal societies, and the inflecting structures of Western exploitative societies.¹¹ The ideological impress left upon basic language structures during their early development is gradually obscured as increasingly complex forms of social activity estrange humans ever more from their own thought, and make language appear as an independent process. Such is not the case. The fundamental elements of language are rooted in different class structures and different angles and degrees of perception of productive activity.

Language, then, is a catalyst in social organization, and it is as a result of social organization that humans produce their own life, because they are now dependent upon cooperative activity as well as nature to produce food and shelter, to insure the life of the species. Consequently, society becomes an organism distinct from nature. Humans are no longer, like other animals, reacting directly to nature; they react to society. Being estranged from nature humans contemplate themselves in a world of their own creation. The process of learning, that is, the process of adaptation, is no longer dependent upon physiological capacities but upon social change. It is in this crucial sense that the brain becomes something qualitatively different from what it was in the lemurs and anthropoid apes: it is now a physiological organ developing as a result of social conditions. Greater demands are placed upon the functioning of the brain because of the existence of collective human activity. The social labor of humans produces the physiological disposition towards language. The human brain is consequently a social phenomenon, and would not be what it is if at some point in prehistory humans had lived in isolation and not in cooperative groups.

Niebyl Seminar Page
Thoughts on the Material Basis of Conciousness - Part 1
Thoughts on the Material Basis of Conciousness - Part 2
A Problem of Methodology

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