Do we need the theory of socio-economic formations

What is a socio-economic formation? As we have already noted in our previous articles, we will not find a clear definition in the works of the classics of Marxism. Karl Marx himself was either unable or unwilling to provide such a definition. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the following definition: “A historically determined type of society representing a distinct stage in its development; ‘… a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character'”¹. As we can see, the GSE also failed to provide a definition that would offer an unambiguous answer, as one could claim that “Franco’s dictatorship” is a formation, and this would fit the encyclopedia’s definition quite well. Further on, the GSE “specifies”: “At the heart of every socio-economic F. lies a specific mode of production”². This gives rise to another question — what is a mode of production? The following answer is given: “A historically determined mode of obtaining the material goods necessary for people’s productive and personal consumption; it represents the unity of the productive forces and relations of production”³. Everything remains hazy and vague. The GSE also notes: “On the basis of generalizing the history of human development, Marxism identified the following main socio-economic Fs., which form stages of historical progress: primitive communal system, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, communist”⁴ (as we will examine later, it was not Marxism that identified them, but Joseph Stalin).

Doctor of Philosophical Sciences Alexey Radugin notes that “the formation concept presumes the inevitability of the historical process developing from a classless primitive-communal formation, through class ones — slave-owning, feudal, and capitalist — to a classless communist formation”⁵. The Philosophical Dictionary provides the following definition: “Socio-economic formation is a historical type of society based on a specific mode of production and acting as a stage in the progressive development of world human history from the primitive communal system through the slave-owning system, feudalism, and capitalism to the communist formation”⁶.

From all available data, one can conclude that a socio-economic formation is a period in the development of society that differs from other periods by the predominant form of labor employment, the predominant form of ownership, the presence or absence of market mechanisms, and the main competing social classes. The theory of socio-economic formations is based on the conviction that world history is divided into periods that succeed one another and differ among themselves in the above-mentioned features. That is, it turns out that after capitalism comes socialism (Marxist-Leninists believe that communism follows only after passing through the socialist formation).

Formations

The first, or at least one of the first, descriptions of socio-economic formations was presented in the preface to Marx’s book “A contribution to the critique of political economy”⁷. There he mentioned the following modes of production:

• Asiatic;
• Ancient;
• Feudal;
• Modern, bourgeois.

Later, he also highlighted the “Germanic” formation, which as a whole differed from both the Asiatic and the ancient ones⁸. The Asiatic and Germanic formations differ from the standard Western model. This indicates that there is no single path of development overall (the so-called civilizational approach holds a similar view), but subsequent generations of Marxists ignored this aspect.

Since Marx and Engels did not compile a classification in a finished form, it changed over a long period of time. In the USSR, there were discussions regarding formations in the 1920s and 1930s. The Asiatic mode of production did not fit into a single picture of development, appearing as a side branch, which did not suit the authorities; as a result, it was removed, and its proponents began to be caustically called “Asiatics”⁹. They did the same with the Germanic formation. In the end, the so-called “five-part” scheme of formations was introduced, consisting of the sequential succession of five formations (we will say more about it later):

• Primitive communal;
• Slave-owning (corresponding to ancient in the earlier understanding of socio-economic formations);
• Feudal;
• Capitalist;
• Communist, the initial stage of which is socialism.

Such a scheme was dogma right up until the dissolution of the USSR.

It can be said that overall there is no single clear-cut formational system, as many countries and societies developed differently from Western ones. The “five-stage scheme” itself was created not by scientists and researchers, but by the politician Joseph Stalin, who, moreover, was not a person of outstanding intellectual qualities (which we will examine in a separate article).

The first flaw of the described formational approach to the typology of the state and to the state in general is its dogmatization. At the core of this approach lies the famous ‘five-stage scheme’ — the division of history into five socio-economic formations: primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, bourgeois, socialist (communist). Such a division of the historical process acquired the force of an unquestioned law after the publication in 1938 of the infamous ‘History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course’. In the fourth chapter of the book, in the section ‘On Dialectical and Historical Materialism’ written by Stalin, an essentially official periodization of world history was given. ‘History shows’, Stalin wrote in his characteristic lapidary style, ‘five main types of relations of production: primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and socialist’. And although Stalin himself does not use the term ‘formation’ here, it is precisely from here that the division of history into five socio-economic formations originates, which has persisted to this day¹².

Why do we need the theory of SEFs?

Before examining whether the theory of socio-economic formations is needed by progressive social democrats, one should determine whether it is actually relevant to reality. Such a question is asked extremely rarely (and in vain), but it is usually assumed that it should predict the development of society and calculate which political and economic system is progressive — that is, effective for achieving certain goals — and which is not. In our case, these goals are the realization of progressive values.

Communists also use the theory of SEFs for propaganda — after all, with its help, they claim that capitalism is currently the prevailing system in the world, while socialism and communism in their own interpretation represent a more progressive system. It follows from their claims that the political and economic system proposed by communists is more efficient, meaning that the future belongs to this movement and its victory is inevitable. By means of SEFs, communists acquire both ardent supporters and sympathizers for their movement.

Refutation of invariance

In the late 1980s and 1990s, when authoritarian political regimes classified according to their interpretation of SEFs as socialist/communist collapsed, this led to the formation of two opposing conclusions from this fact. The first conclusion was as follows: the theory of SEFs is untenable — the socio-economic system classified by this theory as socialism was followed not by communism, but by a system classified by this theory as capitalism. That is, it turned out that capitalism follows socialism, which means that socialism is a less progressive system (since each formation is more progressive compared to the previous one¹³). It turned out that socialism would not happen, and therefore the theory of formations is erroneous (since it implies a transition to socialism).

The second conclusion drawn was that in all countries of the socialist bloc, there was not actually socialism. In essence, this was the only chance to preserve the viability of the theory of SEFs. However, proponents of this conclusion never reached a consensus as to which formation the socio-economic system of the USSR represented. For this reason among others, as well as because the system of socialist powers corresponded to scientific definitions of socialism, the first conclusion prevails in mainstream science today.

The collapse of communist regimes demonstrated another important conclusion — the untenable nature of the idea of linear historical development and its invariance. It showed that there are different paths of development, that the classification of regimes by political and economic traits is much more complex than the “capitalism/socialism” dichotomy, and that any socio-economic system can face a rollback — meaning that even at the stage of a hypothetical transition to communism, history does not end, and after that, either a transition to a previous formation or to a different formation can occur, or a transition to socialism or communism may never happen at all. Simply put, human history has no determinism; it has a multitude of future options.

In general, the very idea that socialism will follow capitalism is not a scientific conclusion, but an attempt at prophecy. There is no evidence that socialism will replace capitalism, other than the predictions of Marx and his followers, who apparently did not possess extrasensory abilities. On what grounds did they conclude that socialism would follow capitalism?

1. If one believes the theory of SEFs, formations succeed one another, which means that capitalism will also be replaced by another formation;
2. Certain mechanisms are embedded within capitalism that will eventually lead to its self-destruction (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify”¹⁵);
3. There is a revolutionary class — the proletariat, and armed with Marxism, it will take the means of production into its own hands and thereby destroy capitalism.

In “The origin of the family, private property and the state”, Friedrich Engels wrote the following:

The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe¹⁶.

However, in the corresponding article, we showed that such a point of view is based on an amateurish understanding of the state. We substantiated there why the state will not “wither away” — it will continue to exist in the future, and it is necessary for building a developed society. But here we are interested not in this, but in the fact that Marxists make their predictions without even considering it necessary to substantiate them: the state will wither away and socialism will arrive simply because this corresponds to Marxists’ concepts of a fair society and economic efficiency, and because it is “inevitable”. But neither socialism nor anything else will arrive simply by the wishing of Marxists. As for the mechanisms that will lead to the self-destruction of capitalism, the existing economic system has held on without fundamental changes for hundreds of years, and so far it is not clear why it will not hold on further. The proletariat did attempt to take the means of production into its own hands, but it did not turn out very successfully. Today, social democrats do not need predictions (which almost never come true), nor do they need a shaman with a magic communist ball predicting fate. Social democrats should possess an accurate, objective understanding of social reality and, with the help of scientific knowledge and social forecasting, competently formulate the policy of the future. Engels, in the above quoted passage, says a great deal about the “inevitability” of the disappearance of the state, thereby excluding the possibility of his own forecasting error, which is characteristic not of scientists, but rather of shamans.

As a result of turning Marx’s hypothesis into an infallible dogma, formational reductionism took hold in Soviet social science — that is, the reduction of the entire diversity of the human world to formational characteristics alone, which manifested in the absolutization of the role of the general in history, the analysis of all social ties along the line of base and superstructure, and the ignoring of the human element of history and people’s free choice. In its established form, the concept of the S.E.F., along with the idea of linear progress that birthed it, already belongs to the history of social thought. However, overcoming formational dogmatics does not mean abandoning the formulation and solution of questions of social typology. Types of society and its nature, depending on the tasks being solved, can be distinguished according to various criteria, including socio-economic ones. At the same time, it is important to remember the high degree of abstractness of such theoretical constructs, their schematic nature, the impermissibility of their ontologization, direct identification with reality, as well as their use for building social forecasts and developing concrete political tactics. If this is not taken into account, the result, as experience shows, is social deformations and catastrophes¹⁷.

Proponents of the SEF concept most often cannot answer the question of what system will follow communism (presumably believing that history ends there), and why, if primitive communism transitioned into a slave-owning system, the communism of the future will not transition into the slavery of the future (which is not excluded without a state, which “withers away” at the stage of communism, as we warned in the article on the state). The right eagerly exploits all the weaknesses of the SEF theory, gaining the opportunity to look convincing. Leftists who use the concept of SEF thus put into the hands of the right a weapon that helps them maintain popularity.

Criteria and periodicity

A clear set of criteria for a socio-economic formation never existed among the classics of Marxism and the theory of SEFs, nor does it exist today. This is one of the reasons why this theory cannot be considered convincing. After all, the absence of a clear set of criteria allows for arbitrarily adding or removing them, thereby altering the concept depending on the conditions of the debate and the speaker’s views. This is good for polemical maneuvering, but it does not correspond to a scientific approach. There are attempts to highlight basic criteria, but they are insufficiently specific:

The main criteria for distinguishing these formations are the presence or absence of: a) private property; b) classes; c) commodity production. In the presence of these traits, an economic social formation is present, which cannot do without one form of statehood or another. In their absence, we face an archaic or communist social formation — that is, stateless (according to Marx) epochs of human history. In extremely concise form, the essence of Marx’s genuine formational theory is set out in the ‘Preface to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859). “In broad outline”, Marx writes in this work, “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epoch marked by progress in the economic development of society”¹⁸.

In general, it can be said that the characteristics of a socio-economic formation most often include, as we have already noted above, the predominant form of labor employment, the predominant form of ownership, the presence or absence of market mechanisms, and the main competing classes. For example, feudalism is characterized by the concepts of seigniory, or estate, serfdom and bondage, land rent of dependent holders in favor of lords, and non-economic coercion¹⁹. For capitalism, on the other hand, the dominance of private property, a free market and competition as the main mechanisms for resource distribution and economic activity coordination, the employment of labor based on its purchase and sale, and profit as the driving motive and goal of production are characteristic²⁰.

However, we can notice, for instance, that private property existed under both the slave-owning and feudal formations (we wrote a separate article on definitions of private property). Market relations, a monetary system, and a bourgeoisie with a proletariat also existed before capitalism. Different forms of labor employment existed as well — for example, slavery persisted in the USA until 1865²¹, but one could hardly classify the socio-economic system of the USA in 1860 as slave-owning. The bourgeoisie existed and hired workers in feudal societies, for example in the Middle Ages²². As for the slave-owning formation, Candidate of Economic Sciences Alexey Zakharov notes, for example, that slave-owning society did not transition into feudalism, but simply collapsed and reached a dead end in its development²³. Feudalism in Europe was created by new peoples who destroyed the Roman state, and to a significant extent the Roman economy, and it was created on the basis of a system closer to the “Asiatic mode of production”.

Some societies did not pass through the stages that the theory of SEFs attributes to formations at all. Thus, hardly anyone can designate the time boundaries of the slave-owning system in Russia, if one even existed. Doctor of Law Anatoly Vengerov, called by some institutes a major theorist of law²⁴, notes in the textbook “Theory of state and law”: “slave-owning states in their pure form existed practically only in Greece and Rome. Feudal states in classical form were known only to Europe”²⁵. Such a lack of universality was noticed as early as Marx, who drew attention to the fact that certain Asian states did not fit into the formational theory that would be applicable to Europe. Their socio-economic system was described by him as the “Asiatic mode of production”²⁶ (plus we also previously spoke of the “Germanic formation”). This indicates, firstly, that there may exist even more formations that were initially unnoticed and undescribed by Marxists (meaning there could be dozens or even hundreds of them, turning this into a civilizational approach), and secondly, that not all societies pass through the formations described by the theory of SEFs. All this deprives it of universal applicability and makes the possible application of this theory rather narrow.

The theory of formations was formulated by K. Marx as a generalization of Europe’s historical path. And he himself saw that some countries did not fit into his scheme of alternating five formations [here Doctor of Historical Sciences Georgy Ippolitov forgets that Marx did not mention five formations: they were invented by Stalin – note by A.R.]. Such countries he assigned to the so-called “Asiatic mode of production”. On the basis of this mode, according to K. Marx, a special formation is formed. But he did not conduct a detailed development of this issue. Later historical studies showed that in Europe, too, the development of certain countries (for example, Russia) cannot always be fitted into the scheme of changing five formations. Thus, the formational approach creates certain difficulties in reflecting the diversity and multi-variability of historical development²⁷.

Socio-economic formations do not have clear chronological boundaries, and this is largely due precisely to the absence of a clear set of criteria. Virtually any statement regarding the chronological framework of any formation can be challenged. For example, the pre-revolutionary system of the Russian Empire can be classified both as capitalism (private property, capitalist enterprises, wage labor, and so on) and as feudalism (preservation of the estate structure, ownership of a considerable portion of the land by the nobility, a relatively small percentage of the working class in the country, and so on). Due to the lack of clear criteria, both points of view will be well-argued and neither can become generally accepted, which means that we cannot unequivocally assign the Russian Empire to either capitalism or feudalism. We have already mentioned the United States. Ancient Sparta, where every Spartiate was granted a plot of land along with the helots who cultivated it²⁸, can be classified as feudalism, but can it be said that the era of feudalism had arrived at that time? What then is the point of such a division if it fails to fulfill the task of clearly demarcating? We also examined the issue of formations in detail in a separate article. In addition, the narrowness of this approach is also noted:

One cannot imagine that the economic “axis” is the only vector of social and, accordingly, state development, predetermining the progress of all other social institutions. Progress in one sector of social reality (public ownership of the instruments and means of production) does not at all mean progress of the entire system, and in particular of the state-legal sphere. On the contrary, such progress, if it can be considered progress at all, may be accompanied by regress in other areas²⁹.

Indeed, the history of the USSR and other states ruled by communist parties shows that the absolute elimination of private property, in accordance with their interpretation of the future society, can be accompanied by social regress and the loss by society of genuine freedom, justice, and solidarity.

Conclusion

We determined earlier that one of the tasks of the SEF theory is to help calculate which political and economic system is effective for achieving certain goals and which is not. The terms “capitalism/socialism” do not allow this to be done, as they combine a large number of overly diverse societies, and therefore it is impossible to conclude which is more effective. Some societies classified as “capitalist” are more successful than societies classified as “socialist”. Furthermore, the latter can be more successful than a portion of “capitalist” societies. Consequently, we cannot set the implementation of “capitalism” or “socialism” as our goal. In the article about capitalism, we also examined in more detail what should be set as a goal.

The SEF theory is also incapable of performing the tasks of high-quality forecasting. Simply by virtue of the fact that the historical process is not linear, we cannot forecast the onset of socialism or any other system of political and economic structure.

Candidate of Historical Sciences Alexander Polyakov writes: “Apparently, one can part with the concept of ‘formation’ without much loss”³⁰. As Anatoly Vengerov notes, “formational criteria explain little in modern state conflicts or the internal development of a specific state”³¹. Communists say that they need the SEF theory to compare eras. But we can compare, for example, Victorian Britain with Periclean Athens, and this will be a much more accurate and specific comparison than if we compare the slave-owning system (into which Athens, Sparta, Persia, and Rome can be dumped into one heap) with capitalism (into which an even greater number of different states will be dumped). Yes, the concept of SEF allows for generalizations that will be convenient in some cases. However, these generalizations, due to the reasons we have described in this article, will be inaccurate, and in some cases completely wrong, which negates any benefit from them.

Progressive social democrats use scientific knowledge as well as a political philosophy of values that are revised, updated, and supplemented in accordance with the logic of social progress. This means that social democracy feels no need for vague, fuzzy generalizations and terms, nor for attempts at prediction. Social democracy, which carries within itself a philosophical foundation of pluralism as a guarantor of the realization of freedom, does not require a monistic understanding of history, of the philosophy of history, or of a dogmatic ideology. The latter is especially important because recently, in the public sphere of Stalinists and Marxist-Leninists, a degradation into practices of political religiosity and sectarian worship has been observed. To study and systematize historical experience, the scientific method and a philosophical approach (while observing pluralism) are entirely sufficient. Summarizing the above, we consider it necessary for progressive social democrats to abandon attributing great importance to the SEF theory, replacing it with a detailed study of history, which, unfortunately, is too cumbersome to fit into the narrow framework of generalizing philosophical concepts.

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2. Ibid.
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