Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

Book | Chapter

181394

The dialectic of human societies as the becoming of reason

pp. 179-218

Abstract

During the nomadic life of mankind at its very origins, the productive forces that were constituted with the evolution of the tool could not yet assume the form of wealth; the house (which will later guarantee effective separation and the conditions for accumulation) had not yet appeared. However, as far as we can tell from ethnographic documents, pure use-value as such already entailed an appropriation whose form was modeled, evidently, on the very conditions of the use of the appropriate object. Thus, in the societies of hunters that we know of, the individual was consistently acknowledged as the owner of his weapons and tools, while the hunting ground, whose actual occupation was possible only on the collective level, belonged to the group. And so it appears that the sense of property derives quite naturally from the very exercise of productive forces: the appropriation of use-values is constituted with the appearance of an absolute legitimacy. Nevertheless, property implies in fact an expropriation of the totality of producers, since it does not consist in the simple enjoyment of the object, but rather in the de jure exclusion of every participation by others, while it belongs precisely to the real being of use-value to be available to all. To be sure, the opposition, at this stage, between individual ownership of weapons and tools and the collective ownership of the hunting ground is itself internal to the general form of private property, since it is still only a question in the second case of private groups that defend their exclusivity. Thus, it is here that there occurs the primordial mystification that will justify the whole later process of exploitation: for exclusivity that is attached to the possession of the object entails the negation of its actual reality and its absorption within the transcendence of a pure consciousness of self, in which the mystical union of the proprietor and his property is accomplished.

Publication details

Published in:

Trần Dức Thảo (1986) Phenomenology and dialectical materialism. Dordrecht, Reidel.

Pages: 179-218

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5191-4_7

Full citation:

(1986) The dialectic of human societies as the becoming of reason, In: Phenomenology and dialectical materialism, Dordrecht, Reidel, 179–218.