William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
The Historical Background of Capitalism
Marx counseled his friends to begin a study of his system, even of the first volume of Capital, by a careful reading of the historical sections. In this chapter, we shall summarize Marx’s and, above all, Engels’s summary of those features of past society that help us to understand the basis of present-day political economy.
Queries
What is the origin of all the basic counters of political economy: of contract, property, state, capital, labor, the family (an important economic unit), taxation, money, inheritance, interest, wages, rent, profits? How have these complex relationships altered? Are they everlasting? Have they existed since we stopped swinging on branches and playing with coconuts? Do they represent human nature? Can it ever change? What preceded or can follow “individual incentive for gain”? If these vary, why do they vary? For whose benefit? Are classes primordial? Temporary? How about auxiliary institutions? Why are priests paid? Scholars? Other nonmilitary, noneconomic leaders? Why aren’t women slaves? Why don’t the strong enslave the weak, buy and sell them, instead of paying them wages? Or, the opposite? Why do the poor, who almost everywhere outnumber the rich, not despoil them? By what magic does a small minority hold on to its power to derive rents and profits? Once these questions are formulated, it becomes obvious that no economic questions can be answered by economic theory alone.
The classic work of Engels on the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State gives the Marxist answers. Engels adopted, in the main, the conclusions of an American ethnologist, Lewis H. Morgan, as embodied in his notable Ancient Society (1877). Since that time anthropologists have deviated far and wide from Morgan’s conclusions, but the socialist thinkers have continued his viewpoint. Engels’s analysis of savagery and the earlier stages of barbarism are not cognate to later capitalist development. But the upper stage of barbarism produces a revolution which enables us to understand our own economic system.
Primitive Barbarism
Under primitive barbarism small tribes were gathered in circumscribed areas. Hunting grounds were near their temporary settlements and beyond there was a neutral hunting ground before one reached an area understood to be reserved to another tribe. Inside the tribe the division of labor was sexual. The men hunted, fished, fought, and, in the case of berrying or primitive agriculture, took care of the plant-food. The women took care of the house, or the wigwam, or tent. They cooked, made clothing, wove the cloth, dressed the skins, raised the children.
Each sex owned the instruments it used. Women and men were equal; if anything, women were the more highly regarded. Primitive communism was widespread, perhaps universal. Not only did every member vote at all councils, but no one would have understood any other system. There was no division of property, hence no classes, and, of course, no state. The tribe was its own state, rule, family. Whatever was used in common was owned in common, such as canoes, arrows, stone instruments.
The organization of society was gentile: all power was in the gens, that is, in a group of related persons. The gens were supposed to have a common descent. They retired the chief and sachem and other weighty personages who had no special sanctity. Among the Iroquois the war-chief was elected without reference to descent, but not the peace-chief, the sachem. He came of the maternal family of the previous sachem. The sachem’s advice was not effective except as that of a wise man who ought to be listened to.
The property of any dead man belonged to his gens. The inheritance rules were complex as to relationship, but their essence was that all belongings were made over to the gens. The gens also avenged its own. Conquered tribes were sometimes admitted into the gens by adoption.
But society soon became more complex, because of numbers. Tribes were united into confederacies for purposes of treaties as to hunting grounds and for war against common enemies. But the warriors were free groupings. There were no class of soldiers, no police to enforce decrees or punish dissenters, no nobility or privileged caste, no judges (in fact, among some Eskimos justice was decided by the tribe listening to lampoon poems by two claimants for a decision; the better poet obviously was innocent), no prison, and, of course, no lawsuits. Despite the complexity of hunting, fishing, battle, peace treaties, preparation of instruments, common manufacture, household difficulties, this economic organization, based on no private property in the means of production and war, had no institutions that separated one man from another. Blood-tradition was enough to hold them together.
The Beginning of Class Society
But this state of society depends on a primitive economic organization. There is no permanent surplus that any class can take from the others and still have them survive. So soon as the mode of production changes, history becomes a record of classes, that is, of a minority seizing productive lands and goods and of imposing its will on a majority.
How? It would seem an impossible evolution. But when cattle were domesticated, the abundance of meat and milk gave the cattle-raising tribes an enormous advantage. They were better fed. Their goatskins were prized. Goats’ and sheep’s wool gave them an abundance of textile materials. Exchange, rare indeed among the backward tribes, was now worth while. The cattle-raisers and sheep-raisers had a surplus. They exchanged this for the primitive fabrications of the less favored tribes.
Cattle were the end-all. They became money, that is, the measure of exchange. (The Latin word pecunia, money, is derived from the word for cattle.) Exchanges became habitual, the basis being the acquisition of domestic animals for milk, meat, wool, and hides. The sporadic rewards of hunting bore no comparison to this peaceful and ordered mode of obtaining animal products.
The need for feeding of cattle during the winter resulted in the planting of forage. Once grains became known, regular sowing of wheat, barley, oats, and in the New World, maize (Indian corn), became common.
The grass regions, however, specialized in hay. A crude agriculture came into being. But as yet the older gentile society and, above all, the most prized tradition, common ownership of the land, still resisted the change of occupations. But as agriculture became more advanced and it was necessary to assign special lots of land to definite families, the gens was faced with a fatal solvent, that certain ways of gaining a living were no longer followed in common.
The weaving loom made the woman’s job more restricted. It was compact and capable of being used by only one family. Once bronze, copper, tin, and other metals were extracted and melted and employed in the arts, the division of labor became intensified.
Trades arose. When gold and silver, lustrous and hard to obtain, were made known, the decorative arts gained a new impetus, and the covetousness that had been developed by exchanging cattle and sowing fields was stimulated. Men now thought outside the gens, outside of society.
The Origin of Slavery
The gain in resources and in the arts produced a surplus above mere animal wants. But everyone had to work harder than in primitive society. Labor became important, precious. Soon expeditions against other tribes that had formerly led to their being eaten or exterminated or, at best, adopted, changed character. They were useful for labor. They were made slaves. Here, then, in the conquering tribe, we see two groups, the tribe that owned the others, and the defeated tribe, the slaves.
The Patriarchal Family
The male now became immensely important. He was a shepherd and cattle-tender, a farmer, a fabricator. Women were still in the home, but relative to the occupations of the men, they were inconsequential, that is, relative to the production of basic goods. The patriarchal authority grew and the position of women declined. It was the man who captured slaves, the new labor-power. He claimed his rightful reward and he shared the proceeds of his skill and spoil with his woman more as a matter of grace. Once woman was defeated in her stronghold, the home, the monogamic or, rather, the patriarchal family was instituted. Gentile society retreated before this new institution. Marriage replaced the old pairing arrangement.
The Rise of the Town
Iron now appears, with it the sword and the plow. It is, says Engels, “their heroic era, the last and most important raw material to play a revolutionary role in history, if we except the potato.” With iron implements, the forests were cleared. Man, at least, changed the face of nature on a big scale. With new implements, stone was lifted to great heights, and settlements were defended by walls. The town was born, as against the temporary aggregation of tents or the long-houses of wood. Except for the adobe dwellings in America, this became the settlement form. The town became the capital of the federation of tribes, for it was relatively secure.
The Rise of Trade
As arts and crafts advanced, unprogressive, stupid man learned to look about, to be ingenious, to experiment. The olive and the grape were used to produce oil and wine. From grains, derived from forage, beans and peas and other vegetables came to be known. The useful plants were separated from the noxious and were reproduced. Once farming became diversified, the arts skillful, and the towns large, the foundations of gentile society crumbled.
Exchange and trade broadened. Ships at sea became large. The longboat was succeeded by sailors. The possession of slaves made it possible to drill whole galleries of rowers, so as to propel the ship at a great speed. In order to exchange goods with distant tribes, bars of gold and silver, the most difficult metals to extract, slowly replaced cumbersome cattle as the universal equivalent in exchange. But as yet they were merely preferred, not as later, unique.
The Breakup of Communist Society
With this development of trade and industry and isolated farms, those that were most aggressive and cunning held goods, whereas others (even in the conquering tribe) fell behind. Trade created a new man, and since there was a surplus for all above animal requirements, he saw no reason to share his superfluity with less successful members of his wife’s gens.
The patriarchal marriage was based on the acquisitive, successful male. He knew that he thrived on production and lost by division. Slowly the wealthier men broke up the communistic groups; they then claimed the hereditary right to pasture or to farm definite sections of land. After a time the communal control of land was reduced to a shadow, although its memory has never wholly left society. Land is still more elaborately conveyed than any other form of property and the state still cherishes eminent domain over it, and in England, for example, it is nominally held of the crown. It was the last right lost by the tribe.
The family, owning things separated from every other unit, living apart, aiming at income for its group alone and subject to the legal authority of the father, became normal, and has subsisted to this day as an ethical ideal.
Thus were accomplished the three great divisions, master and slave, rich and poor, woman less than man, and another, a geographical division, town and country. Society is split. Functions are divided and there is a corresponding inequality of rights. And yet this accumulation of social distinctions and, so to speak, injustices, is a terrific instrument for enforcing the division of tasks and so increasing total wealth.
The State
Increase of wealth and food led to increase of population. The thinly peopled world of the early barbarians gave way to densely settled areas. Some, like the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates, resembled modern populations in scope. Hence arose the union of city-centered tribes into territorial units. The state, ruling a definite area (which seems so natural to us), replaced the tribal confederacy based on blood and on temporary hunting grounds. The only survival of primitive right is found in titles, later on, such as Louis Philippe, King of the French. But this is merely archaism, a memory of tribal days.
The democracy of the gentile society was still a strong tradition. It was preserved in the form of military democracy. Defense and aggression were the main business of the state. War, once a necessity to obtain hunting grounds, was now fought for plunder, for superfluities. The importance of military leaders increased. The leaders, as family patriarchs, sought to keep power in their little units, their families. Thus royalty made its bow. The king’s principal cohorts, on the same principle, became nobles.
Everything that gentile society had built up for the commonalty, for the organization of tribes, was transformed into its opposite. A changed mode of production had turned the gentiles against each other. “Man is to man a wolf” became the wisdom of the Romans.
Money
From this time on conflicts between the country and city became normal. In classic antiquity the city was everything; in feudal Europe centuries later, the country system of lords, lieges, and serfs was the center of power.
In the towns a third class arose whose function was exchange: the merchant, the businessman. For the first time a class arose apart from the direct production of wealth. (The artisan had first been separated from the farmer, but he was a producer.)
Their skill in exchange soon made them a special group of rich men. Under their inspiration and needs, clumsy ingots of gold and silver were made into convenient coins. Thereby exchange was made available in small amounts and barter retreated still further. As these coins commanded any and all merchandise, land, slaves, wives, and even bribed the king, the fountain of life was discovered. One commodity stood out and commanded the others. It became the unique object of desire. It has so remained, for nothing can ever replace a universal ultimate source of power.
The new land laws of the rich men permitted them to sell the land held in trust for the gens. For now land could be exchanged for the new coins.1 The world was for sale and everybody knew what to accept.
The mortgage was invented. The rich loaned to the poor and took their land as security. If that did not suffice, they bound the debtor, their own flesh, their own tribesman, to their forced service. It was not long before there were far more slaves and bondmen than free citizens.
No sooner were men settled in towns than their greed for gain set them to colonizing and emigrating. The poor often wandered to seek work. The gens, once united, was now scattered. Here and there an institution like the Olympic Games or the return of a warrior’s corpse for burial, or cremation in the gentile tombs, reminded men of the past. The mixed gens in every city, with no social cohesion left between its rich and poor members, plus the strangers and slaves, resulted in a mockery of the gentile constitution. The members of the old families, now wealthy and distinguished by their descent, created a democracy, especially in the Greek cities and in Rome, in which the poorer members of their gens played a subordinate part. The so-called democracy was really an oligarchy of a small section of the population, the freemen.
Codes of Laws
Society is now divided into classes. As a result, laws are enacted for the regulation of their relations. Hire, purchase, and sale, slavery, debt, foreclosure, theft, all the infinity of claims and offenses around private property, are made the subject of long, written codes. These are interpreted by a professional class of lawyers. Judges, picked from among the “educated” classes, interpret the law for the “uneducated.”
Guards are set up. The soldiery becomes professional rather than civic. Taxation maintains a separate body of officials. The modern state, arbiter of class conflicts, is complete. It prevents the classes from tearing each other to pieces. But it holds power only because it consecrates order on the basis of property institutions as it finds them.2 Hence law and order, absolutely necessary to a divided society are, in essence, conservative. At rare moments the classes are balanced, and the state is genuinely above the class interests of its members. It then has an independent life. But that never lasts long.
Taxation
The expense of the state mirrors the intensity of class conflicts. In pioneer America, the state scarcely existed. For Jefferson, government was a needful nuisance but always to be sniffed suspiciously. A free farming population with only a few rich men could be governed directly by town meetings. Before 1860 there was practically no national debt and as late as 1913 no income tax. Today American taxation absorbs a fourth to a third of the national revenue, and in Europe so great a part that it is necessary to depreciate the currency at short intervals to conceal the intolerable burden. For the Marxians this measures the stress of the class conflict within these European lands.
It will be seen from the foregoing summary of Marxist state theory that for it the change in the mode of production was the lever of history. Not that its view is as schematic as that given. Necessarily, the evolution of the family, private property, and the state nowhere followed this outline, either in chronology or even in an exact repetition of the idealized processes.
For example, the Peruvian empire, based on only one domesticated animal, the llama, and a non-iron-using culture, was nevertheless a state. But because it lacked iron and cattle, it was a theocratic communalism. The Germanic conquerors of Rome erected the feudal system, rather than a new oligarchy.
This history (mostly taken from Engels) is indicative rather than programmatic. It stands on one great principle, that the changes in the modes of production are the foundations of private property, the family, the state. It therefore considers modes of production the primary study of the economist. Modes of production are also the basis of the economic critique of capitalism. Upon a necessary change in the mode of production it makes its prognostic of Socialism.
The Queries Answered
So we see the answers to the questions raised. Property, the state, the family are answered. Contract arises out of purchase and sale. These arise out of transferable private property. Capital is the accumulated product used by its owner to exploit a laborer. That arises from class divisions which in turn come from private property.
Taxation maintains the state, that instrument created by class division. Inheritance proceeds from the patriarchal family, which is itself conditioned by the modes of production that wrecked gentile communism. Wages are self-explained. Rent and interest are consequences of land-seizure and loans, due to differences of wealth.
These complex relationships are recent so far as the annals of man go. Classes are not primordial but derive from specific needs for production. Until the present, the incentive for gain has been paramount in increasing wealth. It is the psychic servant of private appropriation.
Intellectual and spiritual classes either facilitate production (scientists, educators), are apologists, or serve as deflectors of class conflicts. The strong did enslave the weak, but slavery was an expensive system of production and serfdom interfered with the efficiency of the manufacturing system.
The poor do not overthrow the numerically lesser rich because of the state, whose special function is to keep the division of classes intact by using power (police, army, etc.), external to society. The community is disarmed, except at times when the state requires its services (conscription in time of war). The democratic state is, by its nature, less separated from the people, but Marxist theory holds that it is dubious whether the possessing classes would accept its orders were such states to express a revolutionary content, that is, were they to threaten productive property. (Examples: France, 1792, 1871; Russia, 1917; Spain, 1936; U. S. A., 1861.)
The Decline of Slavery and Rise of Feudalism
The Roman Empire perfected the state apparatus. Its fiscal system became cumbrous, its officialdom excessive, and its production of grain declined as the slave method of production wasted the soil and put a stop to population growth.
The barbarian invasions of the three centuries from the fourth to the seventh gave power to a small number of barbarian conquerors, although the conquered population remained almost everywhere in a great majority, and was made to work for its subduers.
The towns declined to mere hamlets; great cities were reduced to villages. Civilization, in the sense of size of crops, of live stock, of artisanal pursuits, went back and the consequent intellectual activities were much reduced, though perhaps not so completely as has been thought.
It is doubtful whether by the thirteenth century roads, farming, and cattle-tending had not already surpassed the Romans and it is doubtful if Catholics, for example, would grant that the builders of cathedrals and the subtle scholastics were intellectually inferior to the effete Roman writers and architects of the later Empire.
Slavery had everywhere been reduced, and serfdom, or the attachment of peasants to the soil, subject to tribal fighting lords, had become a general system. The monarchy was loosely established. Means of communication were poor and localism throve once more.
Feudalism would not have surpassed the limits of slavery production, in and of itself. Slave production was limited, of course, by the fact that consumption was reduced since four-fifths of the population lived on kind, and bought nothing.
But feudal society, by dissolving slave relations in the towns, allowed a fatal loophole. The country was integrated in local, closed systems of production, but in the towns a relatively free population arose. For the first time the great mass of people in any given setting were free to work and buy and sell.
Marc Bloch holds that improved modes of cultivation led to surplus production on the manors, and its sale in the towns. The use of this money on the manor caused luxury buying and so led to debt. The merchants got the use of the king’s armies to impose “law,” that is, to collect these debts from the predatory nobility.
It was to the interest of the kings to encourage towns as the counterpoise to the feudal nobles. The towns had money; the nobles could give only services and some payments in kind. By the thirteenth century, the free crafts and guild fraternities of artisans, the groupings of merchants (except the Jews, who were the king’s appanages, and the non-landed clergy) had built up an estate of the realm, the burgess: his rights are already important in Magna Carta in 1215 and in the policy of Philippe Auguste of France. In Italy the towns, enriched by Levantine trade, grew more mighty than the country nobility.
From Feudalism to Primitive Capitalism
The fatal loophole of large free populations in the town was to crack feudalism. The monarchy grew stronger, the nobles weaker. The pressure of the towns and their comparatively free craftsmen and traders splintered the feudal peasantry. Their revolts, unlike those of the slaves in antiquity, were more successful, because they had a true alternative. After the Black Death in England, and to some extent in Spain and Italy, the peasant revolts, however brutally repressed, resulted in an improvement so great that for two hundred years real wages rose and serfdom itself declined.
Once the feudal lord paid money wages, he was reduced in resources. He repaired to court and became a follower of the king, himself dependent on the towns for largess. Thus were laid the foundations of the modern world. The merchant and the production of goods for the merchant are the same as in the ancient world. But the market is greater in scope. Freemen soon far outnumber serfs.
The breakup of the Church as a taxing and landowning system in the sixteenth century ended the last barrier to the modern system. For the monasteries, such as those of the Benedictines, were anticommercial and were large in productive scope. Protestant countries transferred the church lands to merchant and usurer parvenus, the new nobility,3 who repressed the peasant revolts as brutally as did the old lords. The Catholic countries defended the Church spiritually but made it secondary to the state. Now there is one taxing power, one source of authority, and one way to make money, wage-exploitation of “free” labor.
NOTE: Consult the appendices for critical and detailed observations on the historical scheme of Engels.
1. Sir William Ridgeway has graphically described the wanton effects of the invention of money. See Bibliography.
2. Not that the poor and the slaves accepted this new system easily. Ancient politics is a theater of ferocious class conflicts. Slave revolts were common and shook society to its foundations. The decline of slavery, the granting of universal citizenship by Caracalla (A.D. 212) are outside my scope.
3. Of the seven hundred alleged nobles of England today a dozen or so precede this plunder, in descent. The others date from the postfeudal graft.